PROJECT OXYGEN

BY S.HARINI

Definition of PROJECT OXYGEN

Project Oxygen is a research project to develop pervasive, human-centered computing. The Oxygen architecture is to consist of handheld terminals; computers embedded in the environment, and dynamically configured networks which connect these devices. The concept behind this is to bring abundant computation and communication, as pervasive and free as air, naturally into people's lives.As the Internet has exploded over the last couple of years it has been facing a massive shortage of bandwidth. Project Oxygen is a massive project that plans to make gigabits of bandwidth available to Net users. The planned capacity is 2,560 Gbits/s. This will available in 75 countries via 96 landing points. The project proposes to provide these services by laying thousands of miles of undersea cables.

. Project Oxygen is not only confined to data and will service these areas as well. But what has really been the main driving force behind the entire idea has been the great mother of all networks, the Internet. A couple of years back the Internet was barely heard of and whatever access existed was largely text based with limited file transfers. As faster modems, ppp/slip and the advent of graphical access with Mosaic and Netscape the Internet simply ran of bandwidth. Project Oxygen will be the world’s first truly global tele-communications network with its 96 landing points in 75 countries. It is an extremely flexible network and has built in switching design. Using the Lucent Bandwidth Manager platform the network will be able to handle any voice or data traffic easily. Oxygen is an extremely reliable network which is extremely essential for a network of its size. It uses the SDH ring architecture which enables traffic to be rerouted within 300 milliseconds (!!!!!) of a fault in the ring. If this does not work then network management centers will be able to manage existing network resources. The OXYGEN Network has a significant advantage over traditional cable systems, which do not have unified management of all the available resources.

VISION

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. We will not need to carry our own devices around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will adopt our information personalities. They will respect our desires for privacy and security.

CHALLENGES

To support highly dynamic and varied human activities, the Oxygen system must master many technical challenges. It must bepervasive—it must be everywhere, with every portal reaching into the same information base;embedded—it must live in our world, sensing and affecting it;nomadic—it must allow users and computations to move around freely, according to their needs;adaptable—it must provide flexibility and spontaneity, in response to changes in user requirements and operating conditions;powerful, yet efficient—it must free itself from constraints imposed by bounded hardware resources, addressing instead system constraints imposed by user demands and available power or communication bandwidth;intentional—it must enable people to name services and software objects by intent, for example, "the nearest printer," as opposed to by address;Eternal—it must never shut down or reboot; components may come and go in response to demand, errors, and upgrades, but Oxygen as a whole must be available all the time

APPROACH

The visual processing system contains visual perception and visual rendering subsystems. The visual perception subsystem recognizes and classifies objects and actions in still and video images. It augments the spoken language subsystem, for example, by tracking direction of gaze of participants to determine what or whom they are looking at during a conversation, thereby improving the overall quality of user interaction. The visual rendering subsystem enables scenes and actions to be reconstructed in three dimensions from a small number of sample images without an intermediate 3D model. It can be used to provide macroscopic views of application-supplied data.

TECHNOLOGIES

Oxygen Device TechnologiesDevices in Oxygen supply power for

computation, communication, and perception in much the same way that batteries and wall outlets supply power for electrical appliances. Both mobile and stationary devices are universal communication and computation appliances. They are also anonymous: they do not store configurations that are customized to any particular user. As for batteries and power outlets, the primary difference between them lies in the amount of energy they supply.

Oxygen Network TechnologiesNetworks, called N21s, connect dynamically

changing configurations of self-identifying mobile and stationary devices to form collaborative regions. N21s support multiple communication protocols for low-power point-to-point, building-wide, and campus-wide communication. N21s also provide completely decentralized mechanisms for naming, location and resource discovery, and secure information access.Oxygen Software Technologies

The Oxygen software environment is built to support change, which is inevitable if Oxygen is to provide a system that is adaptable, let alone eternal. Change is occasioned by anonymous devices customizing to users, by explicit user requests, by the needs of applications and their components, by current operating conditions, by the availability of new software and upgrades, by failures, or by any number of other causes. Oxygen's software architecture relies on control and planning abstractions that provide mechanisms for change, on specifications that support putting these mechanisms to use, and on persistent object stores with transactional semantics to provide operational support for change.

