OXYGEN Project by MIT

Vision

For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. They have been difficult to use. They have required us to interact with them on their terms, speaking their languages and manipulating their keyboards or mice. They have not been aware of our needs or even of whether we were in the room with them. Virtual reality only makes matters worse: with it, we do not simply serve computers, but also live in a reality they create.

In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter the human world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more while doing less. We will not need to carry our own devices around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will adopt our information personalities. They will respect our desires for privacy and security. We won't have to type, click, or learn new computer jargon. Instead, we'll communicate naturally, using speech and gestures that describe our intent ("send this to Hari" or "print that picture on the nearest color printer"), and leave it to the computer to carry out our will.

New systems will boost our productivity. They will help us automate repetitive human tasks, control a wealth of physical devices in the environment, find the information we need (when we need it, without forcing our eyes to examine thousands of search-engine hits), and enable us to work together with other people through space and time.

Challenges
To support highly dynamic and varied human activities, the Oxygen system must master many technical challenges. It must be

• pervasive—it must be everywhere, with every portal reaching into the same information base;
• embedded—it must live in our world, sensing and affecting it;
• nomadic—it must allow users and computations to move around freely, according to their needs;
• adaptable—it must provide flexibility and spontaneity, in response to changes in user requirements and operating conditions;
• powerful, yet efficient—it must free itself from constraints imposed by bounded hardware resources, addressing instead system constraints imposed by user demands and available power or communication bandwidth;
• intentional—it must enable people to name services and software objects by intent, for example, "the nearest printer," as opposed to by address;
• eternal—it must never shut down or reboot; components may come and go in response to demand, errors, and upgrades, but Oxygen as a whole must be available all the time.

Approach
Oxygen enables pervasive, human-centered computing through a combination of specific user and system technologies. Oxygen's user technologies directly address human needs. Speech and vision technologies enable us to communicate with Oxygen as if we're interacting with another person, saving much time and effort. Automation, individualized knowledge access, and collaboration technologies help us perform a wide variety of tasks that we want to do in the ways we like to do them.

Oxygen's device, network, and software technologies dramatically extend our range by delivering user technologies to us at home, at work or on the go. Computational devices, called Enviro21s (E21s), embedded in our homes, offices, and cars sense and affect our immediate environment. Handheld devices, called Handy21s (H21s), empower us to communicate and compute no matter where we are. Dynamic, self-configuring networks (N21s) help our machines locate each other as well as the people, services, and resources we want to reach. Software that adapts to changes in the environment or in user requirements (O2S) help us do what we want when we want to do it.

Oxygen device technologies
Devices in Oxygen supply power for computation, communication, and perception in much the same way that batteries and wall outlets supply power for electrical appliances. Both mobile and stationary devices are universal communication and computation appliances. They are also anonymous: they do not store configurations that are customized to any particular user. As for batteries and power outlets, the primary difference between them lies in the amount of energy they supply.

Collections of embedded devices, called E21s, create intelligent spaces inside offices, buildings, homes, and vehicles. E21s provide large amounts of embedded computation, as well as interfaces to camera and microphone arrays, large area displays, and other devices. Users communicate naturally in the spaces created by the E21s, using speech and vision, without being aware of any particular point of interaction.

Handheld devices, called H21s, provide mobile access points for users both within and without the intelligent spaces controlled by E21s. H21s accept speech and visual input, and they can reconfigure themselves to support multiple communication protocols or to perform a wide variety of useful functions (e.g., to serve as cellular phones, beepers, radios, televisions, geographical positioning systems, cameras, or personal digital assistants). H21s can conserve power by offloading communication and computation onto nearby E21s.

Initial prototypes for the Oxygen device technologies are based on commodity hardware. Eventually, the device technologies will use Raw computational fabrics to increase performance for streaming computations and to make more efficient use of power.

Oxygen network technologies
Networks, called N21s, connect dynamically changing configurations of self-identifying mobile and stationary devices to form collaborative regions. N21s support multiple communication protocols for low-power point-to-point, building-wide, and campus-wide communication. N21s also provide completely decentralized mechanisms for naming, location and resource discovery, and secure information access.

