[116] in magellan
$40M Project to replace PC technology
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Mon Apr 5 10:16:41 1999
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 10:15:09 -0400
To: magellan@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
Exciting stuff at LCS!
Greg
-------------
>To: I/T Leadership Team <itlt@MIT.EDU>, service-tl@MIT.EDU
>Subject: $40M Project to replace PC technology
>From: "Roger A. Roach" <rar@MIT.EDU>
>Address: MIT Room W91-201B, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
>Telephone: 617-253-7011 Fax: 617-253-1266
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 08:27:05 EDT
>Sender: rar@MIT.EDU
>
>From NYTimes:
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/04/biztech/articles/05mit.html
>
>Project Aims to Unhitch Computing From PC Harness
>
>By JOHN MARKOFF
>
>CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- For David Clark, an MIT computer scientist,
>research is like "an expedition into the future."
>
>With the faculty and students at the Laboratory of Computer Science at
>the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clark, one of the lab's top
>managers, is about to embark on just such a journey -- one meant to
>liberate computing from the PC-centric world it has occupied for the
>last two decades.
>
>On April 12, scientists here plan to introduce Oxygen, an ambitious
>$40 million, five-year research project that is being financed by the
>Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's
>research arm. The objective is as broad as it is audacious: to
>reinvent all facets of information technology, from chips and software
>to computers and networks. And in the Oxygenated future, a desktop
>computer would be largely beside the point.
>
>In this digital new world, a person could know if a colleague working
>elsewhere was reachable at her desk, because sensory-based computers
>in the wall would know. A handheld point-and-click pointing device
>could be used to remotely command every household appliance to do its
>bidding. And instead of typing on keyboards or stabbing at a screen
>with a stylus, a person would simply tell any computer what to do.
>
>Or at least such concepts are the vision. In reality, the Oxygen
>project, Clark said, must walk the exceedingly thin line between an
>unrealistically futuristic "Star Trek" notion of computing and an
>overly timid short-armed reach for the easily attainable.
>
>"You have to quantum tunnel from 'It's too soon' to 'It's too late,"'
>he said. "You've got to have guts."
>
>It might be easy to dismiss such talk, were it not for the Laboratory
>of Computer Science's track record over the last three and a half
>decades. True, it has simmered at a lower publicity temperature than
>its bubbly academic sister, the MIT Media Laboratory. But since its
>creation in 1964, the LCS, as it is known, has been associated with
>many of the most important developments in computing.
>
>The lab's many historic fruits include word-processing and spreadsheet
>software. And though it was invented elsewhere by Robert Metcalfe,
>Ethernet, the standard architecture of today's PC networks, was
>subsequently refined during the 1970s as Metcalfe wrote his
>Ph.D. dissertation at the lab.
>
>It may be an MIT effort predating the lab by a year -- Project MAC,
>set in motion by a $2 million DARPA grant in 1963 -- that offers the
>best model for a project like Oxygen and the impact it could
>conceivably have on the next generation of computing.
>
>It was Project MAC, after all, that redefined the computing world by
>making it possible for many users to simultaneously share a single
>computer. From Project MAC sprang innovations like an early e-mail
>system and the concept of shared information utilities, the
>forerunners of today's online communities and even the World Wide Web.
>
>Project Oxygen, which will be formally kicked off at the laboratory's
>35th anniversary next week, is the brainchild of the lab's director,
>Michael Dertouzous, a computer scientist whose own career traces to
>his days working on Project MAC as an MIT student. Intent on putting
>people first, Dertouzous is determined to chart an information
>technology future in which computers recede into the background.
>
>"We want to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of 'going to the
>computer,'" he said.
>
>Oxygen, seen as a proof-of-concept testbed for technologies that
>others might turn into actual products, will be based on several
>components that the lab is already developing.
>
>The first will be called Handy 21 and will be a portable device with a
>small screen, a video camera, a Global Positioning System receiver and
>a powerful computer. Combining the functions of a cellular telephone,
>two-way data radio, television set, beeper, handheld computer and
>intelligent remote-control pointing device, the Handy 21 will rely
>heavily on advanced voice-recognition technologies that have been
>developed at the lab.
