NEWSThe COSMOS Conjecture

GVU Center Brown Bag: Gregory D. Abowd - "The COSMOS Conjecture: Dreaming and Doing in a Post-Moore's Law Era"

Abstract:

Most of us think of Moore's Law as a trend in which computers will dramatically shrink in size and cost over time. While that is not exactly what Gordon Moore put forth as an empirical observation of the shrinking cost of the transistor, it is nonetheless how we designers of interactive technology think of it. This naive, but powerful, interpretation causes us to think about the future in a particular, and I would argue, narrow way. Plenty of mounting evidence reveals that we are past the era of Moore’s Law, and I will argue that this is a good thing. Why? Because it is going to force us to think about computing in an alternative, possibly more impactful, way. A team of colleagues from around Georgia Tech envisions a new form of computing artifact, a computational skin. This “skin” is manufactured at scale as a computationally-enabled, self-sustaining material. The COSMOS (Computational Skin for Multi-Object Systems) project brings together expertise in materials, manufacturing, computing, electrical engineering and design to explore the challenges of this exciting post-Moore’s Law era of computing. This talk will motivate the vision for COSMOS and explore some of the early ideas of this computer for the coming decades, a more extreme and literal interpretation of Weiser’s vision for the computer of the 21st century.