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By Tracey Logan
BBC Go Digital presenter
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By the year 2010, scientists predict we will be immersed in a sea of miniature computers.
Current portable computing systems are cumbersome
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Many of us carry three or four digital devices with us,
according to Simon Moore of Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, but
soon that figure will be in the hundreds.
"They'll be woven into our clothing as identification markers during manufacture," he said.
"They might tell your washing machine what cycle to use, or monitor bio-signs to alert us to impending illness."
Those predictions came at the launch of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Pervasive Computing initiative (CMI).
It is part of a transatlantic collaboration between information
scientists and engineers at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in Boston.
Intelligent agents
As well as ensuring the health of us and our clothes, those
ubiquitous digital devices will, by default, be communicators. They will
talk to each other and us, wherever we are.
Hot-desking may have been a big trend in the nineties, but
future computer users will be truly nomadic, able to access information everywhere.
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We have this joke that we want to make computers as pervasive and as unobtrusive as oxygen
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The challenge for CMI researchers is to build immersive systems
that automatically reconfigure data or voice call connections between the
full range of digital devices, without getting cut off.
Keeping such systems secure from unauthorised use and attack,
will be crucial, as will be the inclusion of intelligent filters that prevent
the system pestering us with trivia.
This became patently clear last year when MIT tested a prototype
system which monitored a person's location and, seamlessly, used the best
available communications device to reach them.
A cell phone call turned into a video-conference call when
the researcher entered his office and back to a cell phone call as he left
for his car.
But the embryonic system noticed a problem with the researcher's office computer, according to MIT's Umar Saif.
"You couldn't escape from the system", he told Go Digital.
"It would find whatever communications that was available and call you.
"The computer was just trying to be helpful, but it turned
into the nightmare scenario because there was no way of shutting the system
down".
Accessible information
Such pestering from not-so intelligent computer systems in
the future will be a real turn-off for users, according to Lancaster University's
Professor of Organisational Psychology, Cary Cooper.
"People already suffer from technological overload and it's
our fault because we allow the technology to manage us, not the other way
around," he said.
Too much information can be overwhelming
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"Some of the problems we have are because technologies are created by engineers trying to think of a really interesting tweak.
"Let the e-mail chase the cell phone if someone's away on
business and if we can't get him that way, we'll get him some other way.
"But they should think more about the impact of these developments on our lives."
This is what the CMI researchers will be doing, said Dr Saif.
Ultimately, he said, the issue is not about information overload
but making the power of computers more accessible to ordinary people with
no special skills and with little money to shell out on the kinds of gadgets
we rely on today.
Energy efficient processors running on wireless devices with
vastly increased battery time will be essential to the CMI's pervasive computing
vision, as will enhancements in computer vision and speech processing.
"We have this joke that we want to make computers as pervasive and as unobtrusive as oxygen", he said.
"We want people to use computers without even realising they're using them."
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