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UIUC Unveils the Worlds Most Advanced Building
Eagle5596 writes "The University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, one of the top Computer
Science programs in the world has just officially opened their new $80
million Siebel
Center. The department head describes the building as a
single computing entity, meant to be programmed and to interact with those
in the building via RFID tags in their ID cards.
This is probably one of
the biggest and most expensive projects in ubiquitous computing ever
launched, touching on all the important issues in this field, from privacy to the ultimate question about the usefulness of such a system. Several papers are covering this including the Chicago Sun Times, and the Chicago
Business"
I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you in. Your GPA is too low this semester.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
...Imagine a beowulf cluster of those
Sorry
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
The UIUC bldg sounds extremely cool, but in 5 yrs folks will be smiling politely at the "hokey-ness" of the place.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Now, when you go down the hall, the "Buildy" mascot asks things like. "You appear to be walking to the bathroom. Would you like some help?"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Clap on. Clap off. What else is there?
Apparently RFID tags (and anything that doesn't have its own power source) don't have enough power to do real crypto. So this will be great until someone builds a device to read people's tags as they walk down the hall, and then impersonate any of them to the building. At least with keys or magnetic striped cards you have to get physical access to them before you can copy them.
This proves the point that all things human go in cycles. First computers were the size of buildings, then they shrunk down to fit in the palm, now they are becoming the size of buildings again.
_____
Thank you.
The real issue with privacy of course is turning off the location function when you don't want something embarressing happening. I present the following situation as evidence:
Johnny wanted to find Professor X to ask a question about his research paper, approaching the wall he intoned, "Computer, please locate Professor X."
In a booming voice the wall responded, "Professor X is currently in Stall 5 of the Bathroom on the second floor, logging in."
Considering that the only scientifically-verified consequence of overexposure to radio waves is radio burns -- and that only happens at very high energy densities -- I wouldn't worry about cancer.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Well, yes. With all of that technology inside, they couldn't spend much on contruction or architecture, and frankly, it's a bit small. I mean, it looks great on the inside, but here's an outside view of the front entrance: click here.
I am waiting for the first time they blow the breakers on the circuit that handles their security computer.
What happens? Does the system fail to "everything is locked"?
This sounds like a RISKS article waiting to happen.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Now all you need to get back at a professor you don't like is hack into the building's computer, and turn off the air conditioning in whatever room he goes into.
Sweet revenge!
-S
I'll let you know before you read the rest of my post that I'm a current student at UIUC.
/ I took a tour of it, and the impression it gave me was, "Look at us, we're MIT! This building looks so crazy, we must be geniuses to work here!"
I got into the PhD programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and UIUC--and UIUC compares very well with the rest of these schools. The only thing UIUC lacks is the publicity to go with the quality of research that happens here. On the other hand, this is a good thing since the students here can concentrate more on research instead of just working very hard at appearing smart like some other schools promote.
At UIUC, the professors are generally fairly young, which I view as a good thing. At the 'bigger' name schools you end up with a bunch of dinosaurs who may have contributed to the field in the past but are simply living off the legacy insteading doing new research. If you actually care about this, check out the UIUC research page at: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/research/areas.html
I have personally found the AI, Databases, and Theory groups to be very impressive and have had experience working with them.
If you want an interesting comparison, check out MIT's new building.http://web.mit.edu/buildings/statacenter
UIUC has a much more honest and less flashy style, which I find rather refreshing.
I do agree that most of the ubiquitous computing features of the building seem a little silly, but why not make your new computer science building a functional experiment in computer science itself?
Of course, if it's running UNIX then it would
crash with "Segmentation fault: floor dumped".
>;k