Invisible Tech

Amy Keller | 3/1/2010

In Sumi Helal's mind's eye, clothing — and just about everything else — ought to be full of sensors and technology. Woven into fabric, for example, high-tech devices might monitor the wearer's vital signs, track and analyze an athlete's performance or remind a beleaguered office worker to sit up straight. Wristwatches and cell phones could silently monitor calories that wearers consume. Cars could remind drivers to take their medication or pick up dry cleaning.

Professor Sumi Helal and his students designed a sensor platform called Atlas (in photo) that connects "smart" health-aid devices together and makes their information available over a computer network. Helal created a spinoff company called Pervasa to commercialize Atlas, which General Electric has shown an interest in. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

Retailers, Helal predicts, will be able to reach out to consumers like never before, via GPS-enabled cell phones that function like tracking devices. Stores like Macy's, for instance, will no longer have to rely only on fliers and ads to lure shoppers inside — retailers will be able to detect regular customers as soon as they enter a mall and, using data generated from massive consumer databases, send a targeted promotion to try to entice the shopper into the store.

Instead of the consumer accessing services, the services will access the consumers, says Helal, an Egypt-born computer scientist who's a professor at the University of Florida. "The world will change."

Helal has become a guru of sorts in the tech circles of what's called ubiquitous, or pervasive, computing — an interdisciplinary field that studies how to use wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. His projects in Gainesville have attracted visitors from as far away as Korea, Japan and France. Last fall, Helal presided over the world's premier gathering of pervasive computing researchers, Ubicomp 2009. The conference, at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, attracted nearly 300 ubicomp researchers and enthusiasts who traveled from around the world to share their ideas for the gadgets of tomorrow.

Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal, 50 Roots: Born in Suez, Egypt. "I was somewhat of a nerd growing up in engineering. I wanted to go to the computer sciences department. It was the first computer science department in Egypt." Education: Bachelor's (1982) and master's (1985) in computer engineering and automatic control, Alexandria University, Egypt; doctorate in computer sciences (1991), Purdue University Family: Wife, Melinda; daughter, Shadia Renae, age 5 Hobbies: Beginner level of many string instruments; gourmet cooking Interests: World history, travel

"Sumi Helal is one of those guys who is larger than life — very well-connected to the reality of problems that matter to society. He is a very, very smart person, and a very, very good technologist and also an entrepreneur. He really has a good mix of all those ingredients," says Jim Osborn, executive director of the Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "He spans the spectrum of being very leading edge — and balancing that with being very practical."

The term "ubiquitous computing" was coined 19 years ago by the late Mark Weiser, former chief scientist at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The computer of the 21st century, Weiser predicted in an article in Scientific American, wouldn't be a desktop PC or laptop that people would have to lug around with them. Rather, Weiser envisioned a wirelessly integrated network of devices so seamlessly integrated into the world around us that they all but vanish into the background as they help us accomplish a multitude of tasks.

"When Mark published this article back in September of 1991, nobody knew what he was talking about," Helal says with a chuckle. Today, he says, the speed of technological change is quickly making ubiquitous computing a reality.

Helal has long been somewhat of a futurist. In the 1980s, while attending Alexandria University's College of Engineering, Helal offered a scientific journal his technological prediction of what the world might look like in 2084. Helal envisioned the ability to program home appliances in the same way computers are programmed — "writing software applications that could control and coordinate appliances is what I imagined," he says. "This ties in with the work I ended up working on now, which is programmable pervasive spaces, which are spaces instrumented with devices, sensors, actuators, appliances, etc., with technology to enable their physical interconnectivity and their logical interaction, which is programming."