Oxygen Perceptual TechnologiesSpeech and vision, rather than keyboards and

mice, provide the main modes of interaction in Oxygen. Multimodal integration increases the effectiveness of these perceptual technologies, for example, by using vision to augment speech understanding by recognizing facial expressions, lip movement, and gaze. Perceptual technologies are part of the core of Oxygen, not just afterthoughts or interfaces to separate applications. Oxygen applications can tailor "lite" versions of these technologies quickly to make human-machine interaction easy and natural. Graceful interdomain context switching supports seamless integration of applications.Oxygen User Technologies

Several user technologies harness Oxygen's massive computational, communication, and perceptual resources. They both exploit the capacity of Oxygen's system technologies for change in support of users, and they help provide Oxygen's system technologies with that capacity

COMPONENTS OF OXYGEN

In this initial release of the toolkit, following components are available: FPS-Meter v3 - Displays FPS (Frames per Second) of last 10 frames. Mem-Meter v1 - Displays available free memory to Flash Lite application. Battery Meter v1 - Shows current battery level of mobile device. Signal Meter v1 - Shows current signal strength of mobile network. The installation package will install two separate libraries. One for Flash Lite 1.x (pre-Action Script) and another for Flash Lite 2.x & 3.x (Action Script 1/2).

FPS-Meter

FPS-Meter component is helpful for optimizing animations for mobile device playback. This is a new version of the FPS-Meter Component, which I released some time ago.

Mem-Meter

Memory Meter component is also a development time component. It shows free memory available to current Flash Lite movie. There is also a bar-graph just below the value, which shows percentage of used memory (in red) from total available memory (in green) to Flash Lite.

Battery Meter

The Battery Meter component shows current battery level. It is Drag' n Drop, ready to use component in any application. The developers can quickly include battery level meter into their Flash Lite applications without any code.

Signal Meter

The Signal Meter component shows current mobile network signal strength. It is also Drag'n Drop, ready to use component in any application. The developers can quickly include network signal strength meter into their Flash Lite applications without any code.

WORKING PRINCIPLE

NEW TECHNOLOGIES MUST BE CREATED Pervasive: Computation will be freely available.

Hardware must become adaptable and scalable.Software is not resource constrained, need to rethink compilers for new constraints and data type. Software must become embedded, eternal, and update-able on the fly.Networking should be seamless across multiple protocols, e.g. multilevel handoffSecurity and privacy raise many concerns.Devices must be anonymous.An integrative architecture must be designed.A new economic model must be created

Human Centered: System must cater to people’s needs

Replace typing with speech, vision, and gestures

Located things by intention, e.g. “the nearest printer”

Enable location-based customized services

Support collaboration

OXYGEN IS ABOUT INTEGRATION

Interfaces: explore multimodal synergy – speech, vision, etc.Person identification – who is the person; who is currently talkingSpeech understanding – in noise; augmented with gesturesInformation rendering – talking headsMobility: integration of location support, networks, securiA systems architecture that addresses the technical challenges in software engineering.Gracefully accommodate changes in user location and needsRespond to local failures and newly available computing resourcesty, and personalizationMobile information delivery – where is the recipient; is it really him/her; what networks and other resources are available

An Example of Integration: E21

Context aware environment: computation “in the air”Synergistic use of speech, vision, and gesture

Control of environmentInformation retrieval

Ranged based stereo person trackingAudio-visual fusion to determine who is talkingA robust SW infrastructure

Manages resourcesSupports multi-modal interactionsCan be customized

A Handy-21 Prototype

A new expansion sleeve for iPAQ - 64-128MB flash memory on board.2 PCMCIA slots.Headset jack for audio I/O.Digital CMOS camera.Jointly developed by Delta Electronics, HP, MIT, and Philips.Initial batch is now available, running Linux.Quite a few applications are running on this platform

PROJECT OXYGEN PARTNERS

Acer

Delta Electronics, Inc.

Hewlett-Packard Corp.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Inc.

Nokia Research Center

Philips Research