Ambient Computational Environments (ACE) [National Science Foundation]
Project Award Date: 09-03-1999
Description
The first of ITTC's Ambient Computational Environment (ACE) projects, this four-year contract with the National Science Foundation supports the equipment needed to create futuristic rooms, or "smart rooms," both in Nichols Hall and elsewhere on KU's campus.
The ACE vision includes computational resources, sensors, and actuators—in their widest sense—being embedded into offices, conference rooms, hallways, and someday even airplanes and taxi cabs. Users will interact with ACE through small personal interaction devices (PIDs), spoken commands, and eventually through gestures.
ACE will put an end to having to lug pounds of computer and communication equipment—laptops, cell phones, and pagers. Through a PID and proper identification by voice or thumbprint, users will access their entire workspace—including computer files—by co-opting the computational resources that exist in the environment.
During its first year, the ACE team reviewed, purchased, and installed the first of the equipment—such as computation/storage servers, projectors, pan-tilt-zoom cameras, PIDs, speech processing software, desktop units, an audio-visual system, and network interconnection—in ITTC meeting and conference rooms. By the time the project concludes, an ACE will be available not only in rooms in Nichols Hall, but also in other buildings on the University campus.
"This technology could eventually change the way people use computer resources," says Gary Minden, ITTC's chief technologist and the project's lead investigator. "It will replace individual computers, wireless phones, disc players, and other devices with one information appliance that could perform numerous tasks."
The ACE project reflects the researchers' vision that low-cost and high-performance future computational devices will be embedded in our everyday environment and will be as invisible and as easy to use as electricity.
Faculty on the ACE Team: Arvin Agah, robotic systems; Perry Alexander, modeling and verification; Allen Ambler, programming languages and systems; Frank Brown, artificial intelligence systems; Joe Evans, networking and computing systems; John Gauch, video information systems; Susan Gauch, information retrieval; Jerzy Grzymala-Busse, learning systems; Jerry James, distributed computing; James Miller, graphics; Gary Minden, Principal Investigator; Doug Niehaus, distributed systems and real-time; Thomas Schreiber, human information retrieval; Shari Speer, psycholinguistics; and Costas Tsatsoulis, expert systems, agent systems, and case-based reasoning.
Investigators
Faculty Investigator(s): Gary Minden (PI), Arvin Agah, Susan Gauch, Costas Tsatsoulis, Chris Brown
Project Sponsors
Primary Sponsor(s): National Science Foundation (NSF)
