Ben Dodson : 2011 POMI 2020 Workshop

NFC (Near-field Communication) is a radio technology for interactions at a few centimeters' distance. While the technology has been around for some time, it is only recently finding its way to the latest generation of programmable smartphones. NFC has attracted interest largely for payments and ticketing services. We explain how NFC enables a host of new social interactions across devices, including smartphones, televisions, PCs, and tablets.

NFC is an enabling technology that helps simplify the setup of vicinity-based interactions; however, we also require new software systems to manage their runtime. We present Junction as an application-level framework and protocol to ease the development of such distributed software. Junction applications do not rely on a centralized ASP (Application Service Provider) model, resulting in more scalable applications with strong privacy and security characteristics.

Ben Dodson is a first-year PhD student focusing on mobile distributed systems. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, he worked for two years at a healthcare startup, Hx Technologies. His main contributions included development of the iSpan Master Patient Index system for deduplicating patient demographics among hospital databases, using machine learning techniques. He also worked towards compliance under the IHE standard for managing distributed electronic medical records, and built compatible Document Registry and Document Consumer components. Ben is also the lead developer of the web-based media streaming application, Jinzora.