TANgents Summer 2004

In the third and final part of our series on presence technology, we will take a brief glimpse into the not-so-distant future. Many of the sprockets and cogs of presence technology are in place and doing a relatively good job of keeping track of us. Work at the Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs R&D facilities is well under way to deploy fully integrated presence systems for home and work.

Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the power of presence is through a scenario, which includes currently available technologies, technologies that are starting to emerge gradually, and technologies that are just around the corner.

Imagine yourself as a researcher in Nebraska. You are working on a highly classified, multidisciplinary research project with a group of over fifty additional specialists from around the world. The international organization that is providing your funding is expecting tangible results from your project by year's end. Real-time collaboration and access to data is crucial to your success. Your team depends on existing, secure technologies, such as encrypted teleconferencing, instant messaging (IM,) e-mail, as well as high-speed and secure telecommunications networks to share research data.

You arrive at your office in the morning; sit down at your desk, and your integrated presence technology system swings into full gear. Being human, you forgot to turn on your cell phone and PDA when you left for work, so this is the system's first contact with you for the day. A sensor in your chair notes that someone of your approximate weight is now sitting in it. A facial image identification system, driven by an all-purpose webcam on your desk and software on your computer has narrowed down the possible occupants of your chair to a few entries in its database with you being one of the possibilities. You put your hand on the mouse and a biometric device in the mouse under your right index finger finds the required 25-point ridge characteristic match in your fingerprint and allows you to enter your secure password to log into your computer. After logging in, your cell phone and PDA come to life and a message admonishing you for not turning them on when you left for work appears on your monitor. You already have an IM from a colleague in Singapore, who is having a late dinner and is communicating with you from the restaurant via her wireless PDA. She wants to know if you are ready to upload the results from her experiment from that day. You click the upload button on and the data transfer automatically takes place and is imported into your database. She mentions that the system is planning a tele-meeting that requires your presence and will have a list of possible times posted within the hour. You have now been at work for less than ten minutes.

The presence technology described above either already exists or will be available within the next year or so. Our global society has made collaborations between widely dispersed groups of workers commonplace. It is no longer quite as likely that you will walk down the hall, stop in a colleague's office and have him check his calendar to find a good time for a meeting. Now, that colleague may be half-way across the country or half-way around the world. Keeping track of large groups of people separated by long distances is one of the strengths of presence technology.

At Sun Microsystems Laboratories, researchers are working on a group of presence projects loosely called Network Communities. Their philosophy, as well of that of other similar presence research projects, is that in a widely dispersed, well-connected network, the status of the people you need to reach is always available. It presupposes total transparency and interoperability between a wide number of computing and communications devices. It also presupposes the same level of transparency between the networks and software that connects the devices. Thus, a person carrying a wireless RIM Blackberry device would, at all times know the status of other members of her workgroup who may be using any combination of web-enabled teleconference-capable cell phones, desktop and notebook computers, or other communications devices. Another function of this technology would be to seamlessly route calls made to a cell phone or other device that is not in service to any active device that is currently available to the person who the caller needs to contact.

It is one thing to have easy access to each member of a worldwide workgroup, but quite another to schedule meetings and conferences that involve all or part of the group. This problem has plagued workgroups on a much simpler level for years. Schedulers, project managers, and executive assistants have maintained their bosses' and coworker's calendars with varying degrees of success, using traditional methods such as e-mail, IM, telephones, etc., to coordinate meetings. Software, such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, has made this task easier, but working with a large, widely dispersed group of people is still a challenging task.

Presence technology, once again, is a possible key to solving this workgroup communications problem. A presence technology known as Rhythm Awareness, also being studied at Sun Labs, is attempting to address this issue. Rhythm Awareness assumes that by collecting large enough samples of each workgroup member's activities and work habits, a predictive database application can be built. That application would use presence probabilities to suggest possible meeting and conference times and locations. For example, the application would know with a certain degree of accuracy that team member A has lunch every Monday and Tuesday between 11:30 AM and 12:45 PM Central Time. The Rhythm Awareness software would automatically eliminate those times for any meeting request involving team member A.
The relatively low levels of accuracy of Rhythm Awareness models currently under development suggest that our existing system of phone calls and e-mails to schedule appointments and meetings may be with us for some time. However, as computing power increases and presence devices become more functional and ubiquitous, there may be a place in our future for Rhythm Awareness scheduling.

Whether we like it or not, presence technology will continue to play a larger role in our lives, at home and particularly at work. Our capability to accept this larger role will ultimately determine the adoption rate and success of this exciting new technology.

TANgents, a quarterly publication of Technologies Across Nebraska, is edited and produced by Linda Tempel, University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension, ltempel@unlnotes.unl.edu, and Anne Byers, Nebraska Information Technology Commission, abyers@notes.state.ne.us. Please contact us if you would like to contribute an article or an idea for an article. Comments and suggestions are also welcome.