Monday, January 4, 1999
The Los Angeles Times
DIGITAL NATION
The Future Lies Beyond the Box
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved
Reporters and columnists attempting to sum up developments in the
high-tech field in 1998, or speculating on the big stories for this year,
are all ticking off what one would expect: the boom in Internet commerce,
the Microsoft antitrust trial, highflying Internet stocks, the resurgence
of Apple Computer, the merger of America Online and Netscape
Communications, the rise of open-source software such as the Linux
operating system, and the year 2000 bug, among other notable subjects.
The interesting developments I saw in 1998 were mostly in research
laboratories, and they pointed to a profound rethinking of how networks
operate and information is circulated.
The buzzwords to watch this year and beyond are "embedded" or
"ubiquitous" computing and "distributed" computing, terms now used by
computer scientists to describe a reorienting of how we'll use networking
and information technologies in the future. This new paradigm, whose
building blocks only began to appear in 1998, will be the next big thing
in computing.
Embedded or ubiquitous computing refers first of all to the trend of
putting computational and networking capabilities into devices and
services other than the familiar "screen-keyboard-box" of the personal
computer. We're seeing a huge shift among technology companies that are
looking beyond the PC toward a proliferation of hand-held network devices
such as 3Com's PalmPilot, a new networking cellular phone from Microsoft
and Qualcomm, a promised palmtop system from Apple and electronic books
from Rocketbook and Softbook, among other related products.
Compaq's Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, which the company
acquired when it bought Digital Equipment Corp., has even produced a
working prototype of a hand-held computer that runs Linux.
At the Internet Society convention in Geneva in July, I frequently heard
the slogan, "IP on everything, everything on IP." IP stands for Internet
Protocol, the basic data standard that allows information to be "seen" or
passed around on the Internet. With everything on IP and IP on
everything, nearly all our common, everyday devices will be "smart" and
"on" the Internet: cars, refrigerators, household appliances and light
switches, manufacturing tools, TVs, cameras, sensors and even smart cards
in our wallets or purses.
In order to get all these devices to talk to each other and to be
identified on the network, we need a new standard of software that's
small, platform-independent and ubiquitous itself. Sun Microsystems'
solution is called Jini (http://java .sun.com/products/jini/), which was
previewed for developers in 1998 and will be formally announced Jan. 25
in New York.
Jini is based on Java, the programming language that runs on a "virtual
machine" that can be included with any operating system. Jini-enabled
devices contain "agents," small segments of software code that tell other
Jini machines what they do, where they are and how they operate. A
Jini-powered house, for example, would show up in a Web browser or on a
PC desktop displaying its capabilities, such as the ability to turn
lights on or off, inventory its refrigerator or cupboards, set the
temperature, check phone messages, etc.
This is how embedded computation and distributed computing intersect:
Machine intelligence shifts from general-purpose computing, such as in a
PC, to device-specific intelligence, and the network itself becomes smart
as an aggregate of billions of devices performing specific tasks and
sharing information.
The network architecture may change too. Instead of the familiar
client-server model we use today, distributed computing allows a
peer-to-peer architecture, which means that there's no longer any need
for large, centralized computers running huge operating systems such as
Windows NT. Jini resources can "see" one another without having to be
switched through a server, and Jini agent software can run in under a
megabyte of memory space.
Microsoft is aware of the threat this model poses to its core software
products. It has its own version of the Jini approach, called the
Millennium Project. Lucent Technologies has one called Inferno
(
http://www.lucent-inferno.com/), and General Magic, in Sunnyvale,
Calif., has a product called Odyssey
(
http://www.generalmagic.com/technology/odyssey.html).
This is where the money and research are headed these days. Another
interesting and related development is under investigation at Caltech in
Pasadena, a program called the Infospheres Project
(
http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/), directed by Caltech computer
science professor K. Mani Chandy.
The Infospheres Project, funded by the U.S. Air Force and the National
Science Foundation, grew out of the tragedy of TWA Flight 800 near Long
Island, N.Y., in 1996, Chandy says. After the airliner blew up, a large
array of institutions and people needed to talk to one another -- the
FBI, hospitals, TWA, the Coast Guard, families of the victims, etc. The
technological problem became how these people could communicate without
knowing one another or knowing how to get in touch with one another in
advance.
The thrust of the Infospheres Project has been to develop a new mode of
information distribution, which Chandy calls "content-based" addressing
instead of "address-based" addressing. In other words, people who need to
communicate would be able to pass information to one another based on the
content of their messages rather than on knowing the precise address of
their correspondents.
To accomplish this task, the Infospheres Project also uses Java agents,
software that organizes information into classes and then searches for
matches on a network. A user who wants to buy a product online, for
example, might use such an agent to search for sellers and have all
potential sellers with a match for the product report back instead of
requiring the user to search individual Web sites.
Using the Infospheres Project software (a trial version will be available
later this month), users will be able to find information not by using
Internet addresses but by creating conditions, or parameters, for agents
that will search the network for appropriate responses. In March, the
project will launch an experimental model in the San Francisco Bay Area
with both end users and vendors.
"I think this is going to be the metaphor for the future," Chandy says.
Most other computer scientists seem to agree -- the phrase "post-PC era"
is heard often among researchers now.
The challenge for this new approach will be how to make the ubiquitous
and distributed models of computing reliable, safe, secure and
transparent to users. Privacy will also be vastly more complicated -- the
present model of online privacy, which is dependent on the "informed
consent" of consumers, will get significantly more opaque if we have
millions of devices constantly communicating all around us without our
direct control or knowledge. There is also the interesting question of
whether future software agents will bear any of the legal rights or
responsibilities we attach to individuals.
Right now, cyberspace is typically viewed by the public as something
glimpsed through a screen, the "window" of a PC monitor. Even that level
of abstraction, however, is about to expand beyond most people's
imaginations as the ideas incubating in research labs begin to migrate
into our daily lives. As we might expect, given the rapid technological
change we've seen in the last five years, things are about to get very
different from what we know now.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of
Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
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