Imagine arriving to a building just in time for a meeting and forgetting the number of the room in which it’s taking place. If that building were the University’s Siebel Center for Computer Science, what could have been a problem has a simple solution, thanks to innovative, home-brewed software running on information panels throughout the building.

Electronic maps and a number of other projects are the products of the first annual, Intel-sponsored Computing Habitat programming competition, a part of the Department of Computer Science’s April 2005 affiliates conference.

When the Siebel Center opened in 2004, it united Computer Science faculty, students and researchers for the first time, in a building capable of supporting a “computing habitat,” an environment in which leading edge technology had been embedded into the physical structure to create a unique, state-of-the-art environment.

To help realize the idea of a computing habitat, the programming competition called for submissions from anyone, students being particularly encouraged, which could leverage the building’s many sensors and displays to provide a useful service to both inhabitants and visitors.

The winning projects, “Find@Siebel,” “Automatic Maps” and “Siebel Radar,” produced technologies that help people find their way around the building, and offer access to information on what is happening around Siebel at any given time. Eleven projects were entered in total.

A panel of judges that included members and affiliates of the Computer Science department selected the winners. According to Professor Ralph Johnson, a competition judge and research associate professor in the department, projects were judged based on their likelihood to enhance the experience of people in the building and the extent to which they leveraged existing technological infrastructure.

Elements from the map-based projects have already been incorporated into Siebel Center by means of video panels that allow people to visually search the building using room number, class name or staff name, and view routes and an image of each location.

“If you’ve never been here, it helps by providing a full directory and maps so you can easily get where you want to go,” Chuck Thompson, manager of the Computer Science department’s Technology Services Group, said. “Even if you’re familiar with the building it can be helpful because you might not know where a particular person’s office is, or what meetings are going on where and when.”

Thompson said the department plans to incorporate other projects resulting from the competition including “Janus’s Map,” which provides door lock history via a Web interface.

“This provides an opportunity to work through concerns about privacy,” Thompson said. “Just because you can make all of this information available doesn’t mean people want it to be,” he said.

Using Janus’s Map, professors and teaching assistants choose whether their door lock status, which can be used to indicate availability, is made public, allowing for protection of privacy, he explained.

Siebel Radar is another competition project that will be incorporated into the Siebel Center’s infrastructure. This project uses motion and proximity sensors to collect real-time data on the location of Siebel Center inhabitants and present room scheduling information. Matthew Loar, the project’s author, said work to incorporate certain aspects has already begun.

Loar worked over the summer with Siebel Center staff to devise a way to incorporate Siebel Radar into the building’s video wall.

“Siebel Radar was originally written as a C# application, but the system that the department uses to run the video wall employs a play list of Web pages,” he explained. “I ended up converting Siebel Radar into an ActiveX control so that it could be embedded in a Web page.”

Loar said coming up with his project idea was not easy, though he knew he wanted his project to take advantage of the center’s video wall.

“I kept thinking about how on Star Trek, the ship kept track of where everyone was,” Loar said. “I knew I couldn’t do this in Siebel because of privacy concerns, but I thought that with a building that large, it would be nice to at least see where there were people, even if you couldn’t tell who exactly they were.”

He said that, in moving his project from an idea to a product, he first had to find a map of the building, and then find coordinates on the map for individual rooms to properly indicate occupancy or print scheduling data.

As work on the project continued, Loar said he decided to incorporate a live feed from the Siebel Center Web cam. He said getting the feed to display in a borderless window, as though it were part of the main Siebel Radar display, involved a great deal of hacking.

“It took me several weeks to finish everything, but I was proud of myself for budgeting my time and getting it done before the deadline,” he said.

Thompson said the deadline for future competitions will be less restrictive, with preliminary announcements scheduled to begin in late September, so that entrants will have more time to perfect their projects.

Loar said he plans to enter the competition again in the future, and hopes that project designers will be given increased access to the building’s existing technology in support of larger-scale projects.

“I hope that, by the time of next year’s competition, there will be a system in place for actually accessing the occupancy sensor data in real-time,” he said. “I can think of a number of great uses for the security cameras, as well.”

Johnson said he would like to see future entries that would be useful not only in Siebel Center, but that could be applied to the community more generally, such as assistive technology for people with disabilities.

He said that, in general, he would be happy to see more people participate in the competition.

“As you get more and more people thinking about a space and what you can do with it, great new ideas will pop up,” he said. “The more the merrier.”