Workshop Keynote: Ubiquitous Service Platform and Field Trial in CUBIQ Project

A variety of smart devices (e.g., sensors, RFID tags, actuators) have recently become available. Their costs and weights are decreasing rapidly so which plenty of them can be deployed in everywhere. For example, electrical appliances in a house can be cooperated to meet the different needs of residents, and watching children or elderly people service can be possible throughout a city. The CUBIQ (Cross UBIQuitous platform) project is a national R&D project in Japan for establishing a ubiquitous service platform, and was performed from 2008 to March 2011. From 2003-2007, several R&D projects were conducted to develop necessary core technologies for ubiquitous network. Many companies and universities joined those projects, and created various core technologies and pilot services, some of which were verified through field trials. The CUBIQ project started to evolve the predecessor projects in order to fill the gaps between the developed technologies and target services. The aim of the CUBIQ project is not just developing various core technologies but establishing the ubiquitous service platform which enables easy and rapid service building by using the core technologies. In a field trial at a shopping mall, we conducted a program ``Timely & Timely,´´ which collects and disseminates timely information to visitors, to evaluate the effectiveness of the ubiquitous service platform as the enabler of easy and rapid service building. In this talk, we describe the concept, design and implementation of ``Timely & Timely, ´´ and discuss the result of the field trial.