Thursday, October 12, 2000

Carnegie Mellon Works to Make Computers Invisible and Pervasive By FLORENCE OLSEN Pittsburgh Carnegie Mellon University's wireless network does more than just permit students to check their e-mail wherever they happen to be. It also lets small groups of robots roam the campus, and allows a class of computer-science students The last of four articles in a series Monday: The Wireless Revolution Tuesday: SUNY's Morrisville Campus Sees Wireless Computing as a Way to Create a Niche Wednesday: Universities Find Wireless Systems Bring Them Convenience and Savings to run a program they wrote called "The Stalker" -- all in the name of research, of course. Daniel P. Siewiorek, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, is one researcher who takes advantage of the wireless network. He is interested in technologies for creating "invisible halos" of computing and information services that would follow every student and faculty member around the campus, regardless of his or her location. With wireless technology, he wants to create hands-free, attention-free computing. Mr. Siewiorek, who believes that computers have become too much of a distraction, says that future computers and networks will be "invisible and pervasive." People and computers will interact through proxies, or "auras." The university's Aura Project is financed by the Defense Department. "I get 75 to 100 e-mail messages a day," Mr. Siewiorek says. But, like other professors, he has trouble finding time to respond to e-mail, send and retrieve files, and carry out all of the other human-computer interactions that are required of him. The aura would permit him to use voice commands to sort e-mail or to request, for instance, that information be displayed on a wall-size video screen. The campus network that provides untethered communications for the ubiquitous-computing project has also inspired Mr. Siewiorek's computer-science students to create a people-locator service that they dubbed "The Stalker." By sending queries to the wireless network's management software, the program can locate students -- those who have a wireless handheld device or laptop turned on -- by determining their proximity to any one of the wireless access points on campus. The service can help track down someone who is late for a meeting, for instance -- and it can even be used to send the person an instant message. But the program, which is being tested by a class of computer-science students, also raises privacy questions that would have to be answered before the university could offer a similar service to the entire campus, Mr. Siewiorek says. By using the campus wireless infrastructure rather than building their own for each research project, scientists in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute say they save research time and dollars. "It's absolutely a multiplier in my work," says Tucker Balch, associate director of the institute's MultiRobot Lab. Mr. Balch and his graduate students work with wireless robot systems, which they program to accomplish tasks as if the robots shared a single brain. Two ant colonies, kept under constant video-camera surveillance in the robotics lab, serve as a source of inspiration and instruction for Mr. Balch's students, who are learning how to program "multi-agent" systems by observing and analyzing the behavior of ants. Just for fun, the robots compete as a team in soccer matches against multi-agent robots developed at other universities, he says. But the real purpose of the research, Mr. Balch says, is to lay the groundwork for activities such as the robot colonization of Mars. "With computers and wireless technology, it turns out there are lots of things that robots can do that humans don't have a chance of doing -- for instance, communicating brain-to-brain at 11 megabits per second," says Mr. Balch. Indeed, any time one robot sees an object, all the robots in the multi-agent system can see the same thing. "I call it mind meld," he says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Chinese writer wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2 California systems face Education Dept. investigation of campus crime data Supreme Court hears arguments over applying disabilities law to public colleges Responding to student complaints, Harvard Law School will cut class sizes Controversial Connecticut College president to take a sabbatical Campus-computing survey finds that adding technology to teaching is a top issue Carnegie Mellon works to make computers invisible and pervasive What makes an online course succeed? Not everyone agrees, a study finds