From cell phones and PDAs to personal music players, digital devices are becoming increasingly personal and important for social use, personal enjoyment, and awareness of what's going on in people's immediate world. In the future we may have a "wardrobe" of personal devices (some requiring interaction and many that sense and respond to us on their own) to help us pursue short- and long-term goals and personal enhancement. Imagine for instance if devices around you wherever you are could set you up with private coaching using real-life animations of your favorite musicians. This learning system could monitor your progress and provide advanced lessons at just the right rate for you.
Achieving such personal awareness in devices presents a number of research challenges.
- Constructing effective personal representations (models) of individuals including goals, preferences, values, social inclinations, and mental state.
- Enabling systems to seamlessly interact with their owners and act on their behalf.
- Developing systemwide support for user-aware services.
- Creating sensors for everything from health and fitness monitoring to emotional state.
- Developing applications for long-term life management.
Current Intel Research projects include multi-sensor approaches and machine learning for activity recognition, personal information presentation, and activity-based computing. In activity-based computing, for example, we're looking at ways to automatically record physical actions, such as walking gait analysis, that are tedious to record but are useful in everything from fitness training to physical therapy.
