Overview

Photo of Jay (2003)I am an associate professor in the School, with general interests in computer systems (whether ubiquitous, distributed, operating, middleware ...), and experience as senior executive responsible for information systems and technology at UW (1996-2003). I was on sabbatical at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY in 2003-2004, and on sabbatical at UW in 2004-2005. As of May 2007, I have administrative responsibilities as associate director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Teaching

My most recent undergraduate teaching has been CS 330, Management Information Systems for non-majors. Primary electronic material for the course is available on UW-ACE (requires authentication and enrolment); there is some information for unauthenticated users.

My most recent graduate teaching has been CS 854, Fall 2006, Middleware for Pervasive & Ubquitous Computing.

Research

My primary research interests are in ubiquitous computing, with a particular focus on how ubiquitous computing can improve health care in domestic and clinical settings. Most of my current effort revolves around the "Smart Walker" project, a multi-disciplinary project involving researchers in computer science, engineering, and applied health sciences. We are augmenting a conventional four-wheel "rollator" walking aid with sensors, cameras, actuators, and communication devices. This provides us with a rich platform for investigating problems in CS (reasoning under uncertainty, context-awareness, smart spaces), computer vision (gait analysis, user recognition), mechatronics (improved braking and stability systems), social psychology (recognizing responsive behaviours of walker users), and clinicians (measures of motion, indicators of instability). In terms of infrastructure for ubiquitous computing, the Jabber open-source community provides a particularly rich platform on which to build future ubiquitous-computing applications. The Impress project uses Jabber-based components as a platform for conduciting research into various aspects of ubiquitous computing.

Shoshin Other interests include mobile and wireless computing, distributed systems, reliability and performance analysis. My students and I belong to the Shoshin distributed systems group, part of the networks & distributed systems group.

Graduate Studies

If you are interested in coming to UW for graduate studies, good for you! We're always interested in high-quality applicants. To apply, see Computer Science Graduate Program Information. To ensure fairness to all applicants, and due to the volume of enquiries, I do not reply to individual letters of enquiry, except to direct queries to the web site. I usually accept at most a handful of students per year, depending on funding and supervisory load.