Advances in pervasive and mobile technologies are making computing available to us at anytime anywhere. Availability however does not automatically mean it is in a form that implies ease of use. Usability in the mobile world amounts to a set of problems that are not so much precedented in the history of computing. Handheld mobile devices that are thin-lean-mean for instance present challenges that require fundamental changes in the way computation is carried out, its architecture, or its supporting environment. A practical goal is to minimize these changes, which calls for automatic or semi-automatic adaptation of existent computing to the small devices. We discuss the issues and research challenges of "X adapting to Y", where X includes content, data, code, computation, GUI, and so on, and the changes in semantics and/or syntax due to the adaptation are to satisfy the constraints of Y. Some experiments we have carred out for content and code adaptation provide some useful illustration.

Francis C.M. Lau received his PhD in Computer Science from University
of Waterloo in Canada in 1986. He has been a faculty member of the
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong since 1987,
of which he is now the head of department. His research specializes in
operating systems, parallel/distributed systems, and pervasive/mobile
computing. He created the Systems Research Group (SRG) which has
graduated many Masters and PhDs over the years. The group has produced
several Java-based software packages which have earned a reputation for
the group. SRG is also responsible for the Hong Kong University Grid
Point which is a key node of the China National Grid as well as an
important gateway to the Asia-Pacific Grid. One of the focuses of his
current research is to tackle some of the fundamental problems
associated with the realization of the "pervasive grid".