Pervasive Computing Systems

nickynicky9doors writes "Washington Technology has an article on Smart Conference Rooms. 'Pervasive-computing systems ...will come about through large numbers of small devices and sensors, some so unobtrusive that people won't know they're interacting with a computer at all.' The Smart Flow System was designed with open-source middle ware and the data acquistion system is based on a Linux cluster of 14 computers."

Comments

Re:Trust?

[delta407]

AT&T labs have produced something they call Sentient Computing, and while technically it may not be sentient, it would probably be kind of creepy. Each person wears a "bat" which lets a central computer monitor their whereabouts, and based on information fed to it by various sensors, can deduce what the person is doing.

This is a neat system; you can point at things with the bat and the computer will respond (like pointing the bat at a poster to choose scanner settings), however, since this computer is tied into the phone system (among other things), this could get kind of scary.

Didn't Parc Place do this years ago???

[Ocelot Wreak]

Borrrrrring!
I'm sure I saw an article in Scientific American like a bajzilllion eons ago (the annual mag devoted to computing?) on ubiquitous computing at Parc Place. It described all their prototype badges, flat panel scribblers, intelligent conference rooms, etc. that were going to change the way we work. Pretty much the same privacy concerns too...

Xerox PARC, not Parc Place.

[SimHacker]

Mark Weiser was the director of Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab, when he first described Ubiquitous Computing in 1988.

The article in Scientific American you saw "like a bajzillion eons ago" was probably the one written about the research at Xerox PARC by Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991.

Parc Place was a Xerox PARC spinoff, that made a commercial product out of Smalltalk, which was originally developed at Xerox PARC long before Mark ran the lab. As far as I know, Parc Place didn't have much to do with Ubiquitous Computing -- they just sold a version of the SmallTalk programming language.

Speaking of pioneering influential Xerox PARC research, has anyone else noticed the striking similarities between Microsoft's ".NET" and Xerox PARC's "Portable Common Runtime"?

-Don