Nimbus: A task aware/context aware mobile computing platform

Abstract

In a true pervasive world barriers among devices no longer exist. Users can access and manipulate data from anywhere at anytime using a dynamic range of computing devices as they move across different environments. Today's "computer-centric" paradigm however puts increasing demand on user attention impacting overall efficiency. Today, typically a user has to manually figure out the available resources and appreciate the constraints of the new computing environment in order to continue performing his computing tasks in a new device, as he moves across computing devices. This results in the user spending considerable amount dealing with the different nuances of different computing environments and remembering the different contexts and ensuring that all data is in sync as he works on a single task but using different devices and different times. In this paper, we describe Nimbus, an enterprise grade platform we have developed and deployed aimed at providing true anytime anywhere computing, realized by an end to end system designed around the "tasks that the user performs" rather than computing devices the user uses.