# The Web, ubiquitous computing, and the Web of Things (2021–2022)

> How distributed systems led to the Web and its history, Tim Berners-Lee and Solid, ubiquitous computing and Mark Weiser's vision, the Web of Things semester project in Simon Mayer's lab — and a gap semester that turned into an internship at Dominique Guinard's EVRYTHNG.

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The study of [distributed systems](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2020-2021_getting-into-distributed-systems) led me to learning the fundamentals of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The latter, in particular, had a strong influence on me: bringing together networking and hypermedia to tie together all the world's information systems was such a fascinating idea — one that completely changed the world.

### The Web and its history

Beyond studying these systems in class, I became fascinated by the history behind them, thanks to books like [Where Wizards Stay Up Late](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late) and [Weaving the Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving_the_Web), written by [Tim Berners-Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) himself. I had been following Tim Berners-Lee since he presented the [Solid project](https://solidproject.org/) back in 2019 at [Campus Party in Milan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WVCPuYwUrw), where I had been sleeping in a tent with some friends for three days.

The fact that information of all kinds, hosted on different computers all around the world, could be accessed in a seamless way with a web browser was mind-blowing. Even more interesting was the fact that technology could not only allow individuals to truly own their money (thanks to Bitcoin), but also own their "digital self" (thanks to Solid — or so I thought), a theme that would come back years later when I founded Fabric.

### Ubiquitous computing

Another huge source of inspiration came from attending the Ubiquitous Computing class taught by [Christian Holz](https://www.christianholz.net/). This is how I first came across the concept of computing that goes beyond the individual device and is instead embedded into the fabric of everyday life. Thanks to this class, I learned how many insights can be extrapolated from the data of simple IoT sensors *[link to a project to come]*.

As I was digging into the history of ubiquitous computing, I fell in love with Mark Weiser's [The Computer for the 21st Century](https://ics.uci.edu/~corps/phaseii/Weiser-Computer21stCentury-SciAm.pdf) and was glad to find out that ETH had made its own contribution to the field, thanks to [Prof. Friedemann Mattern](https://inf.ethz.ch/people/person-detail.mattern.html) and his lab.

### Finding the Web of Things

While researching potential semester projects to work on (as required by my curriculum), I found out about the perfect intersection between the Web, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: the [Web of Things](https://www.w3.org/WoT/), a line of research that [started at ETH](https://vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/show.html?what=wot) thanks to, among others, Dominique Guinard and Simon Mayer (both of whom I eventually worked with).

As I learned more about the Web of Things, I decided that it would be a great topic for my semester project. That's how I ended up in [Simon Mayer's Interactions Lab](https://ics.unisg.ch/chairs/simon-mayer-interaction-and-communication-based-systems/) — Simon, after finishing his PhD at ETH, had moved to the University of St. Gallen.

### The semester project

During my semester project, I built a system that used data from various IoT sensors to learn a user's preferences, and then controlled other IoT devices to personalize the environment accordingly — the project [Learning from interactions](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2021-2022_learning-from-interactions/story).

### Gap semester and EVRYTHNG

I enjoyed working on this project and learning about the Web of Things so much that I decided to take a gap semester and dive deeper into it. Reading [Building the Web of Things](https://www.manning.com/books/building-the-web-of-things), written by Dominique Guinard, made me realize that the same principles that turned computers of different kinds into a seamless web of information could be applied to IoT devices to make them seamlessly interoperable. I had spent a lot of time tinkering with IoT and smart home devices, and I knew that interoperability was actually a big problem.

I thought that spontaneously reaching out to Dominique might lead to something — and so I did. Luckily enough, he offered me an internship at his company, EVRYTHNG *[link to come]*, a pioneer in the commercialization of IoT in industry.

*[More on the internship to come.]*

### The Web of Things everywhere

After the internship, everything I was thinking about was making devices seamlessly interoperable via the Web. Even friends' birthday presents turned into an excuse to build something using the Web of Things — like this computer mouse that would move itself every once in a while to keep a friend's Slack always on (she wasn't enjoying her job much lately).

![The self-moving-mouse birthday gift: a cardboard panel labelled "9–17 É SCHIAVITÙ" ("9–5 is slavery") and "TANTI AUGURI" ("happy birthday"), with a microcontroller driving a little servo arm that nudges the mouse to keep a friend's Slack showing as active.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2021-2022_web-of-things/present-1){layout=third}
![A closer look at the servo arm nudging the mouse.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2021-2022_web-of-things/present-2){layout=third}
![The mouse-mover keeping the cursor — and Slack — alive.](https://assets.massimo.context-use.com/a/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2021-2022_web-of-things/present-3){layout=third}

Next: [Master's thesis at DISCO](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2022-2023_master-thesis-at-disco)