IEEE DS Online, Volume 1, Number 1

Beyond Desktop Computing—MIT's Oxygen Project

By Sara Reese Hedberg, sara@hedberg.com

Origin: http://dsonline.computer.org/archives/ds100/ds1newprint.htm

Some of MIT's leading computer scientists are busy creating the next computing paradigm—ubiquitous computing. Their research, dubbed the Oxygen project, aims to make computers as omnipresent and invisible as the air we breathe, and as mobile as moving through the air.

Oxygen is funded by DARPA, the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which funded the seeds of the Internet in the sixties and seventies. Oxygen, a five-year, $50-million project, has its sights set on freeing us from the keyboard/mouse tether of today's desktop computing. We'll talk to computers as we move through our daily lives, carrying small, powerful computers no bigger than a cell phone. We'll have more powerful processors inlaid in the walls of our buildings and stashed in the trunks of our vehicles.

The main locus of the work is MIT's The Laboratory for Computer Science (www.lcs.mit.edu). Since the 1960s, LCS has been one of the main progenitors of computer systems, spawning a host of seminal technologies such as Multics (the precursor to Unix), the original TCP/IP networking protocol, the first commercial spreadsheet program VisiCalc, and X-Windows.

Suite of technologies

The Oxygen architecture integrates eight different technologies.

Handy 21

MIT researchers are working on a prototype hand-held computer currently the size of two paperback books, which will likely shrink to cell-phone size with time. The Handy 21 is a communications chameleon, functioning with the flip of a bit as a wireless connection to the Internet, pager, radio, walkie-talkie, and TV. It will handle functions such as e-mailinglist, Web search-and-serve, scheduling, and video on demand.

Enviro 21

The Enviro 21 computer is a faster, larger capacity computer than the Handy 21. It can be built into the walls of homes, offices, or even the trunks of cars. In addition to Handy 21 functionality, it will also control devices such as phones, faxes, coffeepots, cameras, sensors and microphones.

Network

Network services will create a secure collaborative region among users as needed, self-organizing and adapting as users move from place to place. In its current instantiation, it even works on top of the noisy Internet. It will also connect with a range of other sensors and electro-mechanical devices.

Conversational I/O

Coupled with wireless mobility, conversational input/output is at the heart of ubiquitous computing. MIT researchers are working on imbuing Oxygen with the ability to accept verbal input, understand the meaning of the language, and generate spoken output. Researchers have made impressive progress in these areas over the past 15 years. However, we still haven't obtained the facility computers display in science fiction movies. MIT researchers do have working prototypes of conversational I/O systems running in limited domains such as weather information for about 600 major cities worldwide (www.sls.lcs.mit.edu\jupiter). Like idiot savants, these systems function well in a narrow range.

Web bots

Fast, focused information retrieval from heterogeneous Web sites is key to Oxygen. Its "knowledge access technology" will find information on the Web, your local disk, and the disks of friends or colleagues. These softbots will sift through data from various sources and help you make sense of it all.

Task automation

Without having to specify fancy macros, users will be able to create scripts for various routine jobs such as turning on the heat, updating your day's stock portfolio value, and giving traffic reports.

Recorder

Functioning much as a secretary or court reporter, this technology will keep track of group decisions and trails of documents—playing back a short summary version to detailed chains of spoken and video sources.

Specialized microprocessor

Running this spectrum of technologies is a specialized chip under development with a flexible design that exposes its wiring directly to the software system. Today, each PC has a microprocessor, and most of us plug in add-on cards for modem, graphics, sound, and video. The Raw chip will use a software compiler and processor that automatically reconfigures the path of electric current through the logic gates as needed—on the fly—thereby adapting and customizing the wiring for each running application.

Groundswell of efforts

MIT has just announced the formation of the Oxygen Alliance, a group of companies that will work with MIT on the Oxygen project. The companies include Hewlett-Packard, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Nokia Research Center, Philips Research, Delta Electronics, and Acer Group. Having such heavy hitters sign on to this project should not only accelerate the development cycle, but it might also bulldoze a path to production and distribution.

The MIT cadre is not the only brainpower being applied to the challenges of ubiquitous computing. DARPA is funding four other groups as well: Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, University of California at Berkeley, and Georgia Tech (working with the Oregon Graduate Institute). The brass ring of ubiquitous computing is not just in the sights of the university research community. Multinational corporations such as IBM and Intel have their own efforts underway.

With so many of the best minds in the world working on and integrating various pieces of the puzzle, we could well see significant progress in ubiquitous computing over the next five years.