Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

CONTENTS

1. THE APPROACH 1

2. SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES 3

3. USER TECHNOLOGIES 13
4. SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES 20

5. HOW DOES OXYGEN WORK? 23

6. PERCEPTUAL TECHNOLOGIES 25

7. CHALLENGES 29

8. CONCLUSION 30

9. REFERENCES 31

THE APPROACH

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INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGIES THAT ADDRESS

HUMAN NEEDS

Oxygen enables pervasive, human-centered computing

through a combination of specific user and system technologies.

Oxygen’s user technologies directly address human needs.

Speech and vision technologies enable us to communicate with
Oxygen as if we’re interacting with another person, saving much
time and effort. Automation, individualized knowledge access,
and collaboration technologies help us perform a wide variety of
tasks that we want to do in the ways we like to do them.

Oxygen’s system technologies dramatically extend our

range by delivering user technologies to us at home, at work, or
on the go. Computational devices, called Enviro21s (E21s),
embedded in our homes, offices, and cars sense and affect our
immediate environment. Hand-held devices, called Handy21s
(H21s), empower us to communicate and compute no matter
where we are. Dynamic networks (N21s) help our machines
locate each other as well as the people, services, and resources
we want to reach.
Oxygen’s user technologies include:
The Oxygen technologies work together and pay attention
to several important themes:
• Distribution and mobility — for people,
resources, and services.
• Semantic content — what we mean, not just
what we say.

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• Adaptation and change — essential features

of an increasingly dynamic world.
• Information personalities — the privacy,
security, and form of our individual interactions with
Oxygen.

Oxygen is an integrated software system that will reside in

the public domain. Its development is sponsored by DARPA and
the Oxygen Alliance industrial partners, who share its goal of
pervasive, human-centered computing. Realizing that goal will
require a great deal of creativity and innovation, which will
come from researchers, students, and others who use Oxygen
technologies for their daily work during the course of the
project. The lessons they derive from this experience will enable
Oxygen to better serve human needs.
USER TECHNOLOGIES

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SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES

DEVICES AND NETWORKS

People access Oxygen through stationary devices (E21s)

embedded in the environment or via portable hand-held devices
(H21s). These universally accessible devices supply power for
computation, communication, and perception in much the same
way that wall outlets and batteries deliver power to electrical
appliances. Although not customized to any particular user, they
can adapt automatically or be modified explicitly to address
specific user preferences. Like power outlets and batteries,
these devices differ mainly in how much energy they can
supply.

E21 STATIONARY DEVICES

Embedded in offices, buildings, homes, and vehicles, E21s

enable us to create situated entities, often linked to local
sensors and actuators, that perform various functions on our
behalf, even in our absence. For example, we can create entities
and situate them to monitor and change the temperature of a
room, close a garage door, or redirect email to colleagues, even
when we are thousands of miles away. E21s provide large
amounts of embedded computation, as well as interfaces to
camera and microphone arrays, thereby enabling us to
communicate naturally, using speech and gesture, in the spaces
they define.

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E21s provide sufficient computational power throughout

the environment

• To communicate with people using natural perceptual

resources, such as speech and vision,
• To support Oxygen's user technologies wherever people
may be, and
• To monitor and control their environment.

E21s, as well as H21s, are universal communication and

computation appliances. E21s leverage the same hardware
components as the H21s so that the same software can run on
both devices. E21s differ from H21s mainly in

• Their connections to the physical world,

• The computational power they provide, and
• The policies adopted by the software that runs on the
devices.

CONNECTIONS TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD

E21s connect directly to a greater number and wider

variety of sensors, actuators, and appliances than do H21s.
These connections enable applications built with Oxygen's
perceptual and user technologies to monitor and control the
environment.

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An E21 might control an array of microphones, which

Oxygen's perceptual resources use to improve communication
with speakers by filtering out background noise. Similarly, it
might control an array of antennas to permit improved
communication with nearby H21s that, as a result of a better
signal-to-noise ratio, use less power. Multiple antennas mounted
on the roof of a building, as well as incoming terrestrial lines,
connect through E21s to high-bandwidth, local-area N21
networks.

