ESSPRITS 2011 workshop, keynote

I was invited to present a keynote at the joint German-Canadian workshop on embedded systems, signal processing, and IT security (ESSPRITS 2011). The workshop is interdisciplinary and technically focused on embedded systems.

My talk was entitled “Challenges in a World of Ubiquitous Computing” and it looked at how the world changed over the last 20 years as ubiquitous computing has become reality. Computing technologies have become an integral part of our life and they shape more and more how we perceive the world and how we interact with each other. The talk highlights some technology trends that enable a new generation of computing systems. It presents a new vision suggesting new forms of perception and interaction without temporal and spatial boundaries.

During the lectures it was great to get a feel of what research is happening on a signal processing level. With regard to security I got the feeling that we need in the future a closer cooperation between people doing cryptography and those doing user interfaces. It seems it is currently still at the level that HCI people understand little about the algorithms, methods and concerns in IT-security and that people in security optimize for security that can be proved, but may not fit humans (and may not really increase security in the real world).