Wednesday, August 22, 2001

A Book on 'Human-Centered Computers' Foresees Productivity Gains as Machines Are Improved By FLORENCE OLSEN Suppose computers were all around you, like oxygen. And suppose using those computers was as easy as breathing. That's the idea behind the Oxygen Project, a five-year, $50-million research effort by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab. Its goal is to redesign computers to make them easier to use. The Oxygen project is now the subject of a book by Michael L. Dertouzos, the director of M.I.T.'s computer-science laboratory. In The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us (HarperCollins, $26), Mr. Dertouzos says the United States could achieve a 300-percent increase in productivity in the 21st century if computers were easier to use. Such gains in productivity would be achieved by processing information more efficiently. Even professors and graduate students, he says, could accomplish many routine tasks in a fraction of the time they now take. The 250 researchers involved in the Oxygen Project are building hardware and software prototypes for what they refer to as "human-centered computing." Next year they will begin testing the prototypes. So far, the research has produced two types of hardware, Mr. Dertouzos writes. The Handy 21 -- for "21st century" -- is a hand-held, battery-powered device that can be reprogrammed in an instant by downloading software to perform different functions. With the appropriate software, it can become a computer on a high-speed network, a cell phone, a two-way radio, an FM or AM radio, or a television. It has no keypad because it understands human speech. A second type of hardware, the Enviro 21, is a stationary computer that could be installed in the walls of offices and other places where people spend much of their time. It is flexible, like the Handy 21, but it has more powerful processors and a capacity to store large amounts of information. It would have connections to the Internet and to other networks, as well as to fax machines, electronic whiteboards, printers, scanners, cameras, microphones, and other hardware accessories. The Oxygen operating system, which will control the Handy 21 and Enviro 21 computers, has modules capable of understanding speech. Initially, the system will understand only conversations it has been prepared for, such as requests for weather or travel-reservation information. It will have a "speech switch" capable of switching between the different speech modules. But unlike speech-recognition systems, Mr. Dertouzos writes in The Unfinished Revolution, the "speech understanding" modules being developed at M.I.T. will require no preliminary voice-recognition training by the speaker, and therefore anyone will be able to use them. The M.I.T. researchers are aiming to build hardware and software that let people interact "naturally" with computers, that automate many routine tasks, and that help people overcome time and geographical distances to collaborate. But Mr. Dertouzos writes that at least initially, this higher-level form of communication with computers will work only if people stick to "a few common and consistent commands to do what we want with information." Human-centered computers, in turn, will respond by displaying information visually or by synthesizing human speech. The newest speech synthesizers achieve effects that he says are "wonderfully natural" because they combine prerecorded speech fragments spoken by a real person. "I am not a futurist," Mr. Dertouzos said in an interview. "I only describe as future activities the things we're building." Of course, it's hard to predict, he said, when the first spin-off companies might start to commercialize the M.I.T. research. In the book, Mr. Dertouzos predicts changes in the world of computers and networks that will support human-centered computing. For instance, he says the Internet will become a thousand times faster than it is today, and the price of a billion bytes of storage capacity will fall to less than $1. People and institutions will pay monthly subscription fees to software-service providers instead of purchasing software or software licenses, as is the common practice of institutions today. Most important of all, he predicts that new Web languages such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) will gain widespread use, enabling people to search for information on the Web more efficiently. These languages can be used to create semantic tags for online information so that future search engines will be able to interpret the meaning of requests and search accordingly, instead of searching simply for occurrences of words and phrases. Mr. Dertouzos disassociated himself in the interview from the futurists who believe that computers can become intelligent machines. "We can make computers have a little bit of intelligence in very narrow areas," he said. But creating computers that have common-sense intelligence is impossible in the foreseeable future, he said. Nor can distance education, mediated by computers and computer networks, substitute for a traditional education, he added. "Don't forget the impact that love has on education," said Mr. Dertouzos, a native of Greece, as he explained what distance education lacks. "If you are loved by your teacher -- and I mean this in the most innocent and Platonic sense -- if your teacher really cares for your well-being -- and you know that because your teacher will ask about you, will scold you for not doing the right thing, and will give you stories about why you should do this or do that -- the learning can be unbelievably different." 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