Thomas Zachariah’s research while affiliated with University of California System and other places

Governments around the world have become increasingly frustrated with tech giants dictating public health policy. The software created by Apple and Google enables individuals to track their own potential exposure through collated exposure notifications. However, the same software prohibits location tracking, denying key information needed by public health officials for robust contract tracing. This information is needed to treat and isolate COVID-19 positive people, identify transmission hotspots, and protect against continued spread of infection. In this article, we present two simple ideas: the lighthouse and the covid-commons that address the needs of public health authorities while preserving the privacy-sensitive goals of the Apple and google exposure notification protocols.

With the current augmented reality and low-power radio technology present on mobile platforms, we can imagine a standard and physically tangible browsing mechanism for objects in the Web of Things. We explore a model for user interaction with IoT devices that makes use of mobile augmented reality to allow users to identify new devices or easily access regularly-used devices in their environment, enables immediate interaction with quickly-obtainable user interfaces from the web, and provides developers a convenient platform to display custom interfaces for their devices. This model represents a step towards software-based interaction that might, one day, feel as intuitive, accessible, and familiar as the physical interfaces we commonly encounter in our daily lives.

In 2015, we performed a study to learn which Bluetooth Low Energy peripheral devices were most prevalent among consumers, as well as which services these devices provided and utilized in practice. Additionally, we sought to investigate the real-world usage of standard Bluetooth services versus custom protocols among developers. The study involved a continuous month-long scan taken on two floors of an academic building. The resulting dataset consists of scan results from approximately 3000 unique devices.

We are becoming increasingly surrounded by smart and connected devices, popularly known as the Internet of Things. The emerging user interface paradigm for many such things eschews physical buttons, knobs, and displays in favor of virtual interfaces that are downloaded from the web and rendered on remote platforms---like smartphones. However, such smartphone app-based interfaces often require tedious discovery and installation, as well as device discovery, pairing, and configuration before a user can interact with a nearby device. Requiring an explicit app install for each new device type scales poorly with device growth, and particularly hinders casual interactions with ambient devices. Instead of the high-friction, walled-garden approach now taking root, we propose name, a physical web browser that provides a seamless, scalable approach to browsing and interacting with nearby things. name leverages multiple network patterns and modern web technologies to provide users with rich device interfaces, even for devices under network or power constraints. We argue that this approach scales better and that it provides more intuitive and natural functionality for both users and developers. This demo presents the basic concept, allows others to experience our preliminary implementation, and raises several open research questions.

Building connected, pervasive, human-facing, and responsive applications that incorporate local sensors, smartphone interactions, device actuation, and cloud-based learning--the promised features of the Internet of Things (IoT)---requires a complete suite of tools spanning both hardware and software. We present a set of these pieces, including a gateway, four hardware building blocks, multiple sensor platforms, an indoor localization system, and software for connecting users and devices. Each piece plays an integral role towards enabling applications, from facilitating rapid development of wireless smart devices to composing data streams and services from a diverse set of components. By providing layered interoperable systems, our toolkit offers cohesive support for moving beyond single-device, cloud-centric applications---typical in today's IoT landscape--and towards richer applications that incorporate multiple data streams, human interaction, cloud processing, location awareness, multiple communication protocols, historical data, access control, and on-demand user interfaces. To show how the pieces in the toolkit cooperate, we demonstrate a location-based access control application where a user's smartphone can control a room's lighting, but only from within the room. Further, data streams from the phone and nearby sensors are used to provide a constant lighting service which attempts to maintain a user-set brightness under variable external lighting conditions.

The Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV-5) focused on applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions. It highlighted research results from contexts where conventional computing solutions are often inappropriate due to limited resources and a variety of contextual factors. Focusing on innovative technical solutions to diverse contextual, infrastructural, and user challenges, the DEV-5 conference fostered exchange between computer scientists, engineers, and others interested in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development. The second report covers the ACM HotMobile 2015 workshop. HotMobile focused on mobile applications, systems, and environments, particularly for new directions or nontraditional approaches in mobile computing.

The vision of an Internet of Things (IoT) has captured the imagination of the world and raised billions of dollars, all before we stopped to deeply consider how all these Things should connect to the Internet. The current state-of-the-art requires application-layer gateways both in software and hardware that provide applicationspecific connectivity to IoT devices. In much the same way that it would be difficult to imagine requiring a new web browser for each website, it is hard to imagine our current approach to IoT connectivity scaling to support the IoT vision. The IoT gateway problem exists in part because today's gateways conflate network connectivity, in-network processing, and user interface functions. We believe that disentangling these functions would improve the connectivity potential for IoT devices. To realize the broader vision, we propose an architecture that leverages the increasingly ubiquitous presence of Bluetooth Low Energy radios to connect IoT peripherals to the Internet. In much the same way that WiFi access points revolutionized laptop utility, we envision that a worldwide deployment of IoT gateways could revolutionize application-agnostic connectivity, thus breaking free from the stove-piped architectures now taking hold. In this paper, we present our proposed architecture, show example applications enabled by it, and explore research challenges in its implementation and deployment.