Roy Want (born 1961) is a British-American computer scientist whose research has focused on indoor positioning, mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, automatic identification, including RFID and wireless beacons, and the Internet of Things. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1988 for work on multimedia distributed systems. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers and articles on mobile systems and holds more than 100 patents. Want joined Google in 2011, following earlier roles as senior principal engineer at Intel and principal scientist at Xerox PARC.
Research and projects
Among Want's early research contributions was the Active Badge system, developed around 1988 to identify mobile users and their location within a building's computing infrastructure."The Active Badge Location System", Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao & Jon Gibbons, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems (TOIS) Vol. 10. No. 1, Jan 1992, Pages 91-102. (SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award 2016) The work was carried out at the Olivetti Research Ltd (ORL) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and the associated publication later received the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award in 2016.
Want was a central figure in the earliest realization (at Xerox PARC) of Mark Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing. The PARC program involved three devices: PARC-Tab,"An Overview of the Parctab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment", IEEE Personal Communications, December 1995, Vol 2. No.6, pp28-43 Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Rich Gold, David Goldberg, Karin. Petersen, John Ellis, Mark Weiser."Context-Aware Computing Applications", Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Roy Want, 1st Annual Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA), Dec 1994, Santa Cruz. PARC-Pad, and LiveBoard. Today, these form-factors map directly to smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs. In the early 1990s, Want was the principal architect and implementer of PARC-Tab, the world’s first context-aware mobile computer in a smartphone form-factor. It allowed applications to respond dynamically to a user's context, a feature that was developed about a decade before the release of the iPhone (2007). A key technology that made the PARC-Tab context-aware was the use of an infrared network, both connecting the device to the local area network, and localizing it to a room using a diffuse infrared-network transceiver.
In the late 1990s at PARC, Want worked on incorporating inertial sensors into mobile user interfaces,"Squeeze Me, Hold Me, Tilt Me! An Exploration of Manipulative User Interfaces". Beverly L. Harrison, Kenneth P. Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Carlos Mochon, and Roy Want - ACM SIGCHI '98, Los Angeles, CA, April 1998. using emerging MEMS technologies. He also designed the Hikari handheld digital organizer, which could automatically switch between portrait and landscape orientation when rotated. Lists could also be scrolled and items selected using a tilt and clutch mechanism, and photos selected from a 2D grid using a ball-in-a-maze puzzle style of user interface."Embodied User Interfaces for Really Direct Manipulation", Communications of the ACM, Sept. 2000, Vol.43 No.9, pp75-80, Ken Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Beverly Harrison, Tom Moran and Roy Want.
By the end of 1990s, Want led PARC’s electronic tag project, “Bridging Physical and Digital worlds”,“Bridging Real and Virtual Worlds with Electronic Tags", Roy Want, Ken Fishkin, Beverly Harrison, Anuj Gujar. Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI. May 1999, Pittsburgh, pp370-377. based on passive RFID. It was the first comprehensive published vision that electronic tags (inexpensive, and battery-free), could link the then new mobile platforms with a location, and related digital web content/control; another example of context-aware computing"Ubiquitous Electronic Tagging", IEEE Distributed Systems Online, September 2000, Vol. 1, No.2, Roy Want and Dan M. Russell."RFID: The Key to Automating Everything", Roy Want, Scientific American, Jan 2004, pp56-65.“The Magic of RFID”, Roy Want, ACM Queue Magazine, pp41-48, Vol 2, No.7 Oct 2004."An Introduction to RFID Technology", Roy Want. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 5, Number 1. pp25-33, Jan-Mar 2006.
