The Activity-Based Computing Project - A Software Architecture for Pervasive Computing Final Report: The Strategic Research Council, grant no. #2106-04-0019

This report describes the results of the Activity-Based Computing (ABC) project granted by the Danish Strategic Re- search Council, grant no. #2106-04-0019. In summary, we conclude that the ABC project has been highly successful. Not only has it meet all of its objectives and expected results, but have been able to pull additional resources and move beyond what was originally planned in the project.
From a research perspective, all of the original research objectives of the project have been met and published in 4 journal articles, 13 peer-reviewed conference papers, and two book chapters. Special attention should be drawn to publication [25], which gives an overview of the ABC project to the IEEE Pervasive Computing community; the ACM CHI 2006 [19] paper that documents the implementation of the ABC technology; and the ACM ToCHI paper [12], which is the main publication of the project, documenting all of the project’s four objectives. All of these publication venues are top-tier journals and conferences within computer science.
From a business perspective, the project had the objective of incorporating relevant parts of the ABC technology into the products of Medical Insight, which has been done. Moreover, partly based on the research done in the ABC project, the company Cetrea A/S has been founded, which incorporate ABC concepts and technologies in its products. The concepts of activity-based computing have also been researched in cooperation with IBM Research, and the ABC project has been widely disseminated to key stakeholder nationally and internationally.
Regarding research education, the original goal was to educate two PhD students as part of the project. Based on the ability to attract additional co-finansing from the University of Aarhus (AU) and the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), in total of four PhD students have been associated with the ABC project. Three of these students have graduated, and now work at Oxford University and Cetrea A/S. The last student will graduate in 2011.
The project was delayed, partly due to 4-year PhDs instead of 3-years, and partly due to delays in recruitment. This delay has not had any impact on the results obtain; on the contrary. From a research management point-of-view, the project has learned us several lessons, which are being incorporated into the management of current research project at ITU.
The research on the ABC concepts and technologies have caused an interest in continuing to using it in further research. The “Collaborative Mini-Grid” project has adopted the technology and is using it for biologists; the “Trust- worthy Pervasive Healthcare Services (TrustCare)” project is investigating how to combine ABC with workflow technologies; and there is an on-going research on ABC technology together with researchers at other universities As such, the ABC project has had a great impact on current and future research at the IT University of Copenhagen and other academic institutions.