UT ECE professor Christine Julien has been awarded a Google Research Award entitled “Gander: Mobile, Pervasive Search of the Here and Now in the Here and Now.”

In pervasive computing environments, as in the Internet large volumes of data motivate the need for expressive and efficient search mechanisms to provide access to information relevant to a user and his needs. However, in pervasive computing environments comprising digital devices, both mobile and embedded in the environment, the data is highly volatile and the ratio of the data that could be made available to the data that is used is extremely high.

This Google research award supports the work that Dr. Julien’s group is doing in building the Gander distributed search engine, in which queries about the here and now are resolved in the here and now, using local dynamic networks that connect the mobile and embedded computing devices. The project focuses on the use of a formal conceptual model of search to drive the development of practical search constructs and has the potential to revolutionize the way ordinary humans interact with their surrounding digitized spaces on a daily basis.

Dr. Christine Julien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are in mobile and pervasive computing, with a focus on application-oriented concerns that include context-aware data generation and discovery, network-oriented concerns that include adaptive context-aware communication, and formal foundations.