Mediating Technologies Peng Chang pengcs cmu edu Shuheng

Mediating Technologies Peng Chang: peng@cs. cmu. edu Shuheng Zhou: szhou@ece. cmu. edu

Information Age Vision • Digital Technologies • change how we express ourselves • how we communicate with others • how we perceive, think about and interact with our world. – Current Status: • Crude, unwieldy, and unpersonalized, poorly matched to human needs of their users. Just like a researcher in MIT said, “Today’s computer technology is just capable of being able to bother people everywhere without necessarily help them anywhere. ”

Media of Tomorrow • Tomorrow’s media applications will have more characteristics: – – – Intelligent: in a sense, it thinks. Personalized: it serves for your own interests. Affective: it feels your mood. Sociable: it connects you with others as a community. . • We will present TV of tomorrow and personal information system as two examples of tomorrow’s media applications.

One Example: TV • Today’s TV: you do have a remote control, but all you can do with it is to switch channels. • Tomorrow’s TV: it is more like a WWW browser – on-demand: you get exactly what you want – user participated: you can even involve into the movie you are watching. john kathy

Core Techniques • Distributed intelligent databases: Media Bank – pull based delivery paradigm – object oriented representation – fully distributed media through dynamic links • Structured Media – from waveform representation of two dimentional images toward more semantically and physically meaningful representation of scenes

Media Bank Heterogeneous Distributed Pull Based Architecture for the Delivery of Object Oriented Multimedia across Packet Switched Networks.

Structured Media • More meaningful representations of video sequences can be obtained by video analyzing and scene understanding with computer vision and machine learning techniques. But this is still a very difficult task based on today’s techniques and various research projects are actively going on along this direction. – For example: a blob representation of a human being dance

Personal Information Architecture • Marathon Man • The Filament Chip – a lightweight connection to networks • Self Organizing Wireless Network

Marathon Man

Trimble Lassen GPS Receiver i. RX 2. 1 PIC board Polar Heart Rate Monitor Star. Tac phone

Filament Chip • Challenge: design an ‘IP Lite’ chip to make it easy to connect something as simple as a light switch to a computer network. • Answer: Single-chip network controller – core would be independent of Link Layer – “host” assumed to be a small slow chip with limited RAM such as a PIC – take on real-time requirements for buffering datagrams and sending ACKs

The Density of Network • • • 1984: 10, 000 nodes in US 1990: 10, 000 in Boston Area 1996: 10, 000 at MIT campus alone 2002: 10, 000 at media lab • Imagine if you will. . . • – Network connections cost under $10 each – hundreds of connections in a single room •

What’s Required • To achieve high-density networking: – Nodes must be wireless – Nodes must be low-power – Overall network must be self-organizing • . . . and some corollaries: – No base stations – Distributed routing and administration – Limited storage and computational resources

The Virtue of Locality • Conserving power: – Reducing transmit range from 200 meters to 6 meters is a factor of 1000 reduction in power. Milliwatts become microwatts. • Conserving airwaves: – Reducing transmit range allows physically separate nodes to broadcast simultaneously. • The Moral: – Today, wireless LAN systems are rated by how far individual nodes transmit. – As network densities increase, a better figure of merit will be how near they transmit.

Infrastructure • For high-density networks, you want: – no base stations – no distinction between routers and nodes – infrastructure created simply by adding nodes

Network is the computer • Application sectors for Hyphos networks – – Wireless LAN Active Inventory: manufacturing, warehousing, shipping Industrial controls and sensors Home and "last meter" delivery • So maybe Sun Microsystems had it right: the network is the computer. But for those of those who still think that computers are the important component, consider this: when everyday objects become connected to digital networks, these same objects can become input and output devices for computers. Among other things, this will give computers much richer means of interaction with people and with the environment. Before long, we'll think it strange that people ever sat at a screen with a keyboard and a mouse.

Why do you connect these devices to network? • Perhaps the most interesting application for Hyphos networks is in the home, where we can really start to connect everyday objects to networks. Why should you ever have to set a clock? When a clock is on the network, it can contact the local Network Time Protocol server and always be within a few milliseconds of the cesium clocks at the National Bureau of Standards. A smoke detector that beeps in the basement isn't effective if you're asleep on the third floor. When it's connected to a network, it will be able to alert you regardless of where you are, even if you're driving on your way to work. Your washing machine, if it's feeling ill, can contact www. maytag. com and download some diagnostic software. And if it detects a problem, it can alert the local Maytag repairman that he finally has a job. All the major appliances in your house could negotiate with the local power company to cut back on usage a few percent during peak hours. By reducing the peak loads, this could save the utility companies billions of dollars. My local telephone company charges $75 to do any internal wiring inside a house. Using a Hyphos network, the phone line terminates outside the house and the "last meter" connections are made wirelessly. In fact, some enterprising service provider could subsidize the cost of a "hyphos gateway" for use in the home. For a monthly fee, all of the everyday objects on a Hyphos network now have access to the internet. Your VCR will have the entire TV guide available to it. A child's toy can be in contact with www. disney. com to download new learning activities every day. --answering question proposed in class seminar

References • Web sites – http: //www. media. mit. edu/Research – http: //www. media. mit. edu/Projects/tvot – http: //www. media. mit. edu/Projects/pentland. html – http: //www. media. mit. edu/pia/ – http: //www. pedinc. com/