1. FOREWORD By: Howard Shrobe MIT CS & AI Laboratory
Smart Environment?
Intelligent Environment?
What does it mean? F1

2. SMART ENVIRONMENTS Do we want them? How pervasive do we want?
Will we allow?
What can we actually accomplish?
What problems and issues
must we address? F2

3. Mark Weiser -- 1991 His vision of pervasive, embedded computation:
"A physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives and connected through a continuous network."
15 years ago
Inexpensive hardware
Communications revolution
Wideband
Digital F3

4. Ubiquitous Feature Computation and Communication
New framework
Distributed & mobile
Broad range of capabilities
Mobility of user
Telephone mobile car phone cell phone pda Internet
People want one device
3. Systems never stop
What about errors, upgrades, reboots? F4

5. Ubiquitous Feature What are some we already use?
4. Embedded sensors & effectors
What are some we already use?
5. Constant human-computer interaction
Human-centered, ubiquitous
Has the past been "human-centered"? i.e. Is it easy? Intuitive?
Computation has placed a burden on us
Not necessarily easier F5

6. Moore's Law Computing Power doubles approximately every 18 months
Does it?
Will it continue?
Will it 'fix' things?
Problem: To be more powerful, computers consume their own resources F6

7. Will Intelligent Environments
Make Our
Lives Easier? F7

8. Challenges
Comprehensive infrastructure & firm computational foundation
Distributed & wireless
Protocols
Systems must respond adaptively
Recognize new devices
Recognize, diagnose & recover from failures
Suppose power "flashes"
System should learn & improve F8

9. Challenges Devices, sensors, noise, failures Common sense
3. Integrate information from many sources
Devices, sensors, noise, failures
4. Extensive knowledge of human world
Common sense
Not standard -- when to buy milk
Robot building stack blocks
Can "bound" it with focus on 'smaller' environments
Office or home or car F9

10. Challenges System reacts to what's going on around it
5. Context
System reacts to what's going on around it
Tied to location (GPS)
Two Roles
How should system respond
When to turn on light
Establishes perceptual bias
"recognize speech"
"wreck a nice beach"
F10

11. Challenges Best interface is one unnoticed
6. Develop techniques for human-centered interfaces
Best interface is one unnoticed
Replace keyboards & pointers with natural language & sketch recognition, machine vision, etc.
Maybe no interface
Just act
Ask questions
F11

12. Challenges Very complex Tend to oppose convenience
7. Guarantee Security & Privacy
Very complex
Tend to oppose convenience
People often don't even try
Access controls necessary
Often rigid
Lack context
F12

13. THIS COURSE One chapter per class meeting -- not really possible
Everyone writes a paper related to a different chapter
Graduate students give 30 minute presentation related to one chapter
At least one written assignment per week
5-minute project presentations - all
Exams – open
See website: cs.mwsu.edu/~ranette
F13