Tanke Nyckeln

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I'm Roland Orre, MSc in engineering physics and computer science. Tech Lic in computer science since 1998 and a PhD student at NADA, computer science dept. at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm. I was earlier working at ABB (Asea Brown Bowery), dealing with e.g. speculative research and development and AI applications.

I'm physically located at Mathematical Statistics dept. at Stockholm University and have my own company NeuroLogic?? (http://www.neurologic.se). My research project BaCoN ("Bayesian Confidence Networks) http://www.bacon.su.se and my computer consultancy project is to develop mathematical and statistical software for WHO (World Health Organization) dealing with data mining of large relational data bases, based on Bayesian statistics and artificial neural networks. The application is drug safety and I'm working with a data base of adverse drug reaction reports data from 55 countries being collected since 1967.

I've always been interrested in hardware solutions and am at the moment on my spare (?) time developing a house control and automation system based upon Dallas 1-Wire chips and TINI Java controllers. In this system will e.g. each water radiator be individually electronically regulated in a cascade regulation system, which will be controllable and supervisable from the web. The control part of the system is based upon Dallas Java iButtons, Nippon IR sensors and Dallas 1-Wire chips, as will the burgler alarm. Each lamp, and most electrical outlets will be individually controllable and supervised through the network. All 1-Wire MicroLANs will be connected to the house Intranet through the TINI micro controllers.

Every function in the house will be remotely controlled with the help of Compaq iPAQ 3150 and soon also 3670. (http://www.compaq.com/products/handhelds/pocketpc/H3150.html) running Linux with WLAN using IEEE 802.11b protocol. I find the Compaq iPAQ to be a great thing and the real beginning of the new era of ubiquitous computing.

The new iPAQ, 3670, http://www.compaq.com/products/handhelds/pocketpc/h3670.html released in April 2001 is somewhat special to me, the reason is that this unit, in combination with IEEE 802.11b is basically what I wrote about 1986, 15 years ago when writing a paper for a school project which I named "TankeNyckeln?" (something like "MindWrench??" in english).

I specified a machine based upon the ARM processor, having 64 Mb of RWM memory and using a cell based radio system allowing it to communicate with 10 Mbit/s with the rest of the world. The protocol used was ad hoc routing based upon a 64 bit id and a 64 bit dynamic location information. I visioned how this type of equipment would help benefit the whole world in exchanging information, education, social as well as business relations. The nice thing with this cell based system was that you got better communication bandwidth the more people there were, the more packed they were and it would not necessary need base stations everywhere. Therefore this system could be easily extended without big investments in communication infra structure, like fibers, and therefore excellent also for the developing countries as well as the country side. I was also dreaming about something like the Terrestrial Operative System where each person could utilize the CPU cycles in all other computers over the world when no one else uses them. I was also very inspired by the Ted Nelson hypertext idea.

Since 1985 I have been dreaming about a connected world, were the connectedness was everyone's right, were all people could be given equal opportunities for development and individual education through the network. In my "TankeNyckeln?" I suggested that the right to connections for every individual was added to the United Nation's declaration of human rights.

In 1986 when my collegues read my paper many of them considered it be science fiction and several people asked what you would really have for usage of this thing "TankeNyckeln?". Since then we have had the internet revolution, to a large extent thanks to the http, which is an implementation of Ted Nelson's old hyper text idea. Now the year 2001, a very symbolically charged year for all lovers of Arthur C Clarke, we have exactly the hardware needed to implement my old dream, a connected world. Take for instance the iPAQ, with 64 Mb memory, 206 MHz StrongARM processor, boot it with Linux, add e.g. a 1 Gb MicroDrive? and an IEEE 802.11b card and you basically have the "TankeNyckeln?". By the way, my idea about the Terrestrial Operative System is also starting to gain some ground like the SETIatHome project. Actually, there is now a group of researchers trying to implement this idea in a general way, using Java, were e.g. Jim Blandy, formerly responsible for the Guile (FSF Scheme project) development, is involved.

I also intend to use the iPAQ as a display client, notice book, and sound server in my wearable computing project, based upon the Cellcomputing Plug-N-Run (PIII 500 Mhz, 512 Mb RWM, 32 Gb IBM 32GH, and of course 802.11b). http://www.cellcomputing.com. I'll try to hack the X drivers for the iPAQ so it can drive my 640x480 MicroDisplay?? FSC (Field Sequential Colors). http://www.microdisplay.com/products/md640g3.html The goal, however, is to make a see through, personal display, built into my prescription glasses based upon their 1024x768 chip.

That is, I don't consider the iPAQ powerful enough for the heavier tasks for my ubiquitous computing, even though I think it is fine for many people. I want to have access to encyclopedias, remembrance agents, speech recognition and frame grabbing and for those tasks the iPAQ is not suitable. For emailing, alarms, web browsing, MP3 playing, talking communication through the WLAN etc it is enough powerful.