MIT Working on a New Kind of Computing Environment
From: NewsFactor - June 25, 2002

The two-year old Project Oxygen Alliance, a project at MIT, is working to
develop a new, "smart" environment for computing and communication. Ken
Steele, a research scientist at MIT, said the goal is to have computers that
understand and communicate with people as if the devices were also people,
similar to having a personal assistant for everyone. For example, in this new
environment, a person could tell the computer to make plane reservations. The
computer would understand speech, know the person's seat preference, and
handle the entire process with no further input. Steele admitted that
researchers don't have a clear vision of exactly what the completed project
might look like, though some observers compare the project to the technology
in the recent film "Minority Report," a science fiction thriller. 

http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18363.html
http://www.oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0626oxygen.html
http://dsonline.computer.org/archives/ds100/ds1newprint.htm
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/06/29/fp15s1-csm.shtml