>
>Speech recognition -- the ability for machines to understand spoken
>instructions -- is a vital part of the Oxygen project. A group led by
>the MIT speech researcher Victor Zue has developed an approach
>significantly different from that now being pursued by most others in
>the speech-recognition field.
>
>Zue's Spoken Language Systems group has developed systems with
>powerful speech-recognition capabilities -- in large part because they
>focus on relatively narrow subject areas, like the weather, airline
>reservations or local traffic.
>
>"I have to confess that I don't know how to build HAL," Zue said,
>referring to the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the complete
>conversational repertory of an eerily dispassionate human being.
>
>The aim of the Spoken Language Systems research group is to achieve a
>limited, though seemingly conversational, voice input system by
>stitching together many different recognition systems with
>vocabularies based on narrowly defined subjects.
>
>Zue cites three factors making voice recognition more important as a
>computer interface: Computers are becoming increasingly mobile; people
>love to talk, and the shrinking size of computers is making the
>conventional keyboard a large and ungainly component.
>
>Much of the design effort will revolve around the idea of delegating
>tasks to machines. For example, Zue said that instead of merely
>inquiring of the Oxygen system when a plane is scheduled to arrive at
>the airport, the user, planning to meet the flight, might also give
>this command: "Call me half an hour before Flight 116 lands."
>
>Besides the Handy 21, the Oxygen system will be based on another
>building-block computer that the researchers call Enviro 21. These
>devices, which would be powerful versions of the Handy 21 system,
>would be embedded in office walls, car trunks or basements at
>home. The systems would have extensive sensor networks meant to enable
>them to monitor the state of the environment -- knowing whether an
>office door is open, for example, or if the car trunk is unlocked or
>the basement sump pump is operating.
>
>And besides merely sensing a situation, the Enviro 21 would have the
>intelligence to instruct mechanical systems to close the door, lock
>the trunk or reset the pump. Or by the same token, if an office door
>is open, a distant colleague might infer that the occupant would not
>mind being interrupted with a phone call.
>
>Both the Handy 21 and the Enviro 21 will be based on a processor chip
>design developed by Anant Agarwal, a computer architect at the lab.
>Working with IBM, Agarwal's group is now designing a processor
>architecture known as Raw. Unlike earlier chip designs which are based
>on predetermined instruction sets, Raw processors subject even the
>most minute, or "raw," circuitry of the processor to customization by
>software designers.
>
>Raw is a gamble, because it would be harder to program than
>conventional processors. But it might have a huge payoff if the
>design proves workable, by offering markedly faster data processing
>and the potential for large numbers of the chips to be custom
>programmed to work in powerful concert.
>
>"A lot of our experiments will be high risk, and they will fail,"
>Dertouzous conceded. "But there is also low-hanging fruit."
>
>Project Oxygen is the clearest example yet in a new direction in
>federal financing of information technology research patterned after
>previous research projects that upset the dominant computing
>assumptions of their day. A notable example from the past is Xerox's
>legendary Palo Alto Research Center during the 1970s.
>
>"This is all about investing in long-term, high-risk research," Tom
>Kalil, President Clinton's special assistant on economic policy, said
>of Oxygen. "What's motivating this is our understanding of the impact
>of government investment in information technology research in the
>1960s and 1970s. Innovations from that investment are driving the
>economy today.
>
>"The administration," he said, "really wants the research community to
>invest in the future and swing for the fences."
>
>Besides speech recognition and Handy 21 and Enviro 21, the other basic
>technology component of Oxygen would be a computer network capable of
>linking the other systems together and also connecting to the
>Internet.
>
>With these, as well the underlying software that supports the basic
>technologies, Dertouzous hopes that Project Oxygen can lead to
>computing systems that bring a meaningful increase in human
>productivity.
>
>"Our overarching goal," he said, "is to enable people to do more by
>doing less."
>
