For the last 40 years, humans have been slaves to their computers. Now the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI)
is setting up an innovative research community that will look for specific
ways to reverse the relationship - and put humans firmly back in charge.
For too long, computers have purported to serve us while in fact, requiring
us to serve them. 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.
Today (24 March 2004), CMI announces the launch of its ‘Pervasive Computing’ Community.
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
24x7, 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"
Editor’s note:
The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) is a pioneering partnership between
two world-class institutions: the University of Cambridge in the UK and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Established in July 2000,
it receives funding from the UK government and industry partners to carry
out education and research to enhance the competitiveness, productivity and
entrepreneurship of the UK economy. CMI is currently focusing on ways of
enhancing the knowledge exchange process between academia and industry to
push forward research and increase the pace of innovation. As part of this,
it is currently setting up four Knowledge Integration Communities (KICs).
For more information about these, and about CMI, please visit our website:
http://www.cambridge-mit.org
For more information please contact:
Rachel Simpson, CMI
01223 448764
Mobile: 07796 261297
E-mail: r.simpson@cmi.cam.ac.uk
or
Fran O’Dwyer, Pall Mall Consult
020 7009 1017
