Issues in the Design and Implementation of Act 2

Act2 is a highly concurrent programming language designed to exploit the processing power available from parallel computer architectures. The language supports advanced concepts in software engineering, providing high-level constructs suitable for implementing artificially-intelligent applications. Act2 is based on the Actor model of computation, consisting of virtual computational agents which communicate by message-passing. Act2 serves as a framework in which to integrate an actor language, a description and reasoning system, and a problem-solving and resource management system. This document describes issues in Act2's design and the implementation of an interpreter for the language.

A Privacy Conscious Bluetooth Infrastructure for Location Aware Computing

We present a low cost and easily deployed infrastructure for location aware computing that is built using standard Bluetooth® technologies and personal computers. Mobile devices are able to determine their location to room-level granularity with existing bluetooth technology, and to even greater resolution with the use of the recently adopted bluetooth 1.2 specification, all while maintaining complete anonymity. Various techniques for improving the speed and resolution of the system are described, along with their tradeoffs in privacy. The system is trivial to implement on a large scale – our network covering 5,000 square meters was deployed by a single student over the course of a few days at a cost of less than US$1,000.