Emergence of the Intelligent Environment and Pervasive Computing

• An intelligent environment must be adaptive - What will the home of the future look like? One popular vision is that household devices -- appliances, entertainment centers, phones, thermostats, lights, etc. -- will be endowed with microprocessors allowing the devices to communicate with one another and with the home's inhabitants. The dishwasher can ask the water heater whether the water temperature is adequate; inhabitants can telephone home and remotely instruct the VCR to record a favorite show; the TV could select news stories of special interest to the inhabitant; the stereo might lower its volume when the phone rings; and the clothes dryer might make an announcement over an intercom system when it has completed its cycle.
• E-topian Visions: The World As Intelligent Environment - Lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder. Urban areas characterized by dwellings in which we both live and work. Twenty-four- hour neighborhoods and electronically mediated meeting places. Decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Electronically summoned and delivered services. Cities as silicon- and software-saturated places that are smart and responsive.
  This is how William J. Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, sees the future in e-topia, published this fall by the MIT Press. E-topia is a follow-on to Mitchell's City of Bits, published by the MIT Press in 1995. In both books, Mitchell pursues his theme of how urban areas will be affected by the global digital network, and what that implies for our future daily lives.
• Intelligent Environment: The Era of Pervasive Computing - People, places and objects will all be soon wired to the web. Pervasive Computing, the concept that computers in the future will be as inextricably woven into our daily lives as electricity or telephones are today, is an idea whose time is coming very fast. Early in the next century, we shall see people, places and things all networked together via the Web. Devices will interact with each other, independently, without human intervention. Web servers will be embedded in a wide variety of places and devices, which will be able to transform information to each other. Also, everything - people, places, and things - will have their own Web pages. By that I mean you, your car, your living room, this auditorium will all have web pages. And these web pages will become the interfaces that allow all of these things to participate in web-based e-services. So, at this point, people, places, and things actually become first-class members of the web. People will be able to declare their presence or participate with their privacy protected in this new world.
• Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A State-of-the-Art Survey - Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Increasingly, traditional centralized and sequential manufacturing planning, scheduling, and control mechanisms are being found insufficiently flexible to respond to changing production styles and highly dynamic variations in product requirements. The traditional approaches limit the expandability and reconfiguration capabilities of the manufacturing systems. The traditional centralized hierarchical organization may also result in much of the system being shut down by a single point of failure, as well as plan fragility and increased response overheads. Agent technology provides a natural way to overcome such problems, and to design and implement distributed intelligent manufacturing environments.
• Context-Aware Computing: The CyberDesk Project - The CyberDesk project is aimed at providing a software architecture that dynamically integrates software modules. This integration is driven by a user's context, where context includes the user's physical, social, emotional , and mental (focus-of-attention) environments. While a user's context changes in all settings, it tends to change most frequently in a mobile setting. We have used the CyberDesk system in a desktop setting and are currently using it to build an intelligent home environment.
• What is Intelligent Space? - The basic concept of Intelligent Space has extended with its development. The Intelligent Space is a system for supporting people in it. Events, which happen in it, are understood. However, to support people physically, the intelligent space needs agents to handle real objects. Mobile robots become physical agents of the Intelligent Space and they execute tasks in the physical domain to support people in the space. Task includes movement of objects, providing help to aged or disabled persons etc. Thus, the Intelligent Space is an environmental system, which supports people in it electrically and physically. Another interesting application here is that the room can serve as a high level, context sensitive interface to robots. The Intelligent Space is not a system for people anymore; it is for both the people and the robots. Recently we decided to treat the Intelligent Space as a platform. The Intelligent Space is a platform to which desultory technologies are installed.
• The Third Element: A Wireless Web - The Internet will increasingly permeate our lives as connectivity becomes ubiquitous and free of tethered connections to cables or phone jacks. The handheld computing market--which includes everything from cell phones with e-mail to PDAs that browse the Web--is estimated to be worth $4 billion by 2003, up nearly sevenfold from 1999, according to the Yankee Group. One reason that demand for wireless Internet services will exceed demand for desktop services is simply because the devices will be with people all the time.