Oxygen software technologies
The Oxygen software environment is built to support change, which is inevitable if Oxygen is to provide a system that is adaptable, let alone eternal. Change is occasioned by anonymous devices customizing to users, by explicit user requests, by the needs of applications and their components, by current operating conditions, by the availability of new software and upgrades, by failures, or by any number of other causes. Oxygen's software architecture relies on control and planning abstractions that provide mechanisms for change, on specifications that support putting these mechanisms to use, and on persistent object stores with transactional semantics to provide operational support for change.

Oxygen perceptual technologies
Speech and vision, rather than keyboards and mice, provide the main modes of interaction in Oxygen. Multimodal integration increases the effectiveness of these perceptual technologies, for example, by using vision to augment speech understanding by recognizing facial expressions, lip movement, and gaze. Perceptual technologies are part of the core of Oxygen, not just afterthoughts or interfaces to separate applications. Oxygen applications can tailor "lite" versions of these technologies quickly to make human-machine interaction easy and natural. Graceful interdomain context switching supports seamless integration of applications.

Oxygen user technologies
Several user technologies harness Oxygen's massive computational, communication, and perceptual resources. They both exploit the capacity of Oxygen's system technologies for change in support of users, and they help provide Oxygen's system technologies with that capacity. Oxygen user technologies include:

• Automation technologies, which offer natural, easy-to-use, customizable, and adaptive mechanisms for automating and tuning repetitive information and control tasks. For example, they allow users to create scripts that control devices such as doors or heating systems according to their tastes.

• Collaboration technologies, which enable the formation of spontaneous collaborative regions that accommodate the needs of highly mobile people and computations. They also provide support for recording and archiving speech and video fragments from meetings, and for linking these fragments to issues, summaries, keywords, and annotations.

• Knowledge access technologies, which offer greatly improved access to information, customized to the needs of people, applications, and software systems. They allow users to access their own knowledge bases, the knowledge bases of friends and associates, and those on the web. They facilitate this access through semantic connection nets.

Applications
The following scenarios illustrate how Oxygen's integrated technologies make it easier for people to do more by doing less, wherever they may be.

Business conference
Hélène calls Ralph in New York from their company's home office in Paris. Ralph's E21, connected to his phone, recognizes Hélène's telephone number; it answers in her native French, reports that Ralph is away on vacation, and asks if her call is urgent. The E21's multilingual speech and automation systems, which Ralph has scripted to handle urgent calls from people such as Hélène, recognize the word "décisif" in Hélène's reply and transfer the call to Ralph's H21 in his hotel. When Ralph speaks with Hélène, he decides to bring George, now at home in London, into the conversation.

All three decide to meet next week in Paris. Conversing with their E21s, they ask their automated calendars to compare their schedules and check the availability of flights from New York and London to Paris. Next Tuesday at 11am looks good. All three say "OK," and their automation systems make the necessary reservations.

Ralph and George arrive at Paris headquarters. At the front desk, they pick up H21s, which recognize their faces and connect to their E21s in New York and London. Ralph asks his H21 where they can find Hélène. It tells them she's across the street, and it provides an indoor/outdoor navigation system to guide them to her. George asks his H21 for "last week's technical drawings," which he forgot to bring. The H21 finds and fetches the drawings just as they meet Hélène.

Guardian Angel
Jane and her husband Tom live in suburban Boston and cherish their independence. As they have advanced in age, they have acquired a growing number of devices and appliances, which they have connected to their E21. They no longer miss calls or visitors because they cannot get to the telephone or door in time; microphones and speakers in the walls enable them to answer either at any time. Sensors and actuators in the bathroom make sure that the bathtub does not overflow and that the water temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. Their automated knowledge system keeps track of which television programs they have enjoyed and alerts them when similar programs will be shown.

