Victor Zue, Project Oxygen

When Victor Zue was chosen last year as director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer
Science, he took over the leadership of one of the world’s most closely watched
computer research programs, Project Oxygen. Backed by the federal government and
major computer firms on three continents, Project Oxygen seeks to develop the next
generation of computing hardware and software – systems designed for a world where
using computers will seem as natural as breathing. Zue spoke last week about this
brave new world with The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray.

By Globe Staff, 6/16/2002

Q. Oxygen’s motto is ”pervasive, human-centered computing.” What do you mean by
”pervasive?”

A. In five to 10 years, in developed countries, computing and communications are
essentially going to be free, pervasive, everywhere. It’s going to be in your walls, in
your cars, on your body.

Q. We’ve been hearing this kind of talk for years But who needs a networked
refrigerator?

A. I would like my computer to tell me that milk sitting there has been around for two
weeks, so don’t drink it; in fact, throw it away. I stand in front of my bathroom scale.
Every day I measure myself. I measure other things about myself, and then I
religiously go to the PC, go into the spreadsheet and type those numbers into that.
That’s stupid.

Q. So you want the scale to talk directly to your computer?

A. If all my devices have IP addresses or are all networked, they can talk to each
other, and all those things would just easily show up on my own PC.

Q. How does Oxygen plan to make computers more human-centered?

A. The example I can think of is typing. I didn’t learn how to touch-type until maybe five
years ago. I like to be able to communicate with my machine anthropomorphically,
and I want to impart these human-like capabilities so that I can do the kind of things
that I do day-to-day with human beings. We think speech and vision are very good
ways for people to communicate…. We ought to make a big push to make computers
able to deal with those kinds of modalities.

Q. Computers can already recognize speech. What new capabilities will Oxygen offer?

A. If you talk in a subway, people begin to focus on your lips. They begin to
subconsciously pay attention to other cues because the signal is too noisy. This is
known as the ”cocktail party” effect.

Q. Why would a computer need to do that?

A. I might be using a computer in a very noisy environment. You can’t clean up the
signal enough for it to understand what you’re doing.

Q. So you’re designing machines that watch you as you speak?

A. MIT professor Trevor Darrell is working on a situation. Let’s say you have 10 people
sitting around the table…. How do you know who is talking? The way he does it, he
takes the acoustic signal and correlates that signal with the visual signal – see whose
mouth is moving … then he can steer the microphone toward that person.

Q. When will we see Oxygen-based products appearing on store shelves?

A. I think there will be low-hanging fruit that are going to happen soon, certainly before
five years are up.

This story ran on page C2 of the Boston Globe on 6/16/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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