>Microsoft Skims Off Academia's Best for Research Center
...meanwhile, the New York Times reports on where the innovative research really is - in government-subsidized research labs.
Doug
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New York Times - April 5, 1999
Project Aims to Unhitch Computing From PC Harness By JOHN MARKOFF
AMBRIDGE, Mass. -- For David Clark, an MIT computer scientist, research is like "an expedition into the future."
With the faculty and students at the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clark, one of the lab's top managers, is about to embark on just such a journey -- one meant to liberate computing from the PC-centric world it has occupied for the last two decades.
On April 12, scientists here plan to introduce Oxygen, an ambitious $40 million, five-year research project that is being financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm. The objective is as broad as it is audacious: to reinvent all facets of information technology, from chips and software to computers and networks. And in the Oxygenated future, a desktop computer would be largely beside the point.
In this digital new world, a person could know if a colleague working elsewhere was reachable at her desk, because sensory-based computers in the wall would know. A handheld point-and-click pointing device could be used to remotely command every household appliance to do its bidding. And instead of typing on keyboards or stabbing at a screen with a stylus, a person would simply tell any computer what to do.
Or at least such concepts are the vision. In reality, the Oxygen project, Clark said, must walk the exceedingly thin line between an unrealistically futuristic "Star Trek" notion of computing and an overly timid short-armed reach for the easily attainable.
"You have to quantum tunnel from 'It's too soon' to 'It's too late,"' he said. "You've got to have guts."
It might be easy to dismiss such talk, were it not for the Laboratory of Computer Science's track record over the last three and a half decades. True, it has simmered at a lower publicity temperature than its bubbly academic sister, the MIT Media Laboratory. But since its creation in 1964, the LCS, as it is known, has been associated with many of the most important developments in computing.
The lab's many historic fruits include word-processing and spreadsheet software. And though it was invented elsewhere by Robert Metcalfe, Ethernet, the standard architecture of today's PC networks, was subsequently refined during the 1970s as Metcalfe wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at the lab.
It may be an MIT effort predating the lab by a year -- Project MAC, set in motion by a $2 million DARPA grant in 1963 -- that offers the best model for a project like Oxygen and the impact it could conceivably have on the next generation of computing.
It was Project MAC, after all, that redefined the computing world by making it possible for many users to simultaneously share a single computer. From Project MAC sprang innovations like an early e-mail system and the concept of shared information utilities, the forerunners of today's online communities and even the World Wide Web.
Project Oxygen, which will be formally kicked off at the laboratory's 35th anniversary next week, is the brainchild of the lab's director, Michael Dertouzous, a computer scientist whose own career traces to his days working on Project MAC as an MIT student. Intent on putting people first, Dertouzous is determined to chart an information technology future in which computers recede into the background.
"We want to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of 'going to the computer,'" he said.
Oxygen, seen as a proof-of-concept testbed for technologies that others might turn into actual products, will be based on several components that the lab is already developing.
The first will be called Handy 21 and will be a portable device with a small screen, a video camera, a Global Positioning System receiver and a powerful computer. Combining the functions of a cellular telephone, two-way data radio, television set, beeper, handheld computer and intelligent remote-control pointing device, the Handy 21 will rely heavily on advanced voice-recognition technologies that have been developed at the lab.
Speech recognition -- the ability for machines to understand spoken instructions -- is a vital part of the Oxygen project. A group led by the MIT speech researcher Victor Zue has developed an approach significantly different from that now being pursued by most others in the speech-recognition field.
Zue's Spoken Language Systems group has developed systems with powerful speech-recognition capabilities -- in large part because they focus on relatively narrow subject areas, like the weather, airline reservations or local traffic.
"I have to confess that I don't know how to build HAL," Zue said, referring to the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the complete conversational repertory of an eerily dispassionate human being.
The aim of the Spoken Language Systems research group is to achieve a limited, though seemingly conversational, voice input system by stitching together many different recognition systems with vocabularies based on narrowly defined subjects.
Zue cites three factors making voice recognition more important as a computer interface: Computers are becoming increasingly mobile; people love to talk, and the shrinking size of computers is making the conventional keyboard a large and ungainly component.
Much of the design effort will revolve around the idea of delegating tasks to machines. For example, Zue said that instead of merely inquiring of the Oxygen system when a plane is scheduled to arrive at the airport, the user, planning to meet the flight, might also give this command: "Call me half an hour before Flight 116 lands."
Besides the Handy 21, the Oxygen system will be based on another building-block computer that the researchers call Enviro 21. These devices, which would be powerful versions of the Handy 21 system, would be embedded in office walls, car trunks or basements at home. The systems would have extensive sensor networks meant to enable them to monitor the state of the environment -- knowing whether an office door is open, for example, or if the car trunk is unlocked or the basement sump pump is operating.
And besides merely sensing a situation, the Enviro 21 would have the intelligence to instruct mechanical systems to close the door, lock the trunk or reset the pump. Or by the same token, if an office door is open, a distant colleague might infer that the occupant would not mind being interrupted with a phone call.
Both the Handy 21 and the Enviro 21 will be based on a processor chip design developed by Anant Agarwal, a computer architect at the lab. Working with IBM, Agarwal's group is now designing a processor architecture known as Raw. Unlike earlier chip designs which are based on predetermined instruction sets, Raw processors subject even the most minute, or "raw," circuitry of the processor to customization by software designers.
Raw is a gamble, because it would be harder to program than conventional processors. But it might have a huge payoff if the design proves workable, by offering markedly faster data processing and the potential for large numbers of the chips to be custom programmed to work in powerful concert.
"A lot of our experiments will be high risk, and they will fail," Dertouzous conceded. "But there is also low-hanging fruit."
Project Oxygen is the clearest example yet in a new direction in federal financing of information technology research patterned after previous research projects that upset the dominant computing assumptions of their day. A notable example from the past is Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center during the 1970s.
"This is all about investing in long-term, high-risk research," Tom Kalil, President Clinton's special assistant on economic policy, said of Oxygen. "What's motivating this is our understanding of the impact of government investment in information technology research in the 1960s and 1970s. Innovations from that investment are driving the economy today.
"The administration," he said, "really wants the research community to invest in the future and swing for the fences."
Besides speech recognition and Handy 21 and Enviro 21, the other basic technology component of Oxygen would be a computer network capable of linking the other systems together and also connecting to the Internet.
With these, as well the underlying software that supports the basic technologies, Dertouzous hopes that Project Oxygen can lead to computing systems that bring a meaningful increase in human productivity.
"Our overarching goal," he said, "is to enable people to do more by doing less."