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| In the most general sense, the goal we technologist share is the elusive triple-A: anything, anywhere, anytime. This goal has gained the more succinct name of "ubiquitous computing". For the purpose of simplicity, I refer to this hypothetical future ubiquitous computing infrastructure as "Ubiquity". The possibilities offered and challenges posed by the Ubiquity dream can be roughly categorized as follows: |
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Fluidic Networking: Exploiting the full potential of our many telecommunications technologies requires expanding the Internet past its static, centralized roots to become a fluidly dynamic, decentralized medium. |
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Global Supercomputing: Rather than continuing to treat each computing device as a separate, distinct tool, it will become increasingly necessary for each device to serve as a gateway into a global supercomputer created from the combined abilities of all devices. |
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Smart Environments: As computing devices become more numerous and powerful, each device will recieve less individual attention. Thus, these devices must become cooperative and "smart" to be of maximum utility. |
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Intrinsic Security: Once relegated to second-class status, security must be brought to the forefront and given a prominent role in ensuring privacy and safety. However, to be effective, this security must not require undo manual administrator attention. |
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Fluidic Networking: Diverse, Decentralized, Dynamic Communication [7 children...]
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| The Internet is arguably the most diverse, decentralized, and dynamic communications medium known to man. Many protocols span many mediums throughout an ever-changing networking topology. Yet the level of diversity, decentralization, and dynamicism the Internet currently supports is nothing compared to what it the future will require. |
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Diversity: Diversity on the Internet is shaped like an hourglass: it is very diverse at the top (as far as applications are concerned) and at the bottom (in physical makeup). However, between these extremes is the bottleneck, where both are limited by the lowest common denominator. |
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Decentralization: While physically decentralized in terms of redundant connections and routers, logically it relies upon centralized decision making and administration capabilities. These centralized bottlenecks prevent the Internet's growth into harsh, ad hoc environments. |
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Dynamicism: The Internet is nearing completion of its original goal to provide a fast, reliable connection between any two computers in the world. However, its original goal did not anticipate the needs of wireless, "occasionally-connected", and highly-mobile computing. |
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[7 children...] |
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| As the Internet grows in reach and capability, traditional boundaries between computers begin to blur. Rather than people owning and using an individual device, such as a PC or cell phone, every device will merely provide access to a global computer created from the combined resources of all digital devices. This global supercomputing environment can be broken down into the following systems: |
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Fine-Grained Ownership: Old-world concepts of physical ownership are becoming obsolete in the face of hosted applications, software subscriptions, co-located hardware, and publically shared resources. In its place is growing a more fine-grained concept of ownership, where digital resources will be bought and sold in tiny amounts, as needed, anywhere around the globe. |
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Micropayment Economy: This new concept of fine-grained ownership will a robust financial system designed to handle enormous volumes of individually minute transactions. |
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Agent Infrastructure: Atop this "micropayment economy" will be built an infrastructure to support self-propelled, mobile agent objects that dynamically purchase resources and assemble themselves wherever necessary. This agent infrastructure will allow for massively distributed applications to be created for such features as extremely-high-bandwidth multiplexing, network-edge hosting, and bulk supercomputing. |
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[3 children...] |
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| As the density of digital devices in our environment increases, the amount of attention the user can allocate to each necessarily decreases. As such, those devices must become increasingly "intelligent" in order to anticipate and solve the user's problems with greater levels of self sufficiency. Likewise, as the variety of device form-factors increase the applications must take upon themselves a greater burden to adapting to local user interface conditions. |
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Device Density: The proportion of computers to users has been steadily increasing from "1:many" in the days of mainframes, "1:1" in the PC age, to "many:1" with the advent of web-based computing. This trend will continue, increasing the proportion to "many:many" as users personally own and cooperatively share huge numbers of devices distributed throughout the environment. |
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Context Sensitivity: Existing devices make the primary assumption that when they are in use, they have a monopoly over the user's attention. The inaccuracy of this assumption will only increase over time, and will impose upon devices the need to intelligently recognize the user's needs and wants with less direct attention from the user. Thus, devices will need to become more "sensitive" to the context of the user to be effective. |
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User Interface Flexibility: As hardware technology continues its inexorable trend of jamming increasing amounts of computing capacity into smaller, cheaper, and more robust form factors, the variety of device shapes and sizes will continue to grow. To cope with this diversity, applications must accept the burden of adapting their user interfaces to local conditions, rather than requiring developers to anticipate and customize every possible configuration. |
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[3 children...] |
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| Security has taken second priority to functionality and simplicity throughout much of the history of computing. As a result, today's hardware and software infrastructures are ill-equipped to deal with the increased intensity and aggressiveness of malicious users. As such, security needs to be given an integral, intrinsic role in Ubiquity. |
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Pervasive Security: Current security techniques revolve around creating gross security rings, akin to dividing the world into "us" and "them". Seeing as how most security breaches come "from within", this coarsity is increasingly inadequate. As such, Ubiquity must treat every network connection, application object, and method invocation with equal scrutiny and suspicion. |
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Distributed User Accounts: Today it is common for each application to maintain its own set of users and permissions; there is no global, cross-enterprise mechanism for unified administration of user accounts. To unify and simplify management of a global user base, Ubiquity must support the ability to have users each maintain a single, logically centralized but physically distributed account. |
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Privacy Feedback Loop: The oversight needs of governments, consumer information needs of corporations, and privacy needs of individuals often come into conflict. However, it's possible to create a system where all participants satisfy their needs, while interally regulating the system in a synnergistic fashion. Because of this system's tendency to inadvertently evolve to higher states of efficiency, accountability, and benefit to all involved, it is called the "privacy feedback loop" |
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[3 children...] |
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