Scott sent me a link to a story on the public trials of the DARPA "Smart Dust" project that's been floating around for the last four years.
This is the key idea: "By self-organizing into a sensor network, smart dust would filter raw data for relevance before relaying only the important findings to central command."
In other words, it's a bunch of generic sensor modules that link to form--ant-colony-like--a single sensory entity that uses heurists about data goodness to extract knowledge from a lot of randomly collected data. I see several interesting things here:
- Self-organization (Using TinyOS)
- Small sensors (what's important to sense? how do you sense it?)
- Relevance filtering (how do you pull knowledge out? How do you know what's important?)
The dystopian possibilities are obvious and ominous, but I think that interesting output is possible for home networks without it becoming Demon Seed.