Just before their children moved away from the area, Jane and Tom enhanced their H21 to provide them with more help. Tom uses the system now to jog his memory by asking simple questions, such as "Did I take my medicine today?" or "Where did I put my glasses?" The E21's vision system, using cameras in the walls, recognizes and records patterns in Tom's motion. When Tom visits his doctor, he can bring along the vision system's records to see if there are changes in his gait that might indicate the onset of medical problems. Jane and Tom can also set up the vision system to contact medical personnel in case one of them falls down when alone. By delivering these ongoing services, the E21 affords peace of mind to both parents and children.

Oxygen today
Oxygen technologies are entering our everyday lives. Following are some of the technologies being tested at MIT and by the Oxygen industry partners.

Oxygen device technologies
A prototype H21 is equipped with a microphone, speaker, camera, accelerometer, and display for use with perceptual interfaces. RAW and Scale expose hardware to compilers, which optimize the use of circuitry and power. StreamIt provides a language and optimizing compiler for streaming applications.

Oxygen network technologies
The Cricket location support system provides an indoor analog of GPS. The Intentional Naming System (INS) provides resource discovery based on what services do, rather than on where they are located. The Self-Certifying (SFS) and Cooperative (CFS) File Systems provide secure access to data over untrusted networks without requiring centralized control.

Trusted software proxies provide secure, private, and efficient access to networked and mobile devices and people. Decentralization in Oxygen aids privacy: users can locate what they need without having to reveal their own location.

Oxygen software technologies
GOALS is an architecture that enables software to adapt to changes in user locations and needs, respond both to component failures and newly available resources, and maintain continuity of service as the set of available resources evolves. GOALS is motivated, in part, by experience gained with MetaGlue, a robust architecture for software agents.

Oxygen perceptual technologies
Multimodal systems enhance recognition of both speech and vision. Multilingual systems support dialog among participants speaking different languages. The SpeechBuilder utility supports development of spoken interfaces. Person tracking, face, gaze, and gesture recognition utilities support development of visual interfaces. Systems that understand sketching on whiteboards provide more natural interfaces to traditional software packages.

Oxygen user technologies
Haystack and the Semantic Web support personalized information management and collaboration through metadata management and manipulation. ASSIST helps extract design rationales from simple sketches.

The Intelligent Room is a highly interactive environment that uses embedded computation to observe and participate in normal, everyday events, such as collaborative meetings.

True innovation in Oxygen comes from MIT students, researchers, and others using Oxygen technologies and systems for their daily work. Hence Project Oxygen is building a system to use, and using it to build

Global smartphone users will cross the 6 billion mark by 2020, says Baidu Inc

With the growth of telecom industry, the number of smartphone users has increased significantly and by 2020, there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users worldwide, says a survey.
Conducted by leading Chinese language Internet search provider Baidu Inc, it said 60 per cent people use smartphones as a communication tool while 23 per cent use it as a companion.
The remaining 8 per cent use it as a social media tool and 9 per cent people treat it as an entertainment device, according to the survey based on usage, trends and problems of smartphone users in 2015.
The age group of 20 and below use their smartphones for music and entertainment, whereas the smartphone seems to be an inseparable companion for the age group of 20 to 29.
In terms of number of apps installed, it said nearly 40 per cent of the users surveyed worldwide installed 21-50 apps on their phone.
In Asia, 6 out of 100 people have 21-50 apps installed on their smartphones whereas 58 out of 100 people have less than 20 apps.

What is Domain Authority and How to Improve It Gradually?

Domain Authority is a website ranking score in a search engines developed by Moz (a SEO software company). So, basically it determines which website will rank higher in search engines like Google.
Its measured on a 100-point scale, means 1 being worst and 100 being the best. SaveDelete.com’s Domain Authority is 40.
To check your website’s Domain Authority you can use Open Site Explorer and MozBar (a toolbar for browsers).

How to Improve your Domain Authority?

Moz has 40+ factors to determine authority of a website and working on these factors will certainly improve your domain authority score.
These factors include:

• Count of Backlinks.
• MozRank.
• MozTrust.
• Other unknown factors.