Want continued to make pioneering contributions to mobile computing over the following two decades. At Intel Research, he led the Personal Server project (2001),"The Personal Server: changing the way we think about ubiquitous computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Gunner Danneels, Muthu Kumar, Murali Sundar and John Light. Proceedings of Ubicomp 2002: 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Springer LNCS 2498, Goteborg, Sweden, Sept 30th - Oct 2nd, 2002, pp194-209. (ACM Ubicomp Test-of-Time Award 2012)."CoolSpots: Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Mobile Devices Using Multiple Radio Interfaces", Trevor Pering, Yuvraj Agarwal, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want, Proc. ACM MobiSys 2006, Uppsala, Sweden June 19th, 2006, pp220-232."SwitchR: Managing Low-Power Wireless Connections in a Multi-Radio Environment", Yuvraj Agarwal, Trevor Pering, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want; IEEE ISWC'08, 1st Oct 2008."Enhancing Web Browsing Security on Public Terminals using Mobile Composition", Richard Sharp, Anil Madhavapeddy, Roy Want, and Trevor Pering; Proc. ACM MobiSys 2008. Breacon Ridge Colorado. a platform later integrated into an early smartphone, which enabled users to present their personal digital content and media onto nearby displays. This led to his vision of Dynamic Composable Computing (2005),"Dynamic Composable Computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, and Barbara Rosario. ACM HotMobile 2008, February 2008 Napa Valley, California."Enabling Pervasive Collaboration with Platform Composition”, Pervasive Computing 2009, Trevor Pering, Kent Lyons, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario, & Roy Want, Nara, Japan, May 2009."Multi-Display Composition: Supporting Display Sharing of Collocated Mobile Devices", Kent Lyons, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario and Roy Want, Interact'09, Uppsala Sweden, August 24th 2009."Context-Aware Composition”, HotMobile-2009, Kent Lyons, Roy Want, David Munday, Jia Jia Sheng, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario & Trevor Pering, ACM Hotmobile 2009, Santa Cruz, CA, Feb, 2009."Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces", Trevor Pering, Raffael Ballagas, and Roy Want, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48, Issue 9, (Sep. 2005), pp 53 - 59, Special Issue: "RFID - tagging the world". in which a mobile user is able to rapidly assemble a logical computer on-the-fly through wireless-connected components. Today, the Personal Server concept is embodied in Apple’s Airplay and Google Cast media services, and as a result the original paper was given the 10-year impact-award at ACM Ubicomp ’12
At Google, Want was one of the leads for the Eddystone Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE) beacon project, with similar context-aware goals to RFID, but enhanced by ubiquitous readers in the form of smartphones, which can detect BLE advertisement IDs at much greater range, and now supported commercially by many vendors.“Enabling the Internet-of-Things”, R. Want, B. N. Schilit, and Scott Jenson, IEEE Computer, Jan 2015, Vol 48. No. 1, pp28-35.“Bluetooth LE Finds its Niche”, Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Dominik Laskowski, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 12-04 (2013), pp. 12-16.“Bluetooth Low Energy in Dense IoT Environments”, Albert F. Harris III; Vansh Khanna; Guliz Tunca; Roy Want; Robin Kravets; IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 54, Issue: 12, December 2016, pp 30-36; DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2016.1600546CM.
Professional service Want served as chair of ACM SIGMOBILE from 2009 to 2012. He has also served as program chair for conferences including ACM MobiSys, ACM HotMobile, IEEE PerDis and IEEE ISWC. From 2006 to 2009, he served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing and has contributed to the editorial board of IEEE Computer.
In 2019 he became the technical editor for the IEEE 802.11az Wi-Fi standard, working on the Next-Generation Positioning standard, and later IEEE 802.11bk (320MHz Positioning), and leading the integration of 802.11mc and the next generation technologies into Android P+ to enable enhanced context-aware operation for more than 3.3 billion devices. The initial technology and API was presented publicly at Google IO ’18, and is expected to lead to ubiquitous (1-2m) indoor location accuracy as the world upgrades its Wi-Fi infrastructure to the latest standards.
Awards Want was named a Fellow of the ACM in 2005 and an IEEE Fellow in the same year. In 2003, he received the Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering for his work on the Intel Personal Server. In 2019, he received the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award for his contributions to context-aware mobile computing.
References