Remediation

In 1988 Mark Weiser envisioned a world where computing was so well integrated into everyday life that it essentially disappeared. If an old man or woman was to fall in his or her home and not move for several seconds, an ambulance would be called and sent to his location – all this without any human assistance. The same technology could also be used for other emergency services like fire and police. This sort of technology would change the way the world worked.

Mark Weiser died on April 27th 1999, before he had the chance to see his vision carried out, but today the sort of technology that he dreamed about is slowly becoming a reality. The idea behind remediation, or ubiquitous computing, is to achieve the full potential of computing and networking through such technology as wireless devices and microprocessor systems that are embedded and practically invisible. Remediation has also been referred to as the third wave in computing, after the mainframe computer era and the personal computing era, as it creates an environment where a person is connected to a network via lots of different devices. This technology changes the way that humans compute from an individual level to a global scale. Weiser’s aim of making computers literally  “vanish into the background” of peoples lives is becoming a reality with the invention and integration of mobile devices and other wireless technologies. Today taken for granted, the technology envisioned by Weiser nearly 30 years ago has truly permeated human life fully as mobile phones and personal computers become crucial in everyday life.

The Revolutionary Project Oxygen

Michael Dertouzos established Project Oxygen with the desire to make computers “as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe”. He believed that it is essential to angle computers toward human needs, rather than to have humans adjust to the needs of computers and thus Project Oxygen was created.

Through the advancement of three key factors to the system, Project Oxygen aims to directly address human needs. These three key factors are; hand held devices, embedded devices and the network. Dertouzos and his team at MIT used the three key factors listed above to create a system that, although still not fully completed today, directly addresses the human users needs. The system uses speech and vision technologies that when utilized correctly, lets users correspond directly with the Oxygen System. A little like the human brain, the Oxygen system can then understand demands and decipher them to boost our productivity by carrying out the automated, repetitive human tasks to find the information that we require and therefore enabling humans and computers to work together to achieve the task required by the user.

Michael Dertouzos died in 2001, but his work is being continued by a highly qualified team at MIT and one day hopefully his dream of computers and humans working together in a user friendly way will be fully recognized and will revolutionise the way we use computers and the internet.

The Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence

Although it is often misconstrued as giving computers and other technology the ability to understand human languages and process information from that, the semantic web actually only allows computers to assist “reading” the web so people can share content. Another invention by Tim Berners-Lee (the man who thought of transitioning the internet into the World Wide Web), the Semantic web can most simply be thought of as a way to make the World Wide Web readable. It gives machines such as personal computers and phones the right tools to find, exchange and to a small degree interpret information. While most web pages are made with HTML script, which allows computers to show or display hypertext, the semantic web depends on a common language amongst computers to allow other computers to understand the data.

The semantic web will allow computers to interpret documents and turn them into information by extracting it online. This may be done through many different techniques such as screen scraping or taking something that is only usable by humans and converting it into something that computers can understand.

It is easy to see why this might be seen as giving computers artificial intelligence, however the semantic web does not give computers the ability to use the information it collects or make them smarter, only the ability to collect information.

The Internet: from experiment to information superhighway

Emerging from the ‘Space Age’ the internet was set up by Tim Berners-Lee, an English born engineer, as a means for scientists all over the world to communicate. Ten years later, in the 1980s, Berners-Lee further introduced the idea of the World Wide Web, a concept that has completely changed the way information is shared the world over. The World Wide Web system meant that universal addressing, hypertext transfer and the display of multimedia content were made widely available to users. Within a year this system had over 1 million people using it, and today it is estimated that over 7 billion people worldwide use it.

The Web has not only become a way for users to simply and quickly distribute information such as emails, text, images, video, TV programming and telephone communications, but with the installation of electronic devices such as mobile phones and personal computers, has become extremely user friendly and widespread.