I’m talking at the BCS Edinburgh branch tonight about sensing and sensor-driven systems.

It has been an old maxim in computing that incorrect inputs can acceptably give rise to unacceptable outputs: “garbage in, garbage out”. This is ceasing to be true, and many classes of systems must behave predictably even in the face of inputs containing substantial garbage — although researchers delicately use terms like “imprecise” or “unstructured” instead of “garbage”. In this talk we discuss some approaches to managing the problem of imprecise, inaccurate, untimely and partial inputs in the context of pervasive and sensor-driven systems, and suggest that we need to re-think radically the way we build software and represent decision-making in these environments.

Details of the venue are available here.