The world is experiencing a technology shift. In 2012, more touchscreen-based mobile devices like smartphones and tablets will be sold than desktops, laptops, and netbooks combined. In fact, in many cases powerful and easy-to-use smart phones are going to be the first and, in especially in developing countries, possibly the only computing devices which virtually all people will own, and carry with them at all times. Furthermore, mobile devices do not only have touchscreens, but they are also equipped with a multitude of sensors, such as location information and acceleration, and they are often connected to the cloud. Although these devices have sufficient memory and processor capacity, they present challenges for user interface design, especially when going beyond typical consumer tasks and instead considering content creation, and even application development or editing on a phone. In the talk we will consider the capabilities of these devices now and in the future. As an example of what is already possible, we will present a new tool from Microsoft Research, TouchDevelop, which is an application creation environment that runs on the smartphone itself, no separate PC required.

Nikolai Tillmann's main areas of research are program authoring on mobile devices, program analysis, testing, code optimization, and verification. He leads the Pex project, a framework for runtime verification and automatic test case generation for .NET applications based on parameterized unit testing and dynamic symbolic execution. He is also involved in the Spur project, where he is working on a tracing Just-In-Time compiler for .NET and JavaScript code. Most recently, he started the TouchDevelop project, which enables writing of programs for mobile devices on mobile devices.