We are actively conducting our Fiscal Year 2011 research efforts and welcome your interest, feedback, and inquiries about collaboration.  Please contact us at info@sei.cmu.edu  with "Mobile" in the subject line to begin a discussion.

Our FY11 Research Agenda

A key to creating effective handheld tactical systems for warfighters and first responders involves development of mobile applications that are modifiable at runtime to support situation-determined needs. For example, a warfighter about to enter a building may wish to have access to historical information about the building and its inhabitants, UAV images of the rooftop, characteristics of the surrounding terrain, data about how the building connects to the power grid, and a wide range of other situational data. However, the specific data about a given building comes from many sources with form factors that vary widely among those sources.  Collectively, the pieces of data may be overwhelming and fail to form a cohesive picture, resulting in information overload.

Since it is neither possible to anticipate all of the situations a warfighter might encounter nor all of the data available for a given situation, the application builder cannot solve this problem directly. However, it may be possible to provide an environment where data from multiple sources is filtered, transformed, and integrated on the fly and in the field to address the warfighter’s specific and context-dependent needs.

We are investigating how mobile tactical systems that are location aware and end-user programmable can support the described scenario. This work is built on research in three areas:

• mobile computing (smartphone applications)
• end-user programming (“edge” programming)
• context-aware applications

 The strategy for the research follows the steps below:

• Work with domain experts to determine edge-programming needs in tactical environments.
• Analyze current approaches to edge programming to determine the extent to which they can be applied in tactical environments.
• Document fundamental concepts for edge programming in tactical environments.
• Demonstrate the feasibility of these concepts using a prototype.
• Analyze what it will take to apply the outcomes of the prototype to a real-world tactical environment.