Nigel visiting, discussion on transportation

Nigel Davies from Lancaster University in the UK is visiting our group at Fraunhofer and b-it. It was really good to have some time – basically most of the day – to discuss interesting research questions and new direction in pervasive computing.

We discovered that we recently have both looked more into issues related to transport and tracking. I learned about possibilities for developing apps for the TomTom navigation system(which is running linux) and the trakm8 in-car-unit. We had a look at Michael Müller’s (master student I supervise in Munich) video of the smart transport container (more details on this at CeBIT).

Both of us are really interested how personal transportation is going to change and how computer science will make its contributions to that? The discussion on motives and motivations for choosing a particular mode of transport, what are the perceived values of certain transport modalities, and how can we influence them made me really think of implications of pervasive computing that are to come.

It is remarkable that as “cars” become more programmable interesting research projects start at many different institutions looking into automotive computing on an application level with an aim for new user experience and additional services/functionalities.