Road Donkeys
No More
by Judith Galas

    "We're tired of being road donkeys," said Gary Minden, chief technologist at KU's Information and Telecommunication Technology Center. "We're tired of lugging our hardware everywhere we go."

    Self-defense, plain and simple. That's what spurred the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center (ITTC) researchers Minden and Joe Evans to put their intellectual muscle behind the Ambient Computational Environment Project -- otherwise known as an ACE.

    These electrical engineering and computer science profs grew weary of flexing their biceps and quads to heft cell phones, pagers, laptops and other personal computing devices -- the communication poundage most well-connected folks tote these days.

    Co-directors of a $1.46-million project with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Minden and Evans hope the results from their two-and-a-half-year project -- Architecture and Prototype of an Ambient Computational Environment -- will soon enable them and others to walk lighter.

    The truth is, when you've got an ACE, the world isn't you're oyster -- it's your computational environment.

    Got a file at home, but you need it at work?

    Find yourself at a staff meeting with a laptop, but you want to pull up a file that's in your office?

    No problemo, says Evans. Once computer researchers get their ACEs cooking, your files -- no matter where you are -- may be just a thumbprint or voiceprint away.

    A network embedded into a home, an office or meeting room, auditorium -- even a taxi -- can link you to the information you need, whether it's a "buy milk" message from your spouse or hot government data for a speech that you'll deliver in an hour but that you're writing in the back seat of a cab. This long-lived and robust ACE network, not a specific piece of hardware, will become the computational heart of your life.

    The time will come, say Minden and Evans, when people will stop thinking of computers as specific boxes on a certain desk. Instead, computational environments will make the creation and retrieval of information widespread, invisible and effortless.

    So road donkeys of the world, straighten those straining shoulders. A lighter future awaits.

 ITTC's growing expertise in computational environments began in 1999 with an NSF award for $1.2 million. That project supports the purchase of equipment such as computers, cameras, video players, projectors, decoder rings and cell phones all linked to the testing network being developed at ITTC and elsewhere on campus.

For more information contact Gary Minden, gminden@ittc.ku.edu, (785) 864-4834, or Joe Evans, evans@ittc.ku.edu, (785) 864-4830.

Judith Galas is marketing manager and public relations chief at ITTC.