Specks has the potential to change computing

Ever thought of how to monitor your marketing or sales team's movements, sometimes even without their noticing it?

Just spray a few specks -- or 'speckled' -- on the bodies of the members of the team and you can know what they are doing and where they are.

Doctors who want to closely monitor the progress of their patients who have undergone surgeries, can also just spray some specks and on their cardiograph screens will appear data related to the patient's pulse rate, blood pressure and what not.

Tired of calling your attendant in a bar and restaurant whenever you need to refill your wineglass or food plate, do the same (i.e spray the speckled) on the plate or glass, so that the waiter will automatically know about the status of your glass or plate.

By now, you must be wondering what these specks or speckled are. To know more, meet D K Arvind, director of the Scotland based Speckled Consortium, who talks passionately about the technology, which is still under evolution and which, he claims, will turn everyday objects into interfaces for computers.

The consortium consists of researchers drawn from five universities in the UK and is co-ordinated by Scotland based University of Edinburgh. The objective of the consortium is to encapsulate sensing, processing and wireless networking capabilities in a cubic millimetre of semiconductor called a speck.

Says Arvind, "in future, computing will be unobtrusive, ubiquitous and pervasive and dumb objects also will have computing power with the help of specks.

Thousands of specks will be able to form programmables networks called Specknets, which are intended to form the basis for future computing applications."

Applications of specknets include in healthcare, tangible interfaces between objects and computational resources, and environmental sensing. Arvind expects the prototype of Specknet to be released within the next three years.

The consortium was granted an initial aid of £1.35 million by the Scotland government to work on the four-year time-bound project.

Currently a 26 team consisting of professors, researchers and students is working on the project since October 2003.

The Scottish government has also put in a proposal to grant another £3 million for the project in future, Arvind said.

"Our objective is to provide ubiquitous computing in an inexpensive way and make people buy these specks by weight as a measurement and not at exorbitant prices," he added.

The consortium invites the Indian IT companies to participate in the research and reap benefits for the IP developed by them. Already some Indian IT majors have evinced interest to work with us, Arvind said declining to reveal the names.