September 13, 2000
Talking to the Internet: UW researchers win $4 million to bring people and cyberspace together
If David Allstot and his University of Washington colleagues have their way, a few years from now you may find yourself talking to the Internet through your wristwatch.
And your own body might provide the electricity.
Allstot, the Boeing-Egtvedt Chair Professor in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering, and a 10-member team of interdisciplinary researchers have been awarded a $4 million federal grant to investigate better ways for people to “interface” with the Internet. The grant, spread over five years, is one of three awarded to the UW today under a new $90 million National Science Foundation program designed to fund innovative projects that will maintain U.S. leadership in computer research.
Allstot’s project focuses on more conveniently integrating humanity and cyberspace. Speech, he says, is the most efficient avenue.
“We’re envisioning a Star Trek-type device that the human wearer can speak into and send various commands into the Internet or into various appliances in the home, automobile, and other locations,” Allstot said. “The Internet or appliance will then display the requested data in some sort of visual format, maybe something like today’s Palm Pilots.”
The major challenges, he said, include reconciling the human requests and the cyberspace answers – the data streams will be very different and the devices, to be wearable, must be small. The data rate going up to the Internet will be low, just a speech rate. But the return, which could include speech, video, graphics and other data, would be very high.
“The current maximum rate is about 1 million bits per second,” Allstot said. “We’ll be trying to increase that by a factor of 100 or greater.”
In addition, the small devices will have to operate on a proportionally small amount of power. He said researchers will investigate low energy designs and look into ways to tap into “free power” from the user, perhaps from body movements or natural body heat.
Other UW awards include:
A $900,000 grant to Henry Levy, with the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering, to study multithreaded computer processors, a promising technology to handle the huge demands of emerging global computer applications. Virtually no research has been done on how the processors interact with operating systems.
A $200,000 award to Lawrence Snyder, also a UW computer scientist, to expand a program to teach fluency with information technology into the K-12 school system, at community colleges and in adult education.
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For more information, contact Allstot at (206) 221-5764 or allstot@ee.washington.edu. For further information about the NSF’s Information Technology Research initiative, check the Web at www.itr.nsf.gov/.
