Pervasive services: challenges in context

The Horizon Hub for the new EPSRC Digital Economy programme is looking at how ubiquitous systems will play out in terms of the value chains in society. One area we are interested in is how commercial applications may be built in an ambient transport system- obviously everyone (google) has thought of location-based advertising, although the problems of avoiding privacy invasion are legion (c.f. Phorm). In this talk, I'll think out loud about some crazier ideas one might try out to see what society will tolerate in terms of pervasive and distributed, p2p ad hoc and delay tolerant applications, in terms of perceived or real threats to reliability, privacy and safety. To this end I'll look at two applications - one is a pay-per-vote idea to control traffic lights in ones favour as a driver (or bus passenger). The other is a disease symptom self-report and tracking application, where the problem is how to incentivize people to make the reports (for the benefit of society, but possibly to their own detriment).