Overview
Development on the PIKS, Personal Information Kiosk System, started three years ago at the IBM Haifa Research Labs (HRL) when researchers realized that people spend the majority of their time in confined spaces.
The PIKS objective is to provide a wide range of information and services to people who are mobile within a defined organizational area. PIKS builds upon the future pervasive availability of small, simple PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)-type devices that will be carried by everyone and used for a variety of purposes.
The main goal of PIKS is to design and test-bed a mass-market type application where the server can handle thousands of simultaneous users within a very short response time. All this is done while keeping the user device resource requirements (CPU, memory, power, cost) to an absolute minimum.
PIKS can be deployed at a wide variety of places, such as airports, theme parks, malls, hospitals, museums, or any other large campus where arbitrary visitors need immediate access to sources of information that enable them to easily get what they need. It is designed to replace the existing information sources such as information desks and bulletin boards, and to improve access to the existing, and new, organizational information. The main advantage of PIKS is that the user only receives the relevant, requested information.
PIKS incorporates an optimal blend of efficient server architecture, minimal network messaging, and palmtop device resources to provide a cost-effective solution for wide-scale deployment. The PIKS application model is designed to allow any type of palmtop PDA with limited resources to interact with the application. In the PIKS architecture, the data and application are located on a central server.
Advantages of PIKS include:
- Easy access to organizational information.
- Good support for access by masses of anonymous users.
- Self explained User Interface.
- Configuration and maintenance are simple.
- Applications run at desktop computers/stations making CPU and memory limitations to palmtop devices irrelevant.
- Upgrading of applications at the desktop occurs once when needed, and not at multiple devices.
- Sensitive business information isn't stored at the mobile device.