The most important factor is gaining high quality backlinks, and your website domain authority will improve. As I have discussed before, getting links from other domains is not that easy and you have to work hard to gain them.
Either you hire an SEO company (high risk and expensive) or you can do content marketing (no risk and takes time).

My advice would be to do content marketing and don’t spend on those whacky SEO companies that guarantees you a higher rank in few months. SEO is all about taking time to build your content and backlinks, the more good content you make the higher the probability of people linking it themselves.
Now, we know what is domain authority and how to improve your domain authority it’s time to learn about content marketing.
Domain Authority is sure a good metrics developed by Moz, but still everything is being done to gain higher position in search engines.

Govt will consider tweaking startup policy, says Jayant Sinha: Report

The government is open to tweaking its startup policy as it aims to nurture indigenous innovation and create new avenues of providing employment, minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha said, according to this report.
The report quotes Sinha saying that as policy making is a dynamic process, it can’t be stopped. He said if a problem is brought to their notice, they can fix it.
Sinha also stressed on the importance of three vectors that would enable the transformation of India — namely Internet, mobile and green technology, and transportation. He explained that all of them are interlinked and technology is the secret sauce for India’s transformation. 
After announcing the ‘Startup India, Stand Up’ initiative to boost startups in India, PM Narendra Modi set the ball rolling with the startup action plan last month. He released a 30-page action plan that makes the journey smoother for startups and helps them grow.
The industry welcomed the initiative but faced criticism too for not having enough insights into the industry and lack of clarity. The Financial Express points out the instance of the clause that says the government would exempt startups from paying income tax for first three years, while critics say no startup actually makes money in the first three years so there’s no question of paying taxes.
To look at some other clauses mentioned in the policy, they are with respect to compliance and patent protection. For instance, startups can self-certify their compliance with environment and labour laws and there would be no inspection for three years.
For patent protection, the government would set up a panel of legal facilitators that would help file patents. It would also make the process of filing for patents easier and transparent.
The government also plans to relax registration procedures for startups. Startups will get 90 days open window to close their businesses in case of failure. A fund of Rs 10,000 crore is planned for the growth and development of the startups. It will be an infusion of Rs 2,500 crore a year. In case a start-up is looking to shut down operations, then a person in charge of the company will be appointed and the assets of the company will be liquidated and its creditors paid within six months.

Backlink Term in SEO and Blogging?

Backlink is a term vastly used in search engine optimization (SEO). Its very important and hence it can be stated as bread and butter of bloggers. A Backlink is just another incoming link to a webpage. When a site A, links to a site B, the site B can say I have a backlink from site A. Simple isn’t it.
Live Example – When I link a website from findyouvision.blogspot.com like this -> Wikipedia, Wikipedia will get a backlink from me.
There are two types of Backlinks:

1. Nofollow
2. Do-follow

Nofollow backlink doesn’t pass the search engine juice, means it will not help in search rankings. While a Do-follow backlink will pass the search engine juice.
To rank higher on Google, Bing and other search engines backlinks are needed, Do-follow backlinks are therefore very essential to rank your site higher in search engine results.
In SEO and Blogging, backlinks are essential as they decide who stays at top of search engine results.
No website in today’s world will give you a Dofollow link, unless they are kind. Therefore SEO companies get hired as they provide Dofollow link at a certain cost. But, one should be aware of spam or low quality links. A link from a good website, that has a domain authority are considered as high quality backlink.
These quality links can really boost your search engine traffic and, traffic means you can earn money through blogging.
All of this may sound easy, but it isn’t building backlinks is a serious business.
2016 is all about blogging and one should try make money through blogging, as its a peice of cake, you don’t have any boss on your head, you don’t have to follow schedules, you can make money even from your home.

• Advantages of Blogging
• Start a money making website with bluehost hosting
• Several other Articles on Blogging

Do let us know your thoughts about blogging and earning money through a blog.

