28-02-2013, 09:18 AM
Project Oxygen: Pervasive, Human-Centric Computing – An Initial Experience
Project Oxygen.pdf (Size: 1.56 MB / Downloads: 56)
Introduction
For the past six months, I have been integrating several experimental,
cutting-edge technologies developed by my colleagues at MIT as part
of the MIT LCS/AIL Oxygen project. This paper gives a snapshot of
this work-in-progress.
Project Oxygen is a collaborative effort involving many research
activities throughout the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and
the Artificial Intellegence Laboratory (AIL) at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). The Oxygen vision is to bring an abundance
of computation and communication within easy reach of humans
through natural perceptual interfaces of speech and vision so computation
blends into peoples’ lives enabling them to easily do tasks they
want to do – collaborate, access knowledge, automate routine tasks and
their environment. In other words, pervasive, human-centric computing.
At first blush, this catch-phrase appears vacuous. Today, computers
are certainly pervasive; it is likely, at this moment, you are within 100
meters of a computer. Computers are certainly human-centric; what
else can they be? On the other hand, computers are not yet as pervasive
as is electricity or water. Although computers perform jobs required by
humans, they do not feel human-centric – humans must conform to an
unnatural way of communicating and interacting with computers. Finally,
the tasks described have little to do with computation; computermediated
functions is a more accurate term but sounds awkward.
Acomputer-mediated, seminar presentation
system
This section describes a computer-mediated seminar presentation system.
As you read through the description, compare it to how presentations
are given today. Although a laptop with programs like Powerpoint
or Freelance attached to an LCD projector is a vast improvement over
the old days of foils or 35mm slides, the human has given up a degree
of control, freedom, and naturalness. The system described below
provides for a more natural human interface.
Alice is to give a seminar about her O2.5 project. As she walks into
the seminar room, she allows herself to be be identified as the speaker.
She does not need to carry a laptop with her slides on it – all of her
files are globally accessible. Alice tells the system how to find her talk
by simply supplying enough keywords to uniquely identify the file she
wants. Her files are well indexed and so she merely describes the file
in human terms and not with some bizarre syntax. The system knows
where she is and marshals all the physical components that may be
needed for her to control the display.
Alice wants to control the display so that it matches her current
desires. A seminar is a live event and the dynamics depend on the
audience and speaker. Although it is crucial that she control the presentation,
this control should be of minimal distraction. The same is
true for the audience – they should be able to see the visual content,
hear her commentary, and take notes at the same time. Moreover, unexpected
events should be handled in a natural way.
The Handy 21 (H21)
Although the commercial sector has been cranking out all kinds of
hand-held devices, there is still much research to be done. The H21
should replace the plethora of communication gadgets with a single
portable device. In particular, it should combine at least the functions
of a cellular phone, wireless Internet connection, pager, radio, as well
as a music and video player/recorder. Packing all this functionality
into a single device appears to make it too heavy to be portable. So,
industry strives to find the right set of combinations and to then sell
add-ons to fill-in the missing pieces. The Oxygen approach is different:
all that is needed is a minimal set of components built into the hardware
with software and reconfigurable hardware used to provide whatever
functionality is needed.
Networking, naming and location management
One’s personal data should be easily and universally accessible. Having
a multitude of digital devices, each with some possibly inconsistent set
of data, is neither natural nor geared towards the needs of the human.
Having to remember a set of arbitrary names just to use a physical
device sitting in plain sight is also demeaning to the human user.
The self-certifying file system, SFS [14], is a universal, secure filesystem
that has a single global namespace but no centralized control.
Other similar filesystems require the users to use a particular key management
system to provide security and authentication. SFS separates
key management from file system security, thereby allowing the world
to share the filesystem no matter how individuals chose to manage their
keys.
Within a building it is useful to know where things, including one’s
self, are physically located. The traditional approach is to have all
things periodically broadcast their identity and to have sensors spread
throughout the building that detect these things. To provide a degree of
privacy, among other reasons, the Cricket [7] location-support system
takes the opposite approach. Spread throughout the building are a set
of beacons. The beacons are a combination of RF and infrared signals
that broadcast physical and logical location information. Things in the
environment sense these beacons.
Security and correctness
As evident by the central place of this subsection, the Oxygen Project
considers security and privacy as a central component of a humancentric
system. We are developing a personal identification device that
has two interesting features. It has a very simple interface, perhaps only
a single button to distinguish between identification and authorization
[12, 19]. The simpler the interface the easier it is to make the device
secure. The second feature is that identification mechanisms provide
privacy. A guiding philosophy is that privacy is the right to reveal information
about oneself. When one chooses to make use of public system
resources one is choosing to reveal information about one’s self. Various
schemes for secure, private group collaboration are being developed [19]
as well.
As computers continue their infestation of human activities, their
reliability becomes more important. Specifying the behaviors of interacting
systems is particularly challenging. Research efforts, I/O Automaton
(IOA) [16] and Term Rewriting Systems (TRS) [5], aimed at
proving the appropriateness of collective behaviors, have focused on
precise and concise specifications.
Human interfaces
There is no question that verbal and visual interfaces to computers are
rapidly maturing and are already being successfully deployed. However,
speech and natural language systems need to extend beyond simple
dialog systems. The approach is to gather information from the speaker
in a number of ways, to fuse this with information from other sources
and to carry out tasks in an off-line fashion as well, so as to optimize
the users time [22].
Collaboration
There is much to be done in the way of supporting computer-mediated
human collaboration. Teleconferencing has made strives in allowing collaboration
between people who are widely spatially disjoint, but it is
still difficult to collaborate when people are temporally disjoint [21].
Much of this work is going on in the Artificial Intellegence Laboratory
at MIT and unfortunately, I only know a little bit about it. The seminar
presentation scenario described in this paper is just the beginning.
Implementing the seminar presentation system
We can now relate the technologies described in the previous section
with the needs of our seminar presentation system. The explanation
roughly follows the description in Section 2. We ignore traditional issues
like authorization and allocation of resources and application code
written in traditional ways.
When Alice enters the seminar room, she must be identified and the
presentation manager must be initiated. A simple tag broadcasts her
public key to her H21 or, if she does not have one, then to the room
computing E21 infrastructure. The H21, with Alice’s permission, will
initiate the seminar presentation manager application as an extension of
Alice’s computing environment.