Through the N21 network, an E21 can connect

unobtrusively to H21s in the hands or pockets of people in an
intelligent space. It can display information on an H21 display in
a person's hand or on a nearby wall-mounted display; it may
even suggest that the person step a few feet down the hall.

H21 HAND-HELD DEVICES

Users can select hand-held devices, called H21s,

appropriate to the tasks they wish to perform. These devices

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accept speech and visual input, can reconfigure themselves to

perform a variety of useful functions, and support a range of
communication protocols. Among other things, H21s can serve
as cellular phones, beepers, radios, televisions, geographical
positioning systems, cameras, or personal digital assistants,
thereby reducing the number of special-purpose gadgets we
must carry. To conserve power, they may offload
communication and computation onto nearby E21s.

Handheld devices, called H21s, provide flexibility in a

lightweight design. They are anonymous devices that do not
carry a large amount of permanent local state. Instead, they
configure themselves through software to be used in a wide
range of environments for a wide variety of purposes. For
example, when a user picks up an anonymous H21, the H21 will
customize itself to the user's preferred configuration. The H21s
contain board-level antennas that enable them to couple with a
wireless N21 network, embedded E21 devices, or nearby H21s
to form collaborative regions.

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H21s, like E21s, are universal communication and

computation appliances. They leverage the same hardware
components as the E21s so that the same software can run on
both devices. H21s differ from E21s mainly in

• Their connections to the physical world,

• The computational power they provide, and
• The policies adopted by the software that runs on the
devices.

CONNECTIONS TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Because handheld devices must be small, lightweight, and

power efficient, H21s come equipped with only a few perceptual
and communication transducers, plus a low-power network to
extend the I/O devices to which it can connect. In particular,
H21s are not equipped with keyboards and large displays,

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although they may be connected to such devices. Through the

N21 network, an H21 can connect unobtrusively to nearby,
more powerful E21s, which provide additional connections to
the physical world. The H21 contains multiple antennas for
multiple communications protocols that depend on the
transmission range, for example, building-wide, campus wide, or
point-to-point.

NETWORK AND SOFTWARE INFRASTRUCTURE

People use Oxygen to accomplish tasks that are part of

their daily lives. Universally available network connectivity and
computational power enable decentralized Oxygen components
to perform these tasks by communicating and cooperating
much as humans do in organizations. Components can be
delegated to find resources, to link them together in useful
ways, to monitor their progress, and to respond to change.

N21 NETWORKS

N21s support dynamically changing configurations of self-

identifying mobile and stationary devices. They allow us to
identify devices and services by how we intend to use them, not
just by where they are located. They enable us to access the
information and services we need, securely and privately, so
that we are comfortable integrating Oxygen into our personal
lives. N21s support multiple communication protocols for low-
power local, building-wide, and campus-wide communication,

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enabling us to form collaborative regions that arise, adapt, and

collapse as needed.

Flexible,
decentralized networks, called N21s, connect dynamically
changing configurations of self-identifying mobile and stationary
devices. N21s integrate different wireless, terrestrial, and
satellite networks into one seamless internet. Through
algorithms, protocols, and middleware, they

• Configure collaborative regions automatically, creating

topologies and adapting them to mobility and change.
• Provide automatic resource and location discovery, without
manual configuration and administration.
• Provide secure, authenticated, and private access to
networked resources.
• Adapt to changing network conditions, including
congestion, wireless errors, latency variations, and

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heterogeneous traffic (e.g., audio, video, and data), by

balancing bandwidth, latency, energy consumption, and
application requirements.

COLLABORATIVE REGIONS

Collaborative regions are self-organizing collections of

computers and/or devices that share some degree of trust.
Computers and devices may belong to several regions at the
same time. Membership is dynamic: mobile devices may enter
and leave different regions as they move around. Collaborative
regions employ different protocols for intra-space and inter-
space communication because of the need to maintain trust.

