Roy Want
Principal Engineer
Intel Research/CTG

Dr. Roy Want, a Principal Engineer at Intel Research and leader of the Ubiquity project, has been named a Fellow by two leading industry organizations, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Want was recognized for his contributions to mobile and ubiquitous computing.

As a recipient of these prestigious awards, Want joins a highly select group of IEEE and ACM members who have been acknowledged for their outstanding professional and technical accomplishments, substantial contributions to the advancement and application of technology, and lasting impact of their work on individuals and society. Only 271 of the IEEE’s 365,000 members were named to the IEEE Fellow class of 2006, and just 34 of the 79,000 members of ACM were inducted as ACM Fellows for 2005.

Want’s research into mobile and ubiquitous computing systems began in 1988, when he joined Olivetti Research after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. While at Olivetti, he developed the Active Badge,* a system for automatically locating people within a building.

While at Xerox PARC in the 1990s, Want continued to build on the Active Badge research, leading a project to develop Xerox PARCTAB, one of the first context-aware computer systems and a PDA-like device that accessed computing power through workstations in the local environment.

While the development of PARCTAB was a significant achievement, Want believed that embedding computing and high-density storage into the mobile device itself was the key to the success of mobile computing. But when pocket PCs emerged, it was clear that this solution was inadequate, because of the tiny size of the display and keyboard.

Want would tackle this problem at Intel. He joined the company in 2001 and began the next phase of his research, inspired by his earlier work and his observation of three trends that had begun to emerge by 1999: rapidly increasing storage density, the adoption of wireless standards such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth¹ wireless technology, and the development of relatively low-power, high-performance processors for mobile devices. “I observed those three trends converge and recognized that they would enable us to build a tiny computing device without the limitation of needing a display or keyboard,” says Want. “Instead, you could wirelessly project your data onto a display in the nearby infrastructure.”

Want and his Ubiquity team built such a device and called it the personal server. Roughly the size of a deck of playing cards, the personal server can store all of a person’s content and applications. To access and use content stored on the device, the user connects wirelessly to a PC or other computing equipment in the local environment.

Recently, Want’s team has experimented successfully with integrating personal server technology into mobile phones. That could expand the reach of computing technology to a vast audience of potential users in emerging regions of the world who cannot afford traditional computers. With global sales of mobile phones estimated at roughly 800 million units in 2005 and projected to exceed one billion units in 2009², personal server technology could have a truly global impact.

In addition to his direct contributions to the advancement of mobile and ubiquitous computing systems, throughout his career Want has helped to develop technology that can be used by the broader research community. That includes the Active Badge* system, which has been widely used by researchers in location-based and context-aware computing. A more recent example is the Stargate* platform, built as a component of early personal server prototypes. “We deliberately made a fairly general embedded systems platform based on Intel XScale® Technology, realizing that many research groups could benefit from access to such a platform,” says Want. Today the Stargate platform is being used by hundreds of researchers to conduct experiments in sensor networks, robotics, and mobile computing.

Intel has long been a strong supporter of the IEEE and ACM and their mission of advancing technology. The selection of Dr. Want as a Fellow underscores Intel’s commitment to participate in the important work of these professional organizations, which benefits both the industrial and academic communities.

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