Project Oxygen

What is Project Oxygen?

Project Oxygen is a research project for developing pervasive human centered computing. This research project is going on at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Project Oxygen architecture consists of handheld animals, computers embedded in environment and dynamically configuring the networks for connecting these devices. Now the computation is based on machines.  Machines do not know about our needs. In future, computation will be based on humans. It will be available everywhere just like as batteries, power sockets etc. These devices will enter into our world and fulfill our needs according to our wish. It improves the easiness of use and is also easily accessible. No need to carry the devices with us. Just configuring the embedded or handheld devices will bring computation to us whenever we need. We can access Project Oxygen by using any handheld device or embedded system.  Now one can interact with the machine by using computer languages or by clicking using mouse, typing using keyboard etc. In future, we do not need to type or click or use any computer language. It is easy to communicate with the machines. We can communicate with them very naturally by using gesture, speeches etc. By using Project Oxygen we can give commands to the machines and they will do whatever we need.

This system will increase the productivity. It helps to automate repetitive human tasks, find the information from a huge amount of data and work together with others.

But there are so many technical challenges the Project Oxygen has to face. These technical challenges must be overcome by the Project Oxygen. Some of them are given below:-

• It must live in our real world.
• It must be everywhere. It must be adaptable. According to the user needs and requirements, it has to be changed.
• It must be eternal. Never reboot or shutdown. It must be available all the time.
• To name the services or software objects according to the intent. Eg: “nearest printer”.

Oxygen’s device, software technologies and network works together to make the Project Oxygen environment. Enviro21s or E21s are computational devices and sensors can be embedded in homes, offices, cars etc. It sense and affect the immediate environment. Handy12 or H21s are handheld and mobile computers which helps to communicate and compute without depending on where we are. Other network devices such as self configuring networks or N21s helps to locate the machines, peoples etc. Tons of software which adapts to change the environment or user needs help us to do what we want.

Project Oxygen device

In the same way of batteries or wall outlet supply power to the electrical appliances, the Project Oxygen devices supply power for communication computation etc. The mobile devices as well as stationary devices are computational and communicational appliances. They cannot store the configurations, which is customized to a user.

Computational devices such as E21s can create intelligent space in buildings, vehicles etc. It also provides large amount of computation and also interface the devices to camera or array of microphones, displays etc. By using speech and vision technologies, the users can easily communicate in this intelligent space.

Handheld devices such as H21s allow mobile access points whether it is intelligent space or not. H21s accepts the speech and vision inputs. It can reconfigure themselves for supporting multiple communication protocols. To efficiently use power and to increase the streaming computation performance, the devices use raw computational fabrics.

Project Oxygen network technology

Networking devices such as N21s connect the changing configurations of self identifying stationary and mobile devices to form collaboration regions. It provides multiple communication protocols such as point to point, building wide etc. It provides secure information access and locate machines etc.

Project Oxygen Software technology

It supports the changes i.e adaptable and eternal. Changes occurred due to failure, software updates, operating conditions, need of applications etc.

Project Oxygen perceptual technology

Without using keyboard and mouse, the Project Oxygen interacts by using speech and vision technologies. The effectiveness can be improved by multimode integration techniques. That is recognizing lip movement, facial expression, gaze etc.

Project Oxygen user technology

There are several user technologies. It includes:-

Project Oxygen directly communicates with human by using speech and vision technologies. It saves the time and effort. Automation, collaboration technologies and individual knowledge access helps to perform several tasks.

• The automation technologies used by collaboration subsystem used for analyze purposes. For process management, knowledge based techniques are used. Also it coordinates the interactions between members of collaborative team. It knows the skills of team members, interests, and also knows the application domain which team works. It may offer easy to use, adaptive mechanism, tuning repetitive information etc.
• Collaboration technologies:- It enables the formation of spontaneous collaborative regions which accommodate needs of people and computations. It supports recording and also archive the speech.
• Knowledge access technologies:- It improves the information access, and access of applications, software systems etc. The user can access their knowledge bases, knowledge bases of friends and associates. It uses individual knowledge accessing subsystem for representing the interactions with human. The individual knowledge access offers accessing of information such as applications, needs of human beings, software applications. In universal access, data manipulations represented in several formats and also allow the content based comparisons. It is also used to acquire information about the human interaction.
• Vision subsystem-It can observe the physical gesture.
• Spoken language subsystem- It can track the human conversation.

Applications of Project Oxygen

• Trusted software provides secure and efficient access to networked, mobile devices. Oxygen provides privacy. The users can locate their needs without revealing their location.
• Multimodal recognizes both speech and vision.
• Intelligent room is a highly interactive environment which can be used in collaborative meeting.
• Personalized information management and collaboration through metadata management and manipulation.