Initiative for Autonomic Computing Gains Strength

museumpeace writes "Tired of fixing your computer? What if your system broke down two billion miles from the nearest spare part or human? NASA has just held a colloquium where Ulster University computer science researcher Roy Sterritt was invited to present his ideas on Autonomic Computing. In the last few years,the leading system vendors have realized 'There is no less than a crisis today in three areas: cost, availability and user experience.' There has been a fair amount of academic research since customers like NASA see in it the potential to make remotely operated complex systems sustainable. It all makes for some very cool systems design work and there are lots of further research opportunities. Just don't forget what it may do to your job."

Comments

A Crisis! The sky is falling!

[EatenByAGrue]

Yah the leading system vendors have realized there's a crisis. How else are they going to sell more systems if the ones in place now aren't dangerously unstable? They could probably explode at any minute, are toxic, and will probably delete all my data at any second.

I better go buy a new computer.

Self-fixing computer?

[ralphart]

If self-fixing computers become the norm, that means half the phone calls I get from friends will stop.

Hmmm....bug or feature?

It's ubiquitously useable knowledge

[Artifakt]

It's just about impossible that a tecnic that makes robotic spacecraft all that much more self sufficient will be confined to just robotic space travel for long. If NASA is successful, we will see widespread robotization here on Earth as a consequence.
30 years from now, this will be characterized as a 'mere spin off', and instead of bitching about Moonrocks, ignorant people will be saying "We spent billions to send robot probes to Pluto, and all we got was a bunch of contaminated Helium."

they'll just get dumber

[Darthmalt]

There's a race, Manufactuer's building smarter computers and AOL signing up dumber users.

So far AOL is winning