Thoughtful computing: Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is working on ways to help computers better understand the needs of the user.
Intel
Massively multicore processors will enable smarter computers that can infer our activities.
Intel recently demonstrated a new, low-power computer chip that will use as many as eight cores, or processing units. Expected in the second half of 2008, the new chip will increase the amount of data that a machine can process and enable more-realistic graphics. But Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is looking beyond eight-core chips and into the range of terascale computing, in which machines with tens or hundreds of cores perform trillions of operations every second. Chien is working with computer scientists at Intel and at universities around the world to find the best uses for these future machines.
Chien is speaking at the Emerging Technologies Conference today about Intel's exploratory research projects. Technology Review caught up with him beforehand to ask about the chip maker's research goals.
Technology Review: What are the major projects at Intel Research?
Andrew Chien: One of the things that we're very focused on is this idea of inference and understanding the world. The big idea is all about this question of whether inference and sensors are really the missing piece to make ubiquitous computing come to fruition. We can build small devices that fit into our pocket, but the things we're falling short on are inference, making the devices work together well, and making them interact with us in natural ways.
Another area of research is obviously terascale computing. This has dual benefits. One very important benefit is to create the computing ability that's going to power unbelievable applications, both in terms of visual representations, such as this idea of traditional virtual reality, and also in terms of inference. The ability for devices to understand the world around them and what their human owners care about is very exciting.
TR: Why would anyone want their gadgets to infer their behavior? Walk me through an example.
AC: One of the initial steps is to build systems that understand what we're doing and understand the importance of different activities in our lives. Now, more than ever, we're always connected. Imagine you have a phone that could be aware of when I get into a line at an airport. There's a difference about what you want to be interrupted with when you're being idle, standing in a line, [versus] when you're going through the security procedure. Imagine if the sensor detects your motion and other information from your environment, such as the Internet signal, and it has knowledge of your past behaviors, so it can actually figure out if it's crucial that the incoming phone call goes through. Is it your five-year-old who's upset, or is it a friend who you talk to all the time? Do you need to take that call right away? The intelligent system could be using sensors, analyzing speech, finding your mood, and determining your physical environment. Then it could decide how that notification came through and how it came through in that context.
TR: The idea that you have sensors that record your activities raises quite a few privacy concerns. How is Intel addressing that?
AC: One of the things Intel is driving hard is [figuring out] how to build platforms with integrity. That means that they are securable, and someone can't come in and take over your machines. There are also a lot of interesting questions about how much data you keep local, on your personal device, how much data you upload to the cloud, and which data you choose to destroy. It comes down to finding what people are comfortable with.
Chips that let errors happen, then correct them, use less power overall.
IBM's combination of hardware and software crunches financial data at an unprecedented rate.
Researchers have revealed details of China's latest homegrown microprocessor.
How about just making a processor that needs 1 or maybe 2 watts to operate? For any mobile gadget, battery life is what we're going to notice most.
I think that devices having the ability to sense the emotions and feelings of people is sick! It adds a new dimension in the field of technology. It could cause people to become to reliant on technology and people will become more like computers and computers more like people. People will lose the ability to show emotion and people will become like robots.
This is typical hype...we've seen it all before. What's still lacking is the scientific foundation for experiential learning from
free-running sensory datastreams. The advantage of symbols constructed from this type of face-value input is that the datum at the periphery are not codes that stand for something. The "meaning" of the input is vested solely in its pattern content (which is fully accessible), not hidden behind some coding scheme impressed on the lowest-level input data, for instance, ASCII input. The meaning of pre-coded input symbols is not accessible to the learner. Even when engineers begin appreciating the fundamental distinction between face-value data and coded data, in relation to systems trying to learn meaning from input, an awful lot of science is left to be done.
The 80% correct benchmark strikes me as absurdly out of touch with human levels of cognitive performance, where the correct sorting out of millions of experiences and new situations is taken for granted, implying a correctness level of 99.9999+ %.
Next time you struggle with a voice-recognition phone tree, consider the impact of engineering when built on top of faulty science.
I only have one thing to say.
I'm feeling much better now Dave, Dave ...
Everybody talking about privacy. Fine. That's truly an issue to address. Still, nobody seems to think about the fact that with all these (for the moment hypothetical) gadgets we actually pass on our decisions into the "hands" of these new cyberentities. I personally find it extremely annoying and would definitely shut down such features. Just think about Windows. XP is so "smart" that it warns the user when the HDD is (almost) full. Disabling that "brilliant" feature is not trivial. There might be users that find this a useful feature, but I'm not one of them. I want to be able to decide at any time what I want to do at any time. I am not a statistical figure. How can a machine decide what is best, if my human peers are at times unable to guess that? Or are machines getting smarter than humans? I seriously doubt that. I have the impression that we are creating a new god in front of which we prostrate.
Why there is no substantial invention in hardware?
Venturing into alternative means to increase the computing ability is better solution? No body is exploiting the optical computing ability in processor industry except few from Intel’s research team. Time has come now to look for alternative hardware materials over silicon. We are sticking to silicon and not deviating from electromagnetic signals. We are thinking about how to reduce the signal interference when wires run close to each other on the board. Without the change in the hardware material in computing we cannot continually boost the performance with the given material like Silicon. Go for optical devices and optical computing. Better to look into alternatives for faster communications. Initially there may not be many customers. But sure it will overcome all the bandwidth and speed problems for the current computing requirement. Then we can make the computers to behave like brain.
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Guest (genetech)
multi-core engineering & computer science
It would be interesting to know how much of the past 50 years of research in parallel computation is incorporated into current thinking on multicore designs. The chips are surely MIMD but how are tasks or instructions or threads apportioned between the cores? The wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_computing sheds some light on this, for starters.
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kwahoo
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Re: multi-core engineering & computer science
Actually, multicore chips are increasingly *SIMD*. Intel and AMD are both growing their SSE execution, and Larrabee is reputed to have 16-wide SIMD. Graphics processors are already very wide SIMD.
Now that being said, the trend seems to be toward indpendent "MIMD cores", each of which is SIMD. This is a nice way to get efficient execution for data-parallel portions while maintaining flexiblity for task parallelism.
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