RESOURCE AND LOCATION DISCOVERY

N21 networks enable applications to use intentional

names, not just location-based names, to describe the
information and functionality they are looking for. Intentional
names support resource discovery by providing access to
entities that cannot be named statically, such as a full soda
machine or to the surveillance cameras that have recently
detected suspicious activity.

N21 networks integrate name resolution and routing. Intra-

space routing protocols perform resolution and forwarding
based on queries that express the characteristics of the desired

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data or resources in a collaborative region. Late binding

between names and addresses (i.e., at delivery time) supports
mobility and multicast. Early binding supports high bandwidth
streams and any cast. Wide-area routing uses a scalable
resolver architecture; techniques for soft state and caching
provide scalability and fault tolerance.

N21 networks support location discovery through

proximity to named physical objects (for example, low-power RF
beacons embedded in the walls of buildings). Location discovery
enables mobile devices to access and present location-specific
information. For example, an H21 might help visitors navigate to
their destination with spoken right-left instructions; held up next
to a paper or an electronic poster of an old talk, it could provide
access to stored audio and video fragments of the talk; pointed
to a door, it could provide information about what is happening
behind the door.

SECURITY

A collaborative region is a set of devices that have been

instructed by their owners to trust each other to a specified
degree. A collaborative region that defines a meeting, for
example, has a set of trust and authorization rules that specify
what happens during a meeting (how working materials and
presentation illustrations are shared, who can print on the local
printer). Typically, trust rules for a meeting do not allow
participants to write arbitrary information anywhere in the
region. However, once users know what the trust rules are, they

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can introduce their devices into the meeting's collaborative

region, with confidence that only the expected range of actions
will happen, even if the details of the interactions are left to
automatic configuration.

Resource and location discovery systems address privacy

issues by giving resources and users control over how much to
reveal. Rather than tracking the identity, location, and
characteristics of all resources and users at all times, these
systems accept and propagate only the information that
resources and users choose to advertise. Self-certifying names
enable clients of discovery systems to trust the advertised
information.

ADAPTATION

N21 networks allow devices to use multiple

communication protocols. Vertical handoffs among these
protocols allow H21 devices to provide seamless and power
efficient connectivity across a wide range of domains, for
example, building-wide, campus wide, and point-to-point. They
also enable applications to adapt to changes in channel
conditions (e.g., congestion and packet loss) and in their own
requirements (e.g., for bandwidth, latency, or reliability). They
provide interfaces to monitoring mechanisms, which allow end-
host transport agents to learn about congestion or about packet
losses caused by wireless channel errors. This enables end-to-
end resource management based on a unified congestion
manager, which provides different flows with "shared state

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learning" and allows applications to adapt to congestion in ways

that accommodate the heterogeneous nature of streams. Unlike
the standard TCP protocol, which is tuned for bulk data
transfers, the congestion manager efficiently handles
congestion due to audio, video, and other real-time streaming
applications, as well as to multiple short connections. N21
networks provide interfaces to control mechanisms, which
enable applications to influence the way their packets are
routed.

SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

Oxygen’s software architecture supports change above the

device and network levels. The software architecture matches
current user goals with currently available software services,
configuring those services to achieve the desired goals. When
necessary, it adapts the resulting configurations to changes in
goals, available services, or operating conditions. Thereby, it
relieves users of the burden of directing and monitoring the
operation of the system as it accomplishes their goals.

USER TECHNOLOGIES

Several important technologies harness Oxygen’s

pervasive computational, communication, and perceptual
resources to advance the human-centered goal of enabling
people to accomplish more with less effort.

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SPOKEN LANGUAGE, SKETCHING AND VISUAL CUES

Spoken language and visual cues, rather than keyboards

and mice, define the main modes of interaction with Oxygen. By
integrating these two technologies, Oxygen can better discern
our intentions, for example, by using vision to augment speech
understanding through the recognition of facial expressions,
gestures, lip movements, and gaze. These perceptual
technologies are part of the core of Oxygen, not just
afterthoughts or interfaces to separate applications.

