SAN FRANCISCO—In his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum here this morning, Intel vice president and chief technology officer Justin Rattner focused on "context-aware computing," in which devices anticipate your needs and desires and help fulfill them—before you even ask.
The goal, he said, of bringing this to currently popular devices is to "change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as companions, things that are indispensable in our daily lives." He described future devices that will constantly learn about you and your preferences based on how you use the device.
Context-aware computing was first described back in 1991 at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Principal Scientist and Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Area Bo Begole joined Rattner onstage to discuss the theory and history of the movement. They admitted there hasn't been much commercial success for context-aware computing yet, but that they believed 2010 was the beginning of the mainstream adoption of the idea.
Rattner devoted most of his keynote to explaining and demonstrating how Intel is researching and pursuing making that mainstream intention a reality. These included:• Tim Jarrell, the Vice President and Publisher of Fodor's Travel, arrived onstage to demonstrate a new Fodor's app (created in collaboration with Intel) that can recommend restaurants based on what the user likes and eats, and the user's location in the city. When used in "Wander" mode, the app helps center the user by providing him information about surrounding landmarks. (A very similar technology, named Augmented Reality, was demonstrated at the Intel Labs "Zero Day" IDF event on Sunday.) The app is not available yet, but Fodor's is continuing development on it.
• Intel Research Scientist Lama Nachman demonstrated the use of "shimmer sensors," wearable sensors that measure stride time and swing time and showed charts that measured Rattner's movements onstage during his speech (he had been wearing them on his ankles). This technology was intended to help measure the gait of elderly people who had difficulty walking.
• A remote control that "enhances the smart TV experience" by recognizing who's holding a remote control and adjusting the viewing experience accordingly.
• A sense system, roughly the size of a large cell phone, that could animate avatars to let you know a person's current activity or state of activities. One example was how someone sitting and drinking coffee might receive a phone call and leave the coffee shop, by showing how the device would animate a troll-like creature at first sitting and then walking while talking on a cell phone.
Nachman explained that the remote and similar devices work through a combination of hard sensing (whether the user is physically using the device, running or walking, what the lighting and weather conditions are like) and soft sensing (whether the user's calendar is free at a particular time, and so on). After collecting the soft and hard data, it's processed to infer what the user is doing or needs.
All this works, said Nachman, by creating a cognitive framework for managing context. It centers on a context engine that unites information from extensible analyzers, inference algorithms, data stores, and sensors, and then distributes them to the appropriate applications. The framework protects context information by putting the user in complete control of it: The user may specify what context is released, when it's released, and to whom it's released. (A form of DRM for context, Rattner joked.)
What does all this mean for developers? Rattner wound down by discussing the platform implications of all this context: always-on sensing and computing, that doesn't work only when you're directly interacting with it; low-power sensors and I/O so they may run efficiently all the time; effective workload partitioning; and optimized primitives.
The real question, Rattner said, is: Is the market ready for all of this context? Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell (who also led the Day Zero events) arrived onstage to explain that all users have "ambivalent and complex" relationships with technology, and that discovering what people truly love is the key to making context-aware computing work. The process involves conceptualizing and designing potential products, validating that in the real world, integrating the changes, and repeating the process until the users are satisfied. This will involve, Bell said, talking more to users, but also helping them understand that context and life are not different contexts—watching a baseball game, seeing a road sign, or using multiple devices in a living room are all examples of context that can help devices learn more about you and what you need. Bell said, "If we get context right—even a little bit right—it propels an entirely new set of experiences."
That word, experiences, has been Central to the IDF mindset this year. After donning an Intel lab coat, Rattner discussed that context-aware devices even further in the future will take information directly from the human brain without needing a device intermediary. (He cited the Emotiv headset, which he showed at IDF a few years ago, as one of the earliest examples of this.) Much of this technology could be as far away as 2020, but it's definitely on the horizon.
What's the ultimate goal of everything Rattner talked about today? Easy, he said: "to create devices that people will really love."