Mobile Computing as a Discipline: CMU's new Mobility Research Center

From Government Computer News:

It’s a sign of having arrived when a new technology
gets its own academic discipline. It happened more than 25 years ago
for computer science. And some schools launched certificate programs in
geospatial studies a couple of years ago.



Now Carnegie Mellon University is launching a new
Mobility Research Center at its Silicon Valley site that will be a
locus of research and teaching focused on mobile computing.



“There are billions of cell phone users all around
the world, and their introduction to the use of computation and the
Internet is going to be through use of this handheld platform, not
through their desktop or laptop computers,” James Morris, professor of
computer science and dean of Carnegie Mellon West, told GCN.




“The United States needs to have that perspective as we look at a global market for computing devices on the Internet.”



The multidisciplinary program will focus on
context-aware applications and services, serendipitous collaboration
and rich semantic information to enable novel data and media
management, visualization and access.



“We have probably 30 faculty members who work in
various areas — anything from antenna design [to] anthropology and
psychology — and we’re getting a lot of these people together into
teams to perform research to look at the way people are going to use
mobile devices in the future,” Morris said.

Link: Mobile computing gets academic,

via ACM TechNews.

CMU page: CyLab Mobility Research Center.