The 'Pervasive Computing' Community

By Roland Piquepaille

Most of us are using computers, but also PDAs and cell phones. And this trend is accelerating in our increasingly networked wireless world. We might use hundreds of computing devices by the end of this decade. Still, we are slaves to our machines. With every new device, we have to learn new commands, languages or interfaces. The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a strategic alliance between the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., has enough of it and wants to give back control to the users. So it launched its 'Pervasive Computing' initiative with the intention to tackle this challenge. In particular, the group wants to develop new technologies to make easier for us to interact with all these computers.

The Community will initially unite researchers at Cambridge University with their counterparts in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CMI initially invested £ 800,000 in research projects in this field and is now investing an additional £2.2 million to start up the Community.

The Community started with a fairly simple constatation.

When computers first became available some forty years ago, they were rare and expensive resources that took up a whole room, and had to be shared by many users. But over the last two decades that has changed, with the shared computer replaced by the personal computer, which in turn has shrunk in size from desktop, to laptop, to palm-held devices including PDAs, mobile phones, and pagers etc.

This trend is likely to accelerate so rapidly, enhanced by wireless technology, that by the end of this decade, we can expect individuals to be using hundreds of computing devices every day for work, education and play