I'm the project lead for Place Lab, a software toolkit to enable indoor and outdoor location-enhanced computing applications. Place Lab was motivated by limitations with existing location technologies. The Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, only works outdoors, while the cell tower-based location services offered by cellular providers are very expensive to use. Using Place Lab, commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones can estimate their position by listening for the IDs of fixed radio beacons, such as 802.11 access points and GSM cell towers. We have shown that 802.11 and GSM beacons are sufficiently pervasive in the greater Seattle area to achieve 20-30 meter median accuracy, with nearly 100% coverage as measured by availability in people's daily lives.

Now that we have largely completed the research phase of Place Lab, one of my key responsibilities as Associate Director of the lab is to help to translate our research into potential new products, by identifying and building relationships with the appropriate product development groups within Intel. We've experimented with using Place Lab in device ensembles-for example, to enable a notebook computer and cell phone to communicate with each other and share readings of radios in the environment. Now we're talking to a group within Intel about the potential for that technology capability. On the usage front, the team has investigated the value and privacy concerns with a prototype application that allows cell phone users to exchange live location information with members of their social network. Finally, we're collaborating with the Mobile Platforms Group to investigate the possibility of adding Place Lab to the Intel Centrino platform.

Since the project was launched in early 2004, Place Lab has generated a significant amount of interest in the research community, and our research is being presented at several top conferences. Place Lab results have appeared or will soon appear in SIGCOMM, UbiComp, Pervasive and CHI, including our recent system overview paper. A complete list of Place Lab publications can be found at http://placelab.org/publications/.

Perhaps one of the best measures of how far we have come is the growth of the Place Lab user group. The mailing lists see daily activity and more often than not these days, the answers to questions are coming from other users rather than the Place Lab development team.