Communicating objects

As information technology becomes more pervasive it must become increasingly accessible and help to broaden the inner circle of early expert users to a wider, all-inclusive community of users. It brings many positive aspects but there are also potential drawbacks which will impact people, markets, the economy and society.

The session covered topics from communicating info-appliances to communicating appliances˛. Unfortunately the extreme weather conditions caused two of the four advertised speakers to be absent. The session was opened by the chairman, Alain Brenac, from the French Ministry of Research. He introduced Juhani Kuusi, senior vice President for Research, Nokia, and Arturo Colantuoni Sanvenero from Merloni household appliances.

Main issues raised

According to Mr. Brenac the term Communicating Objects appeared some years ago, in the context of Bluetooth and UMTS development. It would no longer be only individuals communicating, objects would communicate as well, often at their own initiative. A classical example had become the smart fridge: a fridge that knew what it contained, what was taken out, and thus decided what to order to be filled with the right food. Home appliances seemed to be a privileged sector for application of communicating skills, ranging from self-selection of cheap power, to leaving care of the grass to a robot lawn mower.

Another evolution expected was moving from the laptop and mobile towards a wearable communicator: which was always with you, able to perform everything with the combination of what the laptop and mobile offers today, as well as being more user friendly. Of course, there was also in this area possible usages and savings, but also some potential draw-backs. The session looked into what these were and how they could be overcome.

Juhani Kuusi (Nokia Research Center) pointed out that it was expected that more handsets then PCs would be connected to the Internet by the end of 2003 with 98 percent of the processors, no longer in desktop PCs, but in household appliances etc.

The present wave of the wireless revolution was changing the way people accessed information. The most common way of accessing content and services, the Internet, would in a few years be through mobile phones, not using desktop PCs. The information appliances that were emerging included new generations of mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and small versions of PCs. These devices would have wireless connectivity, but they were mainly intended for office use.

The next wave in this revolution of wireless communicating appliances, a move from communicating information appliances to communicating appliances, was already visible. Instead of having only appliances that served the same type of information needs as the desktop PCs, there could be lots of communicating appliances in our environment. Such devices would be doing computations, but most of it would not be visible to us. Terms that were used to describe this coming wave were ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, invisible computation, etc. The technological drivers behind this wave were the availability of much processing power in small processors; reliable and cheap wireless connectivity over small distances and the technology for sensors and actuators.

The two main challenges in R&D towards pervasive computing remaining were ease of use and building the infrastructure that supported this. Ease of use would not only be easy to operate, but also having devices that did what they should do, without having to be told. David Tennenhouse, Intel's chief scientist, spoke about the necessary transition from human-centred office computations to human-supervised proactive computing. Voice interfaces, gesture recognition, etc. could give a far easier way of interacting with appliances than the traditional use of keyboards. Adaptive systems were systems that were able to learn from their user. At its best, an adaptive system worked like a good executive assistant: doing what we typically wanted to be able to do.

Building the infrastructure of pervasive computation leads to several difficult design problems. For one thing privacy and security should be guaranteed. It would not only be persons communicating with persons, or with objects, but also increasingly objects with objects. Guaranteeing interoperability of the devices was a challenge that demanded new network solutions.

Conclusion and Future Decisions

In the discussion following this presentation the tremendous development of MicroElectronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS; silcon based, extremely durable) was highlighted, as a rapid take up was expected. An issue here was to embed protection against hacker attacks on communicating objects.

Arturo Colantuoni from Merloni home appliances focused on the enormous, expected take-up of communicating objects in households. Since home appliances have a hundred percent penetration in households, these objects will bring the Information Society faster in the house than any other means.

The development of the new economy was based on the interaction of PC, telecommunications, Internet, and electronics. Without the first three it would have been impossible to set up a new business model based on the new network and the information exchange. Basically the state of the art technology represented a way of performing new tasks and applications but the scope of a real network could be the shift of the electronic devices role; from performing objects to communicating objects.

In a changing environment companies would have to find ways of

In the case of Merloni the strategic goal was to place the customer relationship in the centre of strategic frame and to market appliances able to exploit the self-generated information.

Source: Information Society for All (Report of IST Conference, Paris, November, 2000) - a pdf document.