Oxygen burst: MIT is readying new technologies that put humans in the center of computing

June 22, 2004 | Source: Boston Globe

MIT’s Project Oxygen — so named because founder Michael Dertouzos believed computers should be as invisible to their users as the air they breathe — has begun to bear technology fruit.

Last week, in a series of demonstrations at MIT’s futuristic Stata Center, researchers showed off a new reconfigurable microchip that enables a mobile device to change, chameleon-like, from cellphone to hand-held computer to music player; a 1,020-microphone array that can isolate a single voice or conversation at a cocktail party; a family of kiosks that use wireless technologies to provide a building’s employees and visitors with maps, up-to-the-minute information about events in progress, and people’s locations; a sensor network that can track the movements of autonomous robots; and a voice-activated software program that, in response to questions, dispatches intelligent agents to crawl hundreds of thousands of Web pages and recite weather forecasts or financial data.