Increasingly, people are becoming used to networked consumer devices, such as cellular phones, PDAs, Digital TV and game consoles. At the same time, a huge amount of information is becoming available on the Internet, often being produced by these networked devices and sensors. However, sending the right information from the information producer to the information consumer is an increasingly difficult and expensive challenge due to the variety and volume of the information.
The Infosphere project [5], funded by DARPA, is building the systems software to support the development of information flow intensive applications, such as those involving networked consumer devices. The main abstraction proposed by the Infosphere project is the Infopipe [2], which captures and manages the information flow. Experimental implementation is needed to demonstrate the ideas if they are feasible.
Infosphere is a joint effort by the systems groups at Georgia Institute of Technology and Oregon Graduate Institute. Collaborators from around the world also contribute to the project, including France, Germany, and Japan (e.g., the first author).