Project Oxygen

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. 

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.

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.