MIT's iFind Service

In the past decade, various developments have led to the ability to combine location awareness, network-based collaboration and social networking into a single tool. MIT's new service for students, iFind, is the first notable example of this integration.

Developed at MIT's Senseable City Lab, the Wi-Fi-based iFind provides a novel way to let groups of people find one another, set up meeting times or work together. Although ideal for a campus environment, it isn't restricted to academia. And it's available under an open-source license rather than embedded in a vendor solution.With iFind, an MIT student can see instantly which of his friends are available and where they are. Then he can IM them using the embedded client to arrange a meeting place. If the friend isn't close enough, he doesn't waste time trying to establish a meeting place. In a corporate environment, iFind could be used to locate critical personnel, such as doctors, nurses or security officers.

But there are some pitfalls to iFind, especially as it might be used in a corporate setting. Once you make your whereabouts known to your group, you can't control how they use your location information, for example, or what they choose to communicate to you. And, the use of iFind and other people locators eliminates some privacy.

Integrated Tool

IFind addresses location awareness, social networking and collaboration. Although location-awareness capabilities date back to at least the mid-1990s, they became more popular as cellular companies solved the problem of identifying a user's location for emergency purposes. Most location-awareness systems, including iFind, use some combination of triangulation, signal strength and signal time-in-flight to identify a user's location. These measurements and the unique identifier assigned to endpoints can be used to locate and label that endpoint. Knowing the location, service providers can better handle emergency calls--and they can sell a new service: locating friends. Although GPS systems provide similar functions, they require special equipment and don't work indoors.

Asset tracking is closely related to location awareness. While it focuses primarily on providing the location of any important physical asset using an RFID tag, it also is used to locate important personnel. Problematically, most of these systems are tied to the underlying wireless platform, whether a service provider's or a proprietary implementation. So, if the wireless platform is changed, the location information might no longer be available.In contrast, iFind provides the location information using nothing more than the functions of Wi-Fi. It's possible to use the same algorithms that were used in the proprietary wireless voice systems to identify the location of a Wi-Fi endpoint, so locating people and objects over the Wi-Fi network is more feasible, without RFID tags.

YouTube and other social-networking services let friends socialize. We imagine iFind will be used similarly. Although it's intended to let students get together to work on school projects, it lets you find a friend for any reason.

The third aspect of iFind is its ability to facilitate collaboration. With iFind users can more easily decide how to meet based on the location of the group members.

Parallel Developments

Besides iFind, there are other tools that increase collaboration options in interesting ways. Alcatel-Lucent's My Teamwork is a converged communications platform that combines presence-aware IM with phone and conference calls and shared applications and presentations. Nortel Networks' MCS 5100 Server combines unified messaging and multimedia communications. These products rely on the user to tell the network her location.

Cisco Systems' 2710 Wireless Location Appliance, on the other hand, can track many endpoint types to enhance inventory control, people tracking, E911 services and workflow automation. Cisco plans to integrate this location awareness into its presence server.

Can a middleware layer be developed to enable the integration of location awareness and applications? Absolutely. Cisco has stated it will evolve product lines into platforms on which business applications will integrate mobility, presence, location awareness and Wi-Fi. Both Cisco and Newbury Networks provide a SOAP/XML API to spur this integration. Newbury says that it will work with various hardware platforms from Aruba Networks, Cisco, Nortel, Symbol Technologies and Trapeze Networks. Newbury provides both Java-based and Web-based APIs for use by third-party developers.

In parallel with the Wi-Fi efforts, 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) has published a standard for an architecture that includes the Open Services Access API, which can be used as an interface to network devices that know their locations. Such information can be requested of the device or pushed by the device to the application.

Privacy Concerns

Location-awareness capabilities, such as those in iFind, seem to be compatible with business functions that involve a lot of human interaction, like sales, service and support. There are, however, some drawbacks to its use in a corporate setting. Many people don't want their location available to co-workers, for instance, but with a corporate location-awareness program, it might be required. In addition, iFind and other people locators require you to give up some privacy.

Nathan Platt, a Pennsylvania attorney practicing technology law, says these location tools raise several issues when used in a corporate setting. Location information could be used to determine when an employee visits a doctor, which would be a violation of HIPAA regulations. And location information might be abused, say, in the case of managers repeatedly tracking employees into the snack area or fitness center as part of an effort to negatively impact that employee's annual evaluation. Finally, Platt says, the notion of "evidence in plain view" might be changed, since, by yielding information about your location, you might be expanding the court's definition of what you have placed in plain view. This is an important consideration under Fourth Amendment search and seizure rules.

Still, iFind has several positive attributes. It's easy to use, provides a user's location and identity, and helps users communicate instantly. Best of all, it's free. It may be redundant if your system already includes collaboration and location tools from your IP-PBX vendor. If the location part is missing from that system, though, iFind could really be an asset.Phil Hippensteel is an assistant Professor Of Information Systems At Penn State University and an industry consultant. Write to him at [email protected].