They can be customized quickly in Oxygen applications to

make selected human-machine interactions easy and natural.
Graceful switching between different domains (e.g., from a
conversation about the weather in Rome to one about airline
reservations) supports seamless integration of applications.

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KNOWLEDGE ACCESS

Individualized knowledge access technologies offer greatly

improved access to information — customized to the needs of
people, applications, and software systems. Universal access to
information is facilitated through annotations that allow content-
based comparisons and manipulations of data represented in
different formats and using different terminologies. Users may
access their own knowledge bases, those of friends and
associates, and other information publicly available on the Web.

The individualized knowledge access subsystem supports

the natural ways people use to access information. In particular,
it supports personalized, collaborative, and communal
knowledge, "triangulating" among these three sources of
information to find the information people need. It observes and
adapts to its users, so as to better meet their needs. The
subsystem integrates the following components to gather and
store data, to monitor user access patterns, and to answer
queries and interpret data.

DATA REPRESENTATION

The subsystem stores information encountered by its

users using an extensible data model that links arbitrary objects
via arbitrarily named arcs. There are no restrictions on object
types or names. Users and the system alike can aggregate
useful information regardless of its form (text, speech, images,

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video). The arcs, which are also objects, represent relational

(database-type) information as well as associative (hypertext-
like) linkage. For example, objects and arcs in A's data model
can represent B's knowledge of interest to A—and vice versa.

DATA ACQUISITION

The subsystem gathers as much information as possible about

the information of interest to a user. It does so through raw
acquisition of data objects, by analyzing the acquired
information, by observing people's use of it, by encouraging
direct human input, and by tuning access to the user.

AUTOMATIC ACCESS METHODS

The arrival of new data triggers automated services,

which, in turn, obtain further data or trigger other services.
Automatic services fetch web pages, extract text from
postscript documents, identify authors and titles in a document,
recognize pairs of similar documents, and create document
summaries that can be displayed as a result of a query. The
system allows users to script and add more services, as they are
needed.

HUMAN ACCESS METHODS

Since automated services can go only so far in carrying

out these tasks, the system allows users to provide higher

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quality annotations on the information they are using, via text,

speech, and other human interaction modalities.

AUTOMATED OBSERVERS

Subsystems watch the queries that users make, the results

they dwell upon, the files they edit, the mail they send and
receive, the documents they read, and the information they
save. The system exploits observations of query behavior by
converting query results into objects that can be annotated
further. New observers can be added to exploit additional
opportunities. In all cases, the observations are used to tune the
data representation according to usage patterns.

AUTOMATION

The automation subsystem provides technologies for

encapsulating objects, both physical and virtual, so that their
actions can be automated. It also provides scripting
technologies that automate new processes in response to direct
commands, or by observing, imitating, and fine-tuning
established processes.

BASIC AUTOMATION OBJECTS

Basic automation objects are "black boxes" of low-level

actions that can be managed by higher-level automation
processes. The objects can be either physical or virtual. A basic
physical object senses or actuates a physical entity—it may

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sense the temperature or whether an office door is open, and it

may crank up the heat or send an image to a display. A basic
virtual object collects, generates, or transforms information—it
may extract designated items from incoming electronic forms,
operate on them in a designated manner, and send the results
to a particular device.
A common intelligent interface connects basic physical objects
to the network. The interface consists of a chip containing a
microprocessor, a network adapter, main memory, and non-
volatile storage. It makes different sensors, actuators, and
appliances more powerful, provides device status information,
reduces the bandwidth they require, and downloads commands
and new low-level software.
Any software object can be a basic virtual object. Electronic
forms are particularly common basic virtual objects, because
they serve as convenient "interfaces" for exchanging
information among people and organizations.

