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The aim of this project is to survey the "mobile computing landscape" in Bath, by which we mean (1) the disposition of wireless communications signals in the city, and (2) the human behaviours associated with the presence of those radio signals. The aim is to complement knowledge of the physical landscape and of the flows of people through it, and to investigate links between them.
The survey will cover: (a) The disposition of radio. This includes mapping the presence of WiFi, cellular and Bluetooth. The first two mainly derive from fixed infrastructure, whereas Bluetooth will mainly come from devices carried by people.
(b) How users behave with their mobile wireless devices. This includes all phenomena associated with the carrying and use of mobile devices. For example, where do users make mobile telephone calls, and why? How do people physically orient their laptops in cafes, and what wireless activities do they feel safe with?
(c) 'Attacks' mounted against exposed devices. We will leave electronically (but not physically) exposed phones and laptops in public places, in order to understand what attacks are made against them.
The knowledge we gain will feed into Cityware in two main ways. One is part of the total task of "instrumenting the city" in order to design electronic services and applications within it. For example, it will be useful to understand the density of Bluetooth-visible phones on the street if we are to design peer-to-peer applications using them. The second contribution will be to feed into our threat and trust analyses.
Finally, in this project we are not only gathering data, but understanding how to gather the data reroducibly, so that we can chart changes over time.
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