• Ubiquitous Telepresence - This document describes a new technology concept that I call ubiquitous telepresence (UT). As the name implies, this technology enables users to maintain a physical presence remotely in any one of many places.
• Ubiquitous Computing - Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDAs, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.
• Information Age - E-commerce - A Wireless Future - PC penetration will be finite, it can only go so far. That's why technologists and businesses are keen to establish a beachhead in the next exciting frontier of e-commerce - the wireless economy.
• Essential Technologies and Infrastructures - The aim of work is to promote excellence in the technologies which are crucial to the information society, to accelerate their take-up and broaden their fields of application. The work will address the convergence of information processing, communications and networking technologies and infrastructures. Research will cover areas such as the convergence of information technology and communications; mobile and personal communications; microelectronics; technologies and engineering for software, systems and services; simulation and visualisation technologies; novel multisensory interfaces; and the development of peripherals, subsystems and microsystems.
• Ubiquitous Computing: An Interesting New Paradigm - Ubiquitous computing, or calm technology, is a paradigm shift where technology becomes virtually invisible in our lives. Instead of having a desk-top or lap-top machine, the technology we use will be embedded in our environment. From the ubiquitous computing page at Xerox PARC [UBPARC] we have the following description: imagine a world with hundreds of wireless computing devices of different sizes in the same room. In order to bring this type of computing out into the environment, among the things we need to rethink are user interfaces, displays, operating systems, networks, and wireless communications. This rethinking demands a radical departure from the tradition of putting machines out for our use, and having us adapt to them. Instead, in the world of ubiquitous computing, technology will be implicit in our lives, built in to the things we use, including the spaces. The proponents of this technology hold that this type of computing will be a more natural tool, and thus a more powerful and effective one for us to use.
• The MIT Wearable Computing Web Page - To date, personal computers have not lived up to their name. Most machines sit on the desk and interact with their owners for only a small fraction of the day. Smaller and faster notebook computers have made mobility less of an issue, but the same staid user paradigm persists. Wearable computing hopes to shatter this myth of how a computer should be used. A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives.
• Intelligent Environments Resource Page - The Intelligent Environments Resource Page was established at Microsoft Research in 1998 to provide a clearinghouse for WWW links related to the budding field of Intelligent Environments. The relative "newness" of this field implies a large net should be cast when determining what is actually a part of this body of work. This is an evolving set of resources and therefore your suggestions, comments, and additions are most welcome.
• SCOTT eVEST - With SCOTT eVEST's unique, patent pending Personal Area Network (PAN), you can easily use your electronic gadgets while wearing the vest. For example, using the hidden conduits, hands-free headsets and headphones can be used without the hassle of having the wires dangle all over you. Before the SCOTT eVEST, you needed a briefcase to hold all your gadgets and stuff, which defeats the purpose of being truly mobile. The SeV's pockets are specifically designed to hold AND protect your gadgets and their accessories - while providing easy access.
• Advanced Internet for Industry - Communications - Once every machine and device is connected to the Internet, which won't be far off, the traffic on the Internet is going to get a lot heavier. According to a study on machine-to-machine (M2M) communication by Deloitte Consulting, the growth of this type of communication is accelerating and could soon outstrip the already incredible growth of human-initiated communication on the Internet. Deloitte predicts that M2M communication could dominate the Internet by 2005.
• Machine-to-Machine Communications - Will machine-to-machine communications be the Internet technology trend of the 2010s? Does what we see of M2M today constitute the first signs of a technological development that may turn out to be as revolutionary as the PC era and the Internet at the end of the 20th century? Will the new mobile subscribers of tomorrow include toys, bicycles, cars, and all sorts of machines?
• The ghosts in the machines - Embedded devices are everywhere ‹ in your car, in you fridge, even in your children's toys. In the future, expect everything to be connected to everything else.

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