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Everyday robotics, highways with smarts on road ahead

	KOJI SASAHARA / AP Sony's AIBO pet robots, Macaron, left, and Latte, are designed to look like a cuddly cross between a dog and a bear.
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Personal Technology asked Ed Lazowska, holder of the University of Washington Bill & Melinda Gates chair in computer science and engineering, to glimpse into the coming 10 years. Here are his thoughts:

Predicting the future is fraught with peril.

IBM's Tom Watson once said: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corp. said: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

And although there's no historical evidence to support it, Bill Gates is often cited as having said: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

But here are some things I'd bet the farm on:

Speech recognition and natural-language processing: After 50 years of promises, these technologies are ready for prime time. Natural-language processing, for example, may not yet be capable of translating flawlessly from English to Italian and back again, but it is fully capable of categorizing news articles by topic and of enabling spell-checkers to detect semantic errors.
 

Augmented cognition: A project at the University of Washington, recently demonstrated on Capitol Hill, involves cognitive assistance for Alzheimer's patients based on recognizing the intention or plan of the individual. Even those of us without cognitive disabilities are facing an unmanageable onslaught of information we need help managing.

Robotics: Thanks to Hollywood, our expectations are really high. Today, you mainly see stunts: Sony AIBO dogs playing soccer, and autonomous vehicles trying unsuccessfully to navigate 140 miles through the California desert. But the underlying technology today is incredible, and it's just about ready for prime time. Airplanes can land themselves. Consumer Reports won't let you buy a car without stability control.

Search and understanding: As great as Google is, we haven't scratched the surface. We will soon see massive, Web-based extraction of information, arranged in a form to support question answering. And we will also see machine reasoning and understanding. Paul Allen's Halo project (involving development of computers with powers to reason) has succeeded in capturing the knowledge of college chemistry at a level sufficient to pass the Advanced Placement examination!

Huge networks of self-configuring wireless sensors: We will equip our civilian infrastructure (roads, bridges, buildings) to detect impending failures. We will have intelligent homes for energy conservation, health monitoring, security or finding your keys. RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags will identify every object in our environment. Intelligent highways will optimize traffic flow. A new form of computational science will be sensor-based — for example, UW's Neptune project to instrument the Juan de Fuca plate.

Synthetic biology: We will design and manufacture specific biological structures — vaccines, chemical sensors, etc. — using approaches identical to those used for integrated circuit design.

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