Intel's 'people sciences' bringing human touch to tech platforms

Smartphones with people smarts
Intel also showed three concept designs for touchscreen-equipped smartphones based on its Atom processor. The smallest is similar to a T-Mobile Android but is slimmer. A midsized model has a slide-out second touchscreen that could be used for text messaging, for example, while a movie or other content ran on the phone's larger, main screen.

The largest model is bigger than an iPhone but smaller that a Kindle, and slimmer than both. A desktop dock allows this enterprise-caliber mobile Internet device (MID) to sync with a PC.

"Our largest MID is focused more on the enterprise or productivity space," said John Cross Neumann, an industrial designer at PaPR. "Our thought is that this would be a device similar to a BlackBerry that you would use throughout the day at your desk and [at] meetings."

The enterprise MID would be too big to fit in your pocket but small enough to carry with you throughout the day, much as you might carry a clipboard. The larger screen, about the size of the one on Sony's e-reader, could be laid or propped up on a desk and comfortably read by several people at once, letting a group view a presentation together at a meeting, for example.

A wearable camera accessory, with a clip that can be attached to the user's clothing, works with all three of the concept designs and can stream video wirelessly to the MID platforms. Thus, "you could passively capture events without removing yourself from the experience," said Neumann.

By intelligently categorizing the resultant video using the smart pattern recognition algorithms developed by Beckwith's group, Intel hopes eventually to permit users to locate video clips just by searching by image. For example, the user might search for all clips containing "John," whose image would have been stored in the address book to enable automatic pattern matching as the video is streamed in from the phone camera, using the pattern recognition routines created for the envisioned pocket supercomputer.