Chicago sun-times
U. of I. lab unveils a higher-tech world ahead
August 6, 2000
BY DAVE NEWBART STAFF REPORTER
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN--Just minutes from some of the richest farmland in
the country, the University of Illinois has created the high-tech
classroom of the future.
The Smart Spaces Laboratory would make the Jetsons feel right at home,
with computers embedded in doorways, behind walls and in the ceiling,
ready to respond to your beck and call. The goal is to give everyone
more speed and more power in technology as easy to use as a telephone.
The laboratory features two pieces of a massive research effort known
to few outside the rarefied world of high-tech experimentation.
One piece is the "Grid," which will bring volumes of information to
businesses and homes at lightning speed with few of the hiccups or
problems common on the Internet today.
The other component is "implicit computing," the idea that miniature
but powerful computers will be everywhere from clothing and medicine
bottles to books and papers.
This "will transform every aspect of our lives: business, recreation,
home life and travel," said Dan Reed, director of the project.
Here's what it all could mean in five to 10 years:
For business, the images of out-of-state executives could be displayed
in super-high-resolution, multiview video feeds on a conference room
wall at corporate headquarters. They could discuss business as easily
as if they were in the room together, noting every facial tic and hand
gesture. Eventually, the images could be in 3-D.
Companies could shut down costly computer hardware and switch to the
Internet for all of their supercomputing needs, selecting what they
need as if it were one big Sam's Warehouse of computing might.
And at home, it means making your house feel as if Bill Gates lived
there. Computers would sense your presence in the room, turn on your
favorite music or even sense your need to dim the lights for a
romantic interlude.
Friends in several cities could link up via video connections to watch
a Bears-Packers game, "talking and hanging out like normal," said Rick
Stevens, an Argonne National Laboratory researcher and a point man on
the project.
"It's not that you are just watching a football game. You interact
with each other. Everybody is talking and hanging out. You can do
everything but drink beer together."
And here at 1304 W. Springfield Ave., in the Digital Computer
Laboratory building, the door to that future is open. Equipped by the
U. of I. computer science department two months ago, the room connects
to the Internet at warp speed--400 times faster than the typical home
connection.
Headed by the university's National Center for Supercomputing
Applications, the Grid project involves an alliance of more than 50
universities, government agencies and corporations.
Eventually, researchers hope a Greek history professor could walk into
the room wearing a special badge, and immediately a lesson plan would
pop up in the form of giant computer windows, projected on a wall 8
feet high by 22 feet wide. The lighting and background music would
adjust to the professor's preference.
The windows would have the power to display live video and graphics
from around the world: an archeological dig, a museum of Greek art,
Web sites with images of the Parthenon and other sites, an expert at a
Greek university. Other windows could show students attending the
course in Oxford, Princeton and New Delhi.
A Times Square-style news ticker would run across the bottom of the
screen with relevant current events.
Throughout the course, the professor could speak commands to the
computers to search the Web or page through a slide show.
The room is the testing ground for the computer science department's
planned $75 million new building, to open in 2003. The
270,000-square-foot facility will be loaded with intelligent devices,
wireless networking and streaming multimedia.
Reed describes rooms where, if you enter talking on a cell phone, that
conversation immediately would switch to a wall-size video display.
"A good bit of computer science is driven by watching `Star Trek,' "
said Reed, head of the computer science department and the
supercomputing center. He also is the director of the partnership,
called the National Computational Science Alliance.
Already, the Smart Spaces Laboratory has been used for academic
conferences, including one last week in Kansas attended via the Grid
by university researchers. The conferences can include
question-and-answer sessions among remote sites.
The idea for the Access Grid, one component of the Grid project, came
out of Argonne National Laboratory. Developers describe the Access
Grid as helping groups of people get together while bringing more
normal human interaction to Internet communications.
It's like video conferencing on steroids.
Each of the 20 sites currently linked to the Access Grid via a
high-speed research network is equipped with multiple microphones and
cameras, which display views on wall-size screens. The ultimate chat
room, the multiple audio lines allow several conversations to take
place simultaneously.
"The level of audio and video with today's personal computer is
garbage," said Stevens, head of the mathematics and computer science
division at Argonne and the chief computational architect for the
alliance. "It's more of a natural interaction, like you are in the
room together. You can see more than just a person's face and see
their gestures."
For example, if you were talking to a friend in New York using this
system, he would see you as clearly as if he were looking across the
room. He could see a wall-size image of you, the couch you're sitting
on, the newspaper you're reading. And he could speak to you as easily
as if he were sitting next to you.
Smaller images would be used as more people are added to the
conversation.
Tom DeFanti, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, is looking to add virtual
reality to the Grid via three-dimensional technology.
Some businesses trips could become unnecessary as more meetings are
conducted via the Access Grid. Powerful computer databases could be
accessed from any site and be displayed at all sites during a meeting.
In the home, a family could command a computer to display an image of
Grandma's house, Stevens said, and then spend the afternoon
"interacting" in the room together. Grandparents could watch their
grandchildren play.
Randy Butler, a researcher at the National Computational Science
Alliance, suggests a shopper could link with an auto dealer, view
video of the cars on the lot and then judge the body language of a
salesman to determine if the price was good or not.
"The way you interact with the Net will be qualitatively different,"
Stevens said.
Beyond the Access Grid, researchers are trying to advance the
capabilities of the Internet. The current Internet provides access to
loads of information, Butler said, but does not provide access to
supercomputers, high-powered machines working together to do
calculations many times faster than normal computers. The Grid would
link businesses around the world to that computing power with a click
of the mouse.
Stock analysts might want access to advanced weather modeling; auto
companies might need access to advanced car design programs. A
scientist could peer into an electron microscope at another university
via the Grid and then control everything she is looking at.
