MAVERICKS: Reddy says the lab prides itself on being "a little rebellious"
Its technology will preserve an entire life on one tiny hard drive
Carnegie Mellon University has had the reputation of being something of a Young Turk among major research labs. That has even
become a point of pride. "We've always been a little rebellious," says D. Raj Reddy, dean of CMU'S School of Computer Science.
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"It comes from [Herbert A.] Simon and [Allen] Newell," computerscience professors who pioneered artificial intelligence. "They stuck their necks out in the 1950s to insist that the real importance of computers would not be conventional number crunching"-but augmenting human creativity and intelligence.
MAVERICKS: Reddy says the lab prides itself on being "a little rebellious"
Now, CMU'S computerniks are talking about throwing in immortality as a bonus. Not biological immortalitythe virtual variety. It
will take the form of a huge multimedia database with minutebyminute details of your entire life, all stored on a hard drive the size
of a quarter. "Your greatgreatgrandchildren will be able to ask your database about your life and times," Reddy says. Or students
will be able to quiz a synthetic Einstein that understands what the original Albert wrote. CMU'S new Entertainment Technology
Center recently unveiled a virtualEinstein prototype that can, within fairly severe limits, answer spoken questions about Einstein's
theory of relativity. It was built to preview coming attractions in interactive entertainment.
Advances in art, science, and philosophy depend on preserving mankind's knowledge so others can ponder it. To date, it has been
the thoughts mainly of the famous and wealthy that have been preserved. Tomorrow, anything any human creates or experiences
could be captured automatically, organized, and made available to anyone else.
At the rate harddrive prices are plummeting, "storing all your visual experiences during your 5,840 waking hours per year,
including all your creative expressions, will soon cost less than $1,000," predicts Dan R. Olsen Jr., director of CMU'S new Human
Computer Interaction Institute. And 15 years from now, storage will cost pennies a year, he says: $100 per terabyte, or
$50 for enough space to hold 100 years of someone's life. IBM already has a prototype hard drive no bigger than a coin that stores
100 megabytes and is expected to hit 100 gigabytes.
This will precipitate a deluge of information. To cope with it, CMU'S Automated Learning & Discovery Center is working on a
smart searchandedit engine that can handle symbols encapsulating vision, voice, and text information. "It should be ready in 5 to
10 years," says center director Tom Mitchell.
SILICON DREAM. CMU'S Turks also sense that Email's popularity signals the beginning of a fundamental shift away from
reliance on facetoface contacts. So a new Language Technology Institute has set its sights on intelligent multimedia systems for
putting texture back into disembodied humantohuman communications. processor that edits intonations as well as words.
On the hardware side, Reddy is pushing for fresh approaches to making silicon more like us. People recognize images and speech
in a snap, but that is a major chore for computers. Bridging this gap, so computers can augment human intelligence, is the task of
the new Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
"Every man, woman, and child will soon be using information technology [IT] as an integral part of their daily lives," Reddy says.
"So we're spending the intellectual capital to understand how to make IT like driving a car. Most people drive, yet they don't care
much about how the engine works. Whereas 90 years ago, you had to be your own mechanic."
By Otis Port in Pittsburgh