TECoSA Seminar – Wearable Cognitive Assistance:  Vision, Reality and Challenges

We aim to bring you a TECoSA Seminar on the first Thursday of each month during term-time. For Spring 2022, the talks will be on-line or hybrid. All are welcome to attend and we look forward to some lively discussions. Members can accept the invitations, non-members can email tecosa-admin@kth.se to register.

The final seminar this Spring is given in conjunction with the 8th Quarterly Meeting for members, held in real life here in Stockholm.  However, if you wish to join the seminar on-line, you can do so via: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/66857695267.

Our guest speaker is Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (also a member of TECoSA’s International Scientific Advisory Board), who will be addressing
Wearable Cognitive Assistance:  Vision, Reality and Challenges

ABSTRACT:  Viewed as mobile computing systems with built-in sensing, processing, and persistent storage, humans are the result of more than 1 billion years of evolution. Our chances of improving upon nature in a short time (say, 10 years) are negligible if we are bound by the same rules as biological evolution. However, we have a unique opportunity that is not available to nature, namely, to amplify human cognition in real time through low-latency, wireless access to infrastructure resources. These resources can be larger, heavier, more energy hungry, and more heat dissipative than could ever be carried or worn by a human user.   Edge Computing and 5G are key enablers of this vision.  We have been exploring wearable cognitive assistance since 2014, and built close to 20 applications of this genre.   In this talk, I will share what we have learned through this experience.   The potential for this emerging technology to improve human productivity in many domains is indisputable.  At the same time, important challenges must be overcome to realize this potential.

BIO:  Satya’s multi-decade research career has focused on the challenges of performance, scalability, availability and trust in information systems that reach from the cloud to the mobile edge of the Internet.  In the course of this work, he has pioneered many advances in distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Most recently, his seminal 2009 publication “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing” and the ensuing research has  led to the emergence of Edge Computing.  Satya is the Carnegie Group University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  He received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.  You can read more about his research at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~satya