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Location-Aware Services >> Where on Earth...?
2/1/2007
FACTBOX
It is now possible for MIT's campus community members to quickly locate each other via laptop. The "friendspotting" capability is enabled by almost 3,000 WiFi access points, boasts a highly precise positioning system, and was designed with particular attention to privacy and data storage issues: There is no centralized storage of data, and everything happens via encrypted peer-to-peer transmission among users.
The fact of the matter is, locationaware services are a natural outcropping of today's more useful—and used—technologies. LAS incorporates the GPS technology that (to comply with federal E911 regulations) is now standard on most cell phones. In addition, most college students are now equipped with cell phones: The Educause Center for Applied Research reports that 91 percent of post-secondary students carry and use a cell phone. That figure is no doubt growing: According to CTIA, The Wireless Association (formerly the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association), cell phone usage in the US, in general, increased to 207.9 million users in 2005, over 182.4 million the year before.
The Brave and the Few
As it stands now, though administrators at many higher ed institutions are assessing the need for using LAS to enable emergency notification, shuttle-bus tracking, or just plain "friend-finding" (the next hot campus tech term), it's hard to find LAS well-implemented on a US campus—or at least, it's tough to find it well-thoughtout. Leave it, of course, to MIT pioneers to shrug off the budding (if not adolescent) crop of application providers in the LAS space, and boldly develop their own solution, iFIND. iFind was expressly designed by the researchers in MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory (in conjunction with the Information Services and Technology department) to make it possible for any of the 20,000 constantly mobile campus community members accross the Institute's 168 acres to locate anyone else, via laptop. At MIT, the new capability is called "friendspotting," and is enabled by almost 3,000 WiFi access points. The system, with its "extremely precise" positioning system, was designed with particular attention to privacy and data storage issues. Thus, there is no centralized storage of data, and everything happens via encrypted peer-to-peer transmission among users.
WITH iFIND, STUDENTS AT MIT can track down
friends for impromptu study groups or meet with faculty
members who happen to be nearby on campus.
"iFind is device-centric, not networkcentric," explains Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab. "All the intelligence is inside the client application instead of a central server, so nobody can track your position unless you want him to, and you decide how to exchange information with the outside world." Though iFIND currently deals with location data, a whole array of additional personal information could be managed using the same interface and platform. Right now, iFIND helps MIT campus community members find each other quickly ("Imagine coming out of a class in a far-off corner of the MIT campus, and instantly knowing which friends are nearby, or being able to schedule an appointment with a faculty member, based on his or her proximity to you," says Ratti), but future applications of the system will include the ability to select third parties as "friends" and let them share data anonymously. (An iFIND user could, for instance, let the police department know where a given student is, in case of emergency, and yet not reveal the student's identity up front.)
At Montclair State University (NJ), a rush to wireless leadership (as in the case of MIT) wasn't necessarily the driver behind the institution's LAS initiative; administrators and technicians were simply grappling with a shortage of landlines and the need to stay in touch with the institution's student population, recounts Edward Chapel, associate VP for IT. Noting the burgeoning use of cell phones on campus, university officials decided to develop a cellular infrastructure. Then, "We decided that if we were going to go to the trouble of instituting a cellular network, we might as well see what else we could do with it," he says.
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