CONTROL OVER COMBINED OBJECTS

The automation architecture provides mechanisms for

composing modular components, such speech, vision, and
appliances, and for controlling their behavior based on user
scripts. The architecture allows distributed objects (or agents) to
refer to one another by function and capability, without respect
to their location. Objects communicate using a universal
streaming data "bus" standard. They can move around, be re-
connected dynamically, and seamlessly resume previously
established connections with one another. The scripting

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language enables users to specify easily and rapidly the tasks

they wish to automate.

The automation subsystem uses a top-level watch-reason-

automate "loop" to monitor and filter information of interest to
the automation process, to select appropriate automation
regimes for given tasks, and to implement those regimes. The
scripting language enables users to customize automation
regimes in response to context changes and other factors too
complicated to handle automatically, either in the original script
or in the watch-reason-automate loop.

COLLABORATION

The collaboration subsystem uses the knowledge access

subsystem and the automation subsystem to support
collaboration. The collaboration subsystem adds to the
"semantic web" of the knowledge access subsystem by
recording the context of human-to-human interactions. It
informs the automation and knowledge access subsystems
when we are engaged in a collaborative task so that the
responses of these subsystems can be tailored appropriately to
all those participating in the task.

MAINTAINING COLLABORATION CONTEXT

The collaboration subsystem uses the individualized

knowledge access subsystem to represent and acquire
information about human interactions, for example, by using the

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vision subsystem to determine who is present at a discussion

and to observe physical gestures, by using the spoken language
subsystem to track what people say to each other, and by
observing human interactions with software applications. The
collaboration subsystem remembers how a group arranges its
workspace, and it creates virtual work places for distributed
groups. It maintains the context of each collaborative group in
an individualized knowledge database, so that it can be recalled
to continue the discussion at a future time or in another place.
Automated observers track features of interest to the
collaboration and add to the knowledge database. Semantic
links in the database maintain the history of the discussion and
identify issues, alternative courses of action, arguments for and
against each alternative, and resolutions to pursue particular
alternatives. Human input helps guide the indexing process, by
identifying critical decisions and linking them to the rationale
behind them.

AUTOMATING COLLABORATIVE TASKS

The collaboration subsystem uses the automation

subsystem, together with Bayesian techniques for analysis and
knowledge-based techniques for process management, to act as
a coordinator and mediate interactions among members of a
collaborative team. It knows the interests, organizational roles,
and skills of all team members, and it understands the
application domain within which the team functions. For
example, it tracks action items within the group and
dependencies with other groups, retrieving relevant information

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and bringing it to the attention of the most appropriate

individuals. The collaboration system plays the role of an active
participant, noticing tasks that need to be undertaken, noticing
when information required for those tasks has been developed,
and making conclusions when appropriate.

SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES

Project Oxygen's software architecture provides mechanisms for

• Building applications using composable, distributed
components,
• Customizing, adapting, and altering component behavior,
• Replacing components, at different degrees of granularity,
in a consistent fashion,
• Person-centric, rather than device-centric, security, and
• Disconnected operation and nomadic code.

Oxygen's software architecture relies heavily on

abstraction to support change through adaptation and
customization, on specification to support components that use
these abstractions, and on persistent object stores with
transactional semantics to provide operational support for
change.

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ABSTRACTION

Computations are modular, as is storage. Abstractions

characterize components that carry out computations and
objects used in computations. In Oxygen, abstractions support
the use of adaptable components and objects by providing

• Application access to components traditionally hidden

beneath intervening layers of software, so as to observe and
influence their behavior.
• Intent-based interfaces, not just syntax or address-based
interfaces, so as to facilitate component and object use,
adjustment, replacement, and upgrade.
• Stream-oriented interfaces that treat speech, vision, and
sensor data as first-class objects, so as to enable compilers to
manage low-level pipelining concurrency and multithreaded
programs to adjust their behavior correctly at runtime in
response to changes in the number of streams or the
interactions among them.
• Constraint and event abstractions, which separate
computation from control, trigger what is processed when, and
provide flexibility for modifying behavior at runtime without
compromising system integrity.
• Cutpoints, so as to provide safe fallbacks and to enable
"eternal computation".