"Businesses today have a large investment in computer systems, but
there might be a day when they might not have to own their own
computer systems," Butler said. "Some companies specialize in data
storage, some in other applications. Your business could access that
quickly if the Grid is successful."
The main barrier is cost and the availability of bandwidth, the wide
pipes that enable memory-intensive transfer of video and other data. A
link to the Access Grid costs about $50,000. The Smart Spaces
Laboratory cost $200,000 to put together.
But researchers say much of the technology could be widely available
within five years.
"As the cost of bandwidth and equipment goes way down, this will be a
very natural thing people will have," DeFanti said.
***
WHAT'S COMING
Intelligent computing devices and the Grid are the next revolutions in
high-tech. What they mean for you:
* Home: "Hang out" with friends or family members thousands of miles
away. Watch grandkids play. Use embedded computers to play music or
shop online.
* Schools: See video from colleges or experts via the Internet on
computers controlled by sensors or voice commands. Attend conferences
overseas without leaving campus.
* Work: Attend meetings with high-resolution video of co-workers
thousands of miles away, projected on the wall. Talk to them as if
they were in the same room. Link to powerful supercomputers via the
Internet to perform business tasks online.
***
Computer pioneer for half a century
BY DAVE NEWBART STAFF REPORTER
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--begun as a place to
study agriculture--has become a computing powerhouse that has arguably
contributed as much to the high-tech explosion in the last
half-century as any university or company in the world.
The university has been at the forefront of the computer revolution
from the very early days of electronics--a university professor won a
Nobel Prize for developing the transistor--to today's Internet
boom--popularized by software created at the university.
In between, university researchers and graduates developed one of the
very first computers, the microchip and supercomputers.
Today, tens of millions of people around the globe use software,
including Eudora, Lotus Notes and Netscape, developed at the
university or by its former students or faculty.
Still other graduates wrote the software that controlled the Mars
Pathfinder, created two of the most popular video games ever and
oversaw graphic-modeling used in such movies as this summer's
blockbuster "The Perfect Storm."
For their efforts, university alumni have been heavily compensated:
Three of the 10 richest techies in the Chicago area went to the
university. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen is worth hundreds of
millions of dollars.
"U. of I. is one of five places in the world for computer science,"
said Rick Stevens, head of the mathematics and computer science
division at Argonne National Laboratory. "It has influenced
architecture and software forever. It's a crown jewel in Illinois."
The computer engineering department has the highest admission
standards of any department on the Urbana-Champaign campus. The 1,100
undergraduate students average scores on standardized tests in the
97th percentile.
John Holoynak, a professor of computer science and electrical
engineering, traces the university's technical prowess back to the end
of World War II and a new university president, George Stoddard.
"Stoddard started the business of making U. of I. a more powerful
place," Holoynak said.
Among others, Stoddard recruited a young researcher named John
Bardeen. Bardeen later won two Nobel prizes.
Bardeen, in work done for Bell Laboratories shortly before joining the
faculty in 1951, co-invented the transistor. He later refined it while
in Urbana-Champaign, and he taught the first class on semiconductors
and transistors ever offered at a university, said Holoynak, who was
Bardeen's first graduate student.
The transistor revolutionized electronics by replacing bulky and
inefficient vacuum tubes.
Later, alum Jack Kilby invented the microchip by placing multiple
transistors on a single chip. Together, the transistor and microchip
cut power consumption, speeded up electronics and greatly reduced the
size and weight of everything from computers to stereos.
In 1949, the university began building one of the earliest academic
computers, known as Illiac. Ten feet long and 10 feet high, Iliac
weighed 5 tons and was equipped with 2,718 vacuum tubes. But with 5
kilobytes of memory, it had a tiny fraction of the memory of today's
desktops.
PLATO, developed in 1959, was the first computer used for direct
education. Students for the first time could tap into a mainframe and
send messages in real time to other computer systems around the
country--a precursor to today's Internet chat rooms.
From that system, students, led by Ray Ozzie, developed Lotus Notes, a
business communications software program now used by 56 million
people. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called Ozzie "one of the top
five programmers in the universe."
Other major inventions include Holoynak's LED lights and semiconductor
lasers. While LED is used in most digital clocks, the lasers are used
to read data from CD-ROMs, DVDs and for a host of other applications.
In 1983, Larry Smarr, a professor of physics and astronomy, requested
funding from the National Science Foundation to establish the first
U.S. network of supercomputers. In 1985, the network was born at five
centers, including Illinois.
Today, the 1,526 processors in one supercomputer plus a smaller
cluster of 128 dual-processor PCs make it one of the two most powerful
university systems in the country.
"For 50 years, the university has been synonymous with
supercomputing," Smarr said.
In the last decade, however, the university also became synonymous
with electronic mail and the Internet.
Eudora, developed by student Steve Dorner in 1990, is used by 20
million people, according to Qualcomm, which bought licensing rights
to the program from the university.
While working at the supercomputing center, Marc Andreesen and Eric
Bina developed the first popular graphic-based Web browser, Mosaic.
After feuding with the university over the rights to the name and
programming code, Bina and Andreesen bitterly left to start Netscape.
The licensing rights to Mosaic were later contracted to
Naperville-based Spyglass, founded by former U. of I. researcher Tim
Krauskopf. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now based in large part on
Mosaic.
Other contributions have come in the games and graphics area.
Flight Simulator was written by alum Bruce Artwick and later purchased
by Microsoft, becoming one of the software giant's best-selling games.
The controversial Mortal Kombat, created by Ed Boon, is one of the
most popular games of all time. It has generated more than $1 billion
in revenue.
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