Our vision of the future is a world in which humans have access to technology for information and entertainment without doing anything contrived such as logging on to a computer or turning on a television. In science fiction, humans are able to command their personal computing resources from anywhere under any circumstances. Our vision is to make this fiction a reality, and get towards a go anywhere, do anything at anytime model of access to information technology. We wish to invent technology that is necessary to realize ubiquitous presence . To revolutionize the use of such advances at the higher level, we need a vision of a futuristic society and the demands that it will place on information technology.
Ubiquitous presence is one such vision.
Such a radical proposal will revolutionize the way we as computer scientists approach the problem of inventing the technology to support this futuristic infrastructure. The organization of the information processing resources should reflect the nature of the tasks that need to be done. We are betting that the future computing scene is going to be dominated by stream-oriented processing such as interactive vision and speech. Also, technological advances are already making processing a cheap and vastly available resource, pushing the constraints on to the communication, memory, and power consumption. These arguments suggest adopting a stream-oriented organization of the computational resources.