Roy Want

Roy Want (born 1961) is a British-American computer scientist whose research has focused on indoor positioning, mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, automatic identification, including RFID and wireless beacons, and the Internet of Things. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1988 for work on multimedia distributed systems. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers and articles on mobile systems and holds more than 100 patents. Want joined Google in 2011, following earlier roles as senior principal engineer at Intel and principal scientist at Xerox PARC.

Research and projects

Among Want's early research contributions was the Active Badge system, developed around 1988 to identify mobile users and their location within a building's computing infrastructure. The work was carried out at the Olivetti Research Ltd (ORL) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and the associated publication later received the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award in 2016.

Want was a central figure in the earliest realization (at Xerox PARC) of Mark Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing. The PARC program involved three devices: PARC-Tab, PARC-Pad, and LiveBoard. Today, these form-factors map directly to smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs. In the early 1990s, Want was the principal architect and implementer of PARC-Tab, the world’s first context-aware mobile computer in a smartphone form-factor. It could adapt the behavior of applications, depending on the user’s context, a decade before the emergence of the iPhone (2007). A key technology that made the PARC-Tab context-aware was the use of an infrared network, both connecting the device to the local area network, and localizing it to a room using a diffuse infrared-network transceiver.

In the late 1990s at PARC, Want worked on incorporating inertial sensors into mobile user interfaces, using emerging MEMS technologies. He also designed the Hikari handheld digital organizer, which could automatically switch between portrait and landscape orientation when rotated. Lists could also be scrolled and items selected using a tilt and clutch mechanism, and photos selected from a 2D grid using a ball-in-a-maze puzzle style of user interface.

By the end of 1990s, Want led PARC’s electronic tag project, “Bridging Physical and Digital worlds”, based on passive RFID. It was the first comprehensive published vision that electronic tags (inexpensive, and battery-free), could link the then new mobile platforms with a location, and related digital web content/control; another example of context-aware computing

Want continued to make pioneering contributions to mobile computing over the following two decades. At Intel Research, he led the Personal Server project (2001), a platform later integrated into an early smartphone, which enabled users to present their personal digital content and media onto nearby displays. This led to his vision of Dynamic Composable Computing (2005), in which a mobile user is able to rapidly assemble a logical computer on-the-fly through wireless-connected components. Today, the Personal Server concept is embodied in Apple’s Airplay and Google Cast media services, and as a result the original paper was given the 10-year impact-award at ACM Ubicomp ’12

At Google, Want was one of the leads for the Eddystone Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE) beacon project, with similar context-aware goals to RFID, but enhanced by ubiquitous readers in the form of smartphones, which can detect BLE advertisement IDs at much greater range, and now supported commercially by many vendors.

Professional service Want served as chair of ACM SIGMOBILE from 2009 to 2012. He has also served as program chair for conferences including ACM MobiSys, ACM HotMobile, IEEE PerDis and IEEE ISWC. From 2006 to 2009, he served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing and has contributed to the editorial board of IEEE Computer.

In 2019 he became the technical editor for the IEEE 802.11 az Wi-Fi standard, working on the Next-Generation Positioning standard, and later IEEE 802.11bk (320MHz Positioning), and leading the integration of 802.11mc and the next generation technologies into Android P+ to enable enhanced context-aware operation for more than 3.3 billion devices. The initial technology and API was presented publicly at Google IO ’18, and is expected to lead to ubiquitous (1-2m) indoor location accuracy as the world upgrades its Wi-Fi infrastructure to the latest standards.

Awards Want was named a Fellow of the ACM in 2005 and an IEEE Fellow in the same year. In 2003, he received the Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering for his work on the Intel Personal Server. In 2019, he received the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award for his contributions to context-aware mobile computing.