INFINITY

Ïnfïnïty is the industry's first privacy-preserving, data sharing middleware for mobile devices, including cell phones, PDAs and portable computing devices. Ïnfïnïty will enable those heterogeneous devices, regardless of their operating systems, hardware or makers, to share information and access the network via various communications modes, including device-to-device direct communications, not through central servers. We have implemented a prototype system and two application scenarios (evacuation routing and restaurant recommendation) that demonstrate the Ïnfïnïty concept.

Ïnfïnïty has three key advantages/benefits:

• With device-to-device direct communications, it will provide people with limitless amounts of data that were previously inaccessible or unavailable.
• The Ïnfïnïty middleware platform will help programmers to develop applications for a variety of mobile devices more easily. Today, a variety of mobile OS offer many different programming environments and interfaces. Applications must be custom-tailored for each platform. Diverse data types, database software and connection hardware also make broad-spectrum mobile device integration difficult. Ïnfïnïty will improve cross-platform integration and communication for mobile applications.
• It will help the Internet to shift from today’s "network of pages" to a "network of data sources" for the future. It will enable access to the world’s highly distributed data sources. It will provide a middleware framework for linking heterogeneous mobile devices into

Papers:

• Alvin Cheung, Tyrone Grandison, Christopher Johnson, Stefan Schönauer, "Ïnfïnïty: A Generic Platform for Application Development and Information Sharing on Mobile Devices", Sixth International ACM Workshop on Data Engineering for Wireless and Mobile Access (MobiDE) 2007, in conjunction with SIGMOD/PODS 2007, Beijing, China, June 2007.

• Blog, January 2007. - The HyperText Computer (HTC) and IBM’s Infinity Project
• ComputerWorld, January 2007 - IBM's Infinity middleware looks to bridge ad hoc networks. Also Computer Partner in Netherlands, CIO India, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, ComputerWorld Singapore.
• eWeek, December 2006 - Looking to the Future
• eWeek Podcast, December 2006 - IBM: To Infinity and Beyond
• MuleSource Blog, December 2006 - Post-lunch ponderings on IBM’s “Infinity” Integration Project
• ZDNet, December 2006 - IBM: Net’s future is mobile middleware.
• eWeek, December 2006 - Future Net: Expanding the Web from Pages to Data Sources. Digg, OSSnet, Yahoo News