SPECIFICATIONS

Specifications make abstractions explicit, exposing

features to other system components. In Oxygen, specifications
support adaptation and change by providing information about

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• system configurations, to determine what modules and

capabilities are available locally,
• module repositories, to provide code over the network for
installation on handheld and other devices,
• module dependencies, to support complete and consistent
installations or upgrades,
• module capabilities, to support other components and
applications in scripting their use, and
• module behavior, to support their safe use through a
combination of static and runtime checks.

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PERSISTENT OBJECT STORE WITH TRANSACTIONAL

SEMANTICS

Code, data objects, and specifications reside in a common

object-oriented store, which supports all Oxygen technologies
(i.e., user, perceptual, system, and device technologies). Object-
orientation helps maintain the integrity of the store by
restricting updates to those performed by methods in the store.
The store has transactional semantics, which enables
concurrent access, rollback and recovery, and consistent
updates to modules and data. It also operates efficiently, using
techniques such as optimistic concurrency, pre-fetching, and
lazy updates and garbage collection, which defer the costs of
modifying the store as long as possible or until there is time to
spare.

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HOW DOES OXYGEN WORK

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The figure showing h21-n21-e21 communications.

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PERCEPTUAL TECHNOLOGIES

SPEECH

The spoken language subsystem provides a number of

limited-domain interfaces, as well as mechanisms for users to
navigate effortlessly from one domain to another. Thus, for
example, a user can inquire about flights and hotel information
when planning a trip, then switch seamlessly to obtaining
weather and tourist information. The spoken language
subsystem stitches together a set of useful domains, thereby
providing a virtual, broad-domain quilt that satisfies the needs
of many users most of the time. Although the system can
interact with users in real-time, users can also delegate tasks
for the system to perform offline.

The spoken language subsystem is an integral part of

Oxygen's infrastructure, not just a set of applications or external
interfaces. Four components, with well-defined interfaces,
interact with each other and with Oxygen's device, network, and
knowledge access technologies to provide real-time
conversational capabilities.

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SPEECH RECOGNITION

The speech recognition component converts the user's

speech into a sentence of distinct words, by matching acoustic
signals against a library of phonemes—irreducible units of sound
that make up a word. The component delivers a ranked list of
candidate sentences, either to the language-understanding
component or directly to an application. This component uses
acoustic processing (e.g., embedded microphone arrays), visual
clues, and application-supplied vocabularies to improve its
performance.

LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING

The language understanding-component breaks down

recognized sequences of words grammatically, and it
systematically represents their meaning. The component is easy
to customize, thereby easing integration into applications. It
generates limited-domain vocabularies and grammars from
application-supplied examples, and it uses these vocabularies
and grammars to transform spoken input into a stream of
commands for delivery to the application. It also improves
language understanding by listening throughout a conversation
—not just to explicit commands—and remembering what has
been said.

Lite speech systems, with user-defined vocabularies and

actions, can be tailored quickly to specific applications and

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integrated with other parts of the Oxygen system in a modular

fashion.

LANGUAGE GENERATION

The language generation component builds sentences that

present application-generated data in the user's preferred
language.

SPEECH SYNTHESIS

A commercial speech synthesizer converts sentences,

obtained either from the language generation component or
directly from the application, into speech.

VISION

The visual processing system contains visual perception

and visual rendering subsystems. The visual perception
subsystem recognizes and classifies objects and actions in still
and video images. It augments the spoken language subsystem,
for example, by tracking direction of gaze of participants to
determine what or whom they are looking at during a
conversation, thereby improving the overall quality of user
interaction. The visual rendering subsystem enables scenes and
actions to be reconstructed in three dimensions from a small
number of sample images without an intermediate 3D model. It
can be used to provide macroscopic views of application-
supplied data.

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Like the spoken language subsystem, the visual

subsystem is an integral part of Oxygen's infrastructure. Its
components have well-defined interfaces, which enable them to
interact with each other and with Oxygen's device, network, and
knowledge access technologies. Like lite speech systems, lite
vision systems provide user-defined visual recognition, for
example, of faces and handwritings.

OBJECT RECOGNITION

A trainable object recognition component automatically

learns to detect limited-domain objects (e.g., people or different
kinds of vehicles) in unconstrained scenes using a supervised
learning technology. This learning technology generates domain
models from as little information as one or two sample images,
either supplied by applications or acquired without calibration
during operation. The component recognizes objects even if
they are new to the system or move freely in an arbitrary
setting against an arbitrary background. As people do, it adapts
to objects, their physical characteristics, and their actions,
thereby learning to improve object-specific performance over
time.

For high-security transactions, where face recognition is

not a reliable solution, a vision-based biometrics approach (e.g.,
fingerprint recognition) integrates sensors in handheld devices
transparently with the Oxygen privacy and security environment
to obtain cryptographic keys directly from biometrics
measurements.

ACTIVITY MONITORING AND CLASSIFICATION

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan

Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

An unobtrusive, embedded vision component observes

and tracks moving objects in its field of view. It calibrates itself
automatically, using tracking data obtained from an array of
cameras, to learn relationships among nearby sensors, create
rough site models, categorize activities in a variety of ways, and
recognize unusual events.

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan

 Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

CHALLENGES

To support highly dynamic and varied human activities,

the Oxygen system must master many technical challenges. It
must be

 pervasive—it must be everywhere, with every portal

reaching into the same information base;
 embedded—it must live in our world, sensing and affecting
it;
 nomadic—it must allow users and computations to move
around freely, according to their needs;
 adaptable—it must provide flexibility and spontaneity, in
response to changes in user requirements and operating
conditions;
 powerful, yet efficient—it must free itself from constraints
imposed by bounded hardware resources, addressing instead
system constraints imposed by user demands and available
power or communication bandwidth;
 intentional—it must enable people to name services and
software objects by intent, for example, "the nearest printer," as
opposed to by address;
 Eternal —it must never shut down or reboot; components
may come and go in response to demand, errors, and upgrades,
but Oxygen as a whole must be available all the time.

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan

Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

CONCLUSION

Widespread use of Oxygen and its advanced technologies

will yield a profound leap in human productivity — one even
more revolutionary than the move from mainframes to
desktops. By enabling people to use spoken and visual cues to
automate routine tasks, access knowledge, and collaborate with
others anywhere, anytime, Oxygen stands to significantly
amplify human capabilities throughout the world.

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan

Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

REFERENCES

1. WWW.LCS.MIT.EDU
2. WWW.AI.MIT.EDU
3. WWW.GLOBAL.ACER.COM
4. WWW.DELTACA.COM
5. WWW.HP.COM
6. WWW.NTT.CO.JP
7. WWW.NOKIA.COM
8. WWW.ENTECOLLEGE.COM
9. WWW.RESEARCH.PHILIPS.COM
10. IEEE Spectrum March 2002

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan

Project Oxygen Seminar Report ‘2010

ABSTRACT

In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will

be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power
sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter the human
world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more
while doing less. We will not need to carry our own devices
around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either
handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring
computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might
be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will
adopt our information personalities. They will respect our
desires for privacy and security.

New systems will boost our productivity. They will help us

automate repetitive human tasks, control a wealth of physical
devices in the environment, find the information we need (when
we need it, without forcing our eyes to examine thousands of
search-engine hits), and enable us to work together with other
people through space and time.

It must be accessible anywhere. It must adapt to change,

both in user requirements and in operating conditions. It must
never shut down or reboot —components may come and go in
response to demand, errors, and upgrades, but Oxygen as a
whole must be available all the time.

Ch.B.P.G.E.C Made By: Ankit Chauhan