Thanks to Rob Orr for putting together an excellent set of
pointers for Tuesday's talk on the embedded Internet and its
implications for the home. Please read as much of this as
possible before the seminar.
Gregory
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Tuesday's FCE meeting will focus on "the embedded internet", and
specifically what microcontrollers, reliable light-weight operating
systems, and embedded computer applications are doing for making computers
ubiquitous and invisible to the user (ok, ok...so this is largely what the
whole seminar is about). A good summary article on this topic was
published in the October issue of Wired
(http://www.hotwired.com/wired/4.10/es_embedded.html). An analogy is made
there between the evolution of electric motors and one possible path for
computing. The electric motor a century ago was large, had to be
installed and operated by specialists, and was fairly expensive. Over the
intervening decades, the motor has shrunk in size, increased in
reliability, and has become so trivial to use that today we hardly notice
them even though they are in widespread use. A similar phenomenon may
occur in computing. Central to this possibility is the use of reliable
light-weight operating systems (and accompanying microcontrollers) such as
OS9 (http://www.microware.com/), pSOS
(http://www.isi.com/Products/pSOS/embed.html), JavaOS
(http://www.sun.com/), and Inferno
(http://inferno.bell-labs.com/inferno/). These OSes, unlike dominant
systems such as UNIX or Windows, offer reliability, small size,
portability, and low cost, while like their larger progenitors allow
networking of small embedded devices.
Speculative examples of devices that these technologies might help bring
about are given in another October Wired article
(http://www.hotwired.com/wired/4.10/features/philips.html). These
objects, such as interactive wallpaper and a flexible screen travel
planner, are also shown at Philips "Vision of the Future" magazine
(http://www.philips.com/design/vof/vofsite1/vof1main.htm). Also
interesting are other issues of this magazine.
On a more down-to-earth note, currently available kitchen cyber-devices
have been sighted at http://www.diba.com/products/kitchen.html and
~cga/Public/recipe.gif. Also, home automation and networking pages can be
found at http://www.smart-house.com/ and
http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Howto/HomeLAN/.
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