[Brian]

In a recent User Thought submitted to Palm Addicts, I talked about how our PDAs haven't yet evolved to bring us intelligent features like those of the Apple Newton MessagePad from almost 10 years ago. The Apple Knowledge Navigator (Quicktime Movie), while only a concept, was given as an example of a truly intelligent handheld that has yet to materialize. While the term "Personal Digital Assistant" might evoke images of a handheld that can take an active role in organizing our lives, currently it's the user who is left to do all of the real thinking and work. Where is the intelligence, and why is my PDA still nothing more than a glamorized digital day planner in many regards?

As Evan Light at Palm Addicts points out in a recent Associate Writer Thought, we're starting to see more "smart" features and applications for our smartphones and PDAs, and the upcoming Treo 700w has one example - a "friendly SMS":

"The 700w boasts a powerful and yet simple feature: the ability to, in a small series of button presses, allow you to ignore a call and SMS the caller that you're busy but will get back to them."

While this is going in the right direction, we should expect and demand even more intelligent features in the future. How, when, and where will intelligence come into play, and who will be the innovator to bring it to us? Here are a couple of areas where improvements can and will be made, and I'll discuss more in a future article.

Putting everything into context

Context is an important and powerful concept in human-computer interaction, as it is in our social interaction and perception of the world. Who, what, where, why, when, and how are all important pieces of "metadata" that help us put information and events in the proper context. Software applications and services that have context awareness operate using information about context and react accordingly. The goal is to create a computing environment that is much more seamless, convenient, relevant, and intuitive for the user.

A recent article at EContentMag.com about the MIT Media Lab's Reality Mining Project provides a glimpse at how patterns and context can be used to make more intelligent applications for our smartphones and PDAs that predict our behavior and react accordingly:

"If your cell phone knew what you were going to do at two o'clock, would that change how you planned your day? If your cell phone "predicted" correctly where you would be at a particular time of the week, how would you feel? No longer hypothetical situations, the Reality Mining experiment answers these questions."

GPS receivers will soon become a common feature in handhelds and smartphones, but mapping, navigation, or "location aware" advertisements won't be the killer applications. Where you go on a daily basis, and what you do while you are there as well as everywhere in between are important pieces of contextual information that can be used in intelligent applications. It would be nice to have a device recognize where you are, what your patterns of usage are, and then present information in a more meaningful way and in the proper context. What applications do you use most often at home, and when do you use them? What do you do in the morning before work, when you get home, or on weekends when you don't work? How could his information be used?

The article about MIT's Reality Mining project provides a few hints.

"According to data collected by Eagle and his staff, 35% of the subjects used their phone's clock application regularly, yet opening the clock application on the phone involved 10 keystrokes. The data showed that people who used the phone's clock application used it at their homes rather than at work."

Here are some other examples - use them as a guide and then use your own imagination about other possible scenarios.

• If you have a smartphone and a regular landline, it would be nice to have an option to automatically forward incoming calls to your landline while you're home. It would also be convenient if your device would automatically present you with a to-do list of tasks and reminders that you need when you get home, and switch to a special launcher screen with your "home" applications. If you are one of those people who use the clock application regularly at home, it would be nice if a large clock was always displayed on the screen in the launcher while in your home.
• In the morning when you wake up, Traffic for Treo could automatically check the traffic conditions of your regular route to work and sound an alert if you needed to leave earlier due to traffic congestion. On Saturdays and Sundays - days that you don't usually work