| | So that HIPAA thing that I've been ranting about... yeah, well the national deadline for implementation was originally October 16 (last week). All health care organizations were to have implemented the standardized electronic data interchange protocols by that date. Well, they did a survey a little earlier and the results were disastrous. Fewer than 20% of all surveyed organizations said they would be "HIPAA compliant" by the deadline. So then they were like, maybe we were a little strict, and pushed the deadline back to February. *sigh* Expect to hear me rant again later.
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The name of my research group is Oxygen Research Group. We are in the field of pervasive computing. Explanation:
Early developments in computer science resulted in many people using one single computer (mainframes and timesharing systems). Later on, in the 80s, was the advent of the personal computer - one person to one computer. Now, the theory goes, we are shifting to one person using many computers. Already it's happening - computers in your car, your cell phone, pda, your desktop computer. Computers are becoming ubiquitous, pervading our lives.
Project Oxygen is an effort by MIT to study this phenomenom, to study how we might best utilize computers as they change in our society. There is a vision of a day when computers are taken for granted, much like the air (oxygen.. haha) we breathe, when they truly are pervasive (like oxygen.. haha) and fade from the monstrous attention demanding behemoths that we toil in front of today to the invisible technologies that are woven into the fabric of our lives (fabric.. haha).
Nobody really knows where the deep academic subjects are in pervasive computing. It's not like AI, or supercomputing, where the problems are very clearly defined. In supercomputing, you just make the computer go faster. In AI, there's an aim to create rational decision making programs, to build machines that can perform complex tasks.
But there are no unproven theories in pervasive computing. Hell, there are no real theories. If you read the academic papers and proposed scenarios, it's all lame stuff like being able to tell your car to book you a plane ticket to london while you're stuck in traffic on the 95N, or about your television magically knowing what channels might interest you given your mood and the phase of the moon.
But there's definitely something there. Oxygen Research Group was founded to study pervasive computing from the computer science perspective, and that's what I'll be doing (I think...) |
| | Posted 10/21/2003 9:37 PM - 9 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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