p2pnet.net News Feature:- For the last 40 years, humans have been slaves to their computers, states the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI).

"For too long, computers have purported to serve us while in fact, requiring us to serve them," it says. "We have pampered them with air-conditioned rooms; learnt their language, in order to talk to them; and been required to manipulate them with awkward tools like keyboard or mouse."

However, CMI - a strategic alliance between the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US - wants to put humans firmly back in charge.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Pervasive Computing’ Community
Cambridge-MIT Institute

This Community is aiming to bring together an unusually wide range of participants, including academic researchers, students, industrial partners and other organisations to explore some of the major challenges that stand between us, and a networked wireless world where hundreds of miniaturised computers are at our beck and call all around us.

The Community will initially unite researchers at Cambridge University with their counterparts in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CMI initially invested £ 800,000 in research projects in this field and is now investing an additional £2.2 million to start up the Community, and expects it to attract further support from other partners as they join.

CMI’s ‘Pervasive Computing’ Community is one of several new Knowledge Integration Communities (KICs) that CMI is setting up. These KICs aim to find new ways in which academia and industry can work together and exchange knowledge to push forward research in areas where UK industry has a demonstrable competitive position – like information and communications technology.

When computers first became available some forty years ago, they were rare and expensive resources that took up a whole room, and had to be shared by many users. But over the last two decades that has changed, with the shared computer replaced by the personal computer, which in turn has shrunk in size from desktop, to laptop, to palm-held devices including PDAs, mobile phones, and pagers etc.

This trend is likely to accelerate so rapidly, enhanced by wireless technology, that by the end of this decade, we can expect individuals to be using hundreds of computing devices every day for work, education and play – some of them mobile, many of them embedded in the environment around us.

But for this to happen - and for all these computers genuinely to improve our quality of life - computer scientists will have to overcome a number of research challenges including:

• Reconciling the twin demands of allowing computer users to be mobile and connected at the same time. Therefore computer networks and connections must be easy to establish and dismantle; and devices in the environment that anyone can use, must also offer the user security and privacy.
• Allowing us to become more mobile, by designing new generations of computer device that have smaller, lower-power batteries so that the devices themselves can be even smaller.
• As computers become too small to access by mouse or keyboard, designing new, improved ways of communicating with them by speech, vision and gesture.
• Above all, researchers must create an architecture capable of addressing the technical challenges in software engineering, supporting systems that can gracefully accommodate changes in user location, available computing resources, and local failures.

The CMI ‘Pervasive Computing’ Community is setting out to tackle these challenges, by running a range of projects. These include:

• Security: when computing devices are readily available in the environment (for example, bank cash machines, palm-held devices etc), we need to find ways to make their user interfaces more robust against unauthorised use and intrusion.
• The latest generation of peer-to-peer systems: researching ways of creating robust networks that can spread information anonymously and are available 24×7, eg news networks that can disseminate news in countries with strict censorship.
• Immersive systems: designing systems that will be programmed by expressing a mere intent of the required service, while automatically generating an implementation to satisfy and maintain the user goal. For instance, we will be able to request a conversation with a friend or colleague - via the desktop PC in our office, say - and then have the system automatically establish and reconfigure the connection and keep it going so that we can keep talking (via mobile phone, handheld device, or whatever computer is available) as we leave the office and move around.
• Power-efficient computer architectures: If we are genuinely going to be able to do our computing on the move, we need to address the shortage of battery power on wireless computing devices, and find new processor architectures designed to conserve power.
• The development of computer vision and speech processing technology so that instead of having to communicate with our computers using the tools it understands - Windows software, icons, a mouse - we can do so using better language technology than exists today, and computer vision technology that will let us communicate with gestures and body language.

Simon Moore, from Cambridge University’s Computing Laboratory, who is leading the Community in Cambridge, says:

"We can take a 1960s supercomputer, shrink it to the size of a sugar cube and sell it for under £10, but how do we use it to make your life better? It needs to be sentient, loyal, small and low maintenance. This raises technical challenges in the areas of low power electronics, security, distributed computing and human/computer interaction."

Victor Zue, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, who is leading the Community at MIT, says:

"Within the next decade, many of us will be fully immersed in a nomadic lifestyle, in which we will demand instant access to data and information for education, work, and play, no matter where we are. This KIC, consisting of some of the best minds across the Atlantic ocean on computer networks, power-aware computing, security and privacy, natural interfaces using speech and vision, and software architecture, will work cooperatively to meet some of the challenges posed by this change in lifestyle."

"It is not just about research, however’ says Umar Saif from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, who is managing the CMI community on Pervasive Computing. ‘What excites me most about this multi-million dollar collaboration is how this research will provide a catalyst to increase the economic competitiveness and productivity of UK businesses.

"Alongside the innovations that will ensue from the research collaboration, we are equally interested in the innovations in methods of knowledge exchange, in mechanisms for translating such revolutionary research into commercial products and in engaging the public sector to benefit from this community of world-class researchers.

"In the coming years, the members of the KIC will liaise with the UK high-tech industry, conduct executive education courses, compete in KIC-wide business plan competitions, organize collaborative workshops with the UK regional development agencies, exchange research students and, of course, help advance the future of computing."

Jeff Patmore, Head of Strategic University Research at BT Exact, BT’s research, technology and IT operations business, which is joining the Community, says:

‘The initial focus by the Knowledge Integration Community on creating a system architecture for pervasive computing, developing computer-assisted learning and new generation peer-to-peer systems will complement our research programme. Itshould also allow BT Exact to collaborate over the next two to three years on joint programmes that will both increase the breadth of our internal research, and help enhance the overall UK knowledge base"

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2004 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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