Pervasive Computing: The Future of Technology - Assignment Example

Pervasive Computing: The future of Technology The ultimate goal of all technology is to pervade the environment completely and get integrated into the everyday life in a ubiquitous and unobtrusive manner. This disappearance of technology is a result of human psychology, and when that happens to any technology, it means the technology has achieved its ultimate goal. This has happened with writing, which was probably the first ever information technology. (1) The same must be the goal with computing, which must eventually become ubiquitous and invisible. The whole idea of the personal computer, the laptop, or even virtual reality with the user wearing special goggles and sitting in front of a complex machine is against the principles of pervasive technology. Essentially, the computer must slip into the fabric of everyday life, embedded into every conceivable electronic device, and transform our way of life from within. The technology that will bring out such pervasive computer into our world can be divided into three parts: a. Cheap, low-power computers that include equally efficient displays. b. Software for ubiquitous applications. c. A network to tie them all together. Display technology is already improving with high-resolution flat-panels and falling prices. However, this is still more valid for small displays. Truly large displays will need ultra advanced microprocessors that achieve the desired high degree of power efficiency, lighter weight and low costs. The displays will have to include equally efficient memory storage devices, or disks. A large disk storing a terabyte of information – roughly equivalent to the data content of the Library of Congress – will be commonplace. Without this, the aim of pervasive computing cannot be realized. Secondly, new software will have to be developed to cope up with such large quantum of information. Thirdly, the network that can connect such pervasive hardware and software poses another challenge for the future. The current computer technology has a constraint that the user must remain holed up in front of a brightly lit screen. It is unhealthy from a physical as well as a social point of view. This barrier must be crossed with pervasive computing. Pervasive computers will reside in the human world, posing no hurdles to personal human interactions. In fact, by shrinking the world with advanced connectivity, the ubiquitous computers will only help to bring communities closer together. The second aspect of pervasive technology in the future will be the convergence of sensing, monitoring, networking, and computing technologies. A futuristic vision of our planet seems to be teeming with billions of wireless ultrawideband communication nodes connected to countless pinhead sized cameras, microphones, motion detectors, and biometric and other sensors to form a fine-grained mesh of networks that cover every square millimeter of the globe. Equipped with full-color, see-through displays that cover each pupil like a contact lens and clothing that senses muscle twitches, people will be able to exploit an immensely sophisticated successor of today’s Internet. They will be able to immerse themselves in gripping gaming environments, silently communicate with friends just by tensing their muscles, and hunt down information about other people. Eventually we will reach a point where the combination of powerful microprocessors, terabytes of data storage capacity, ubiquitous sensor networks, and deeply embedded user interfaces will human and machine “so intimate that users may be considered super humanly intelligent.” (2) Transparent user identification is one of the critical requirements in the pursuit of pervasive computing. Ubiquitous computers and smart environments cannot succeed in a real sense without transparent user identification. If a computer or environment could transparently identify the user, it could customize its interface and behavior to match the preferences, history, and context of that particular user. Computers could become easier to use, and could become more transparent overall. Such transparency in user identification can be achieved with passive biometric identification systems that do not interrupt or interfere with the lives of the users in any way. These are invisible systems in the sense that the user does not need to remember any codes or passwords, or carry a badge or a tag, or suffer from the background interference that audio and video identification systems are afflicted with. However, a major challenge that the transparent user identification technology is expected to face is that of privacy. Since the technology is envisioned to be practically invisible, it is going to be difficult to ensure privacy for the users. Every user has a right to know what information is being gathered about him, and be able to control the gathering of that information and the flow of that information after it has been gathered. (3) Mobile computation is another area that excites the imagination due to its immense potential to leverage the power of the World Wide Web. The geographic distribution of the Web naturally calls for mobility of computation, as a way of flexibly managing latency and bandwidth. Due to recent advances in networking and language technology, the basic tenets of mobile computation are now technologically realizable. The high-level software architecture potential, however, is still largely unexplored, although it is being actively investigated in the coordination and agents communities. The main difficulty with mobile computation on the Web is not in mobility per se, but in handling the administrative domains. Firewalls partition the Internet into administrative domains that are isolated from each other except for rigidly controlled pathways. System administrators enforce policies about what can move through firewalls and how. Mobility requires more than the traditional notion of authorization to run or to access information in certain domains: it involves the authorization to enter or exit certain domains. In particular, as far as mobile computation is concerned, it is not realistic to imagine that an agent can migrate from any point A to any point B on the Internet. Access to information is controlled at many levels, thus multiple levels of authorization may be involved. Today it is very difficult to transport a working environment between two computers, for example, between a laptop and a desktop, or between home and work computers. The working environment might consist of data that has to be copied, and of running programs in various stages of active or suspended communication with the network that have to be shutdown and restarted. Why can’t we just move one part of one environment to another computer? This is the motivation of mobile computation technology to support and enhance a pervasive computing environment. One of the paradigms of computation mobility is where computational ambients are hierarchically structured, where agents are confined to ambients, and where ambients move under the control of agents. A novelty of this approach is in allowing the movement of self-contained nested environments that include data and live computation, as opposed to the more common techniques that move single agents or individual objects. (4) Mobile Virtual Desktop Computing is another important step in the technological march for pervasive computing. It involves creation of an infrastructure that leverages continued improvements in network speed, cost, and ubiquity, to address the complexity, cost and mobility limitations of today’s personal computing infrastructure. This technology transparently virtualizes a user’s computing session by abstracting underlying system resources in three key areas: display, operating system, and network. It provides a thin virtualization layer that decouples a user’s computing session from any particular end-use device, and moves all application logic to hosting providers. Essentially, Pervasive Computing defines the ways in which contemporary technological models, based upon 3 basic designs: Smart Devices, including mobile, wireless and service devices, Smart Environments of embedded system devices, and Smart Interaction between devices, relate to and support a computing vision for a larger spectrum of computer devices, used in a larger spectrum of environments and activities. (5) The concept of Aware Systems is emerging as another exciting area in the field of computing, fueled by the latest goings-on in the area of pervasive computing. Mobile services, appliances, smart devices, software agents, electronic communication, sensor networks, security frameworks, and intelligent software agents will be pervaded through context-aware environments. The technology will also bring context awareness in communication among people, devices, and software agents, and how sensors can be aware of their own situations. (6) Conclusion: Pervasive Computing is next paradigm of human imagination and human endeavor. Efforts are already on to turn this vision into a reality. The forthcoming decades are going to witness dramatic advancements in this area, if the ongoing research and development in the field is any indication. It is going to transform practically every aspect of our existence, and transport mankind to a new age of technological evolution. Sources: (1) Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st century,” Jan-Mar. 2002, Pervasive Computing. (2) Harry Goldstein, “Mike Villas’ World,” July 2004, IEEE Spectrum (3) Robert J. Orr and Gregory D. Abowd, “The Smart Floor: A mechanism for natural user identification and tracking.” (4) Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon, “Mobile Ambients.” (5) Stefan Poslad, “Ubiquitous Computing: Smart Devices, Environments and Interactions,” Wiley, 1st edition (May, 2009) (6) Seng Loke, “Context-Aware Pervasive Systems: Architectures for a new breed of applications,” Auerbach, 1st edition (December, 2006) Read More