Research Issues in Adapting Computing to Small Devices

Abstract

Advances in pervasive and mobile technologies are making computing available to us at anytime anywhere. Availability however does not automatically mean it is in a form that implies ease of use. Usability in the mobile world amounts to a set of problems that are not so much precedented in the history of computing. Handheld mobile devices that are thin-lean-mean for instance present challenges that require fundamental changes in the way computation is carried out, its architecture, or its supporting environment. A practical goal is to minimize these changes, which calls for automatic or semi-automatic adaptation of existent computing to the small devices. We discuss the issues and research challenges of “X adapting to Y”, where X includes content, data, code, computation, GUI, and so on, and the changes in semantics and/or syntax due to the adaptation are to satisfy the constraints of Y. Some experiments we have carried out for content and code adaptation provide some useful illustration.