Panasonic has announced the launch of P66 mega with support for 21 language

Panasonic has announced the launch of P66 Mega, its newest P-Series smartphone, which supports 21 Indian languages. The smartphone is priced at Rs 7,990, the P66 Mega comes equipped with connectivity options such as Bluetooth, GPS and dual SIM 3G and 2G.
Powered by a 3200mAh battery, the device runs on Android Lollipop 5.1 and a 1.3 GHz Quad Core processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal memory – expandable to 32GB, the company said in a statement.
The 8MP rear camera and 5MP front camera are complemented by a 12.7 cm HD IPS display. On the software front we get Android 5.1 Lollipop with Panasonic Icon UI on top.
“Digital India is about all about bridging the digital divide through technology and connecting people to the digital world in their own language. The growing numbers of mobile internet users in India is proof of the digital aspirations of Indians today,” Pankaj Rana, business head – mobility division, Panasonic India, said while announcing the launch of the device.
“By deploying a multi-language portfolio in our latest device, Panasonic seeks to connect Indians through smartphone technology to the world of opportunities in mobile banking, online shopping, social networking and virtual entertainment,” he added.
The Panasonic P66 Mega will be available in Electric Blue, Rose Gold, and Russet Brown colour variants. The company had recently launched the security-oriented smartphone, the Eluga Mark, priced at Rs 11,990. The Eluga Mark runs Android 5.1 Lollipop OS and comes powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon octa-core processor and 2GB RAM with the highlight being the fingerprint reader.

Google computers can qualify as driver ....

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet, of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week.
Google’s self-driving car unit on Nov. 12 submitted a proposed design for a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver,” the letter to Google from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh said.
“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” NHTSA’s letter said.
“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”
Major automakers and technology companies such as Google are racing to develop and sell vehicles that can drive themselves at least part of the time.
All participants in the autonomous driving race complain that state and federal safety rules are impeding testing and eventual deployment of such vehicles. California has proposed draft rules requiring steering wheels and a licensed driver in all self-driving cars.
Karl Brauer, senior analyst for the Kelley Blue Book automotive research firm, said there were still significant legal questions surrounding autonomous vehicles.
But if “NHTSA is prepared to name artificial intelligence as a viable alternative to human-controlled vehicles, it could substantially streamline the process of putting autonomous vehicles on the road,” he said.
If the car’s computer is the driver for legal purposes, then it clears the way for Google or automakers to design vehicle systems that communicate directly with the vehicle’s artificial pilot.
In its response to Google, the federal agency offered its most comprehensive map yet of the legal obstacles to putting fully autonomous vehicles on the road. It noted existing regulations requiring some auto safety equipment can not be waived immediately, including requirements for braking systems activated by foot control.
“The next question is whether and how Google could certify that the (self-driving system) meets a standard developed and designed to apply to a vehicle with a human driver,” NHTSA said.
Google is “still evaluating” NHTSA’s lengthy response, a company spokesperson said on Tuesday. Google executives have said they would likely partner with established automakers to build self-driving cars.
WORRIES ABOUT PEOPLE UNDERMINING SAFETY
Google told NHTSA that the real danger is having auto safety features that could tempt humans to try to take control.
Google “expresses concern that providing human occupants of the vehicle with mechanisms to control things like steering, acceleration, braking… could be detrimental to safety because the human occupants could attempt to override the (self-driving system’s) decisions,” the NHTSA letter stated.
NHTSA’s Hemmersbaugh said federal regulations requiring equipment like steering wheels and brake pedals would have to be formally rewritten before Google could offer cars without those features.
For example, current federal rules require alerts on dashboards if tire pressure runs low. NHTSA said a test would need to be created that shows the vehicle computer is informed of the problem. NHTSA raised the question of whether humans in the vehicles should also be made aware.
In January, NHTSA said it may waive some vehicle safety rules to allow more driverless cars to operate on U.S. roads as part of a broader effort to speed up development of self-driving vehicles.
NHTSA said then it would write guidelines for self-driving cars within six months. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the administration may seek new legal authority to allow deployment of autonomous vehicles “in large numbers,” when they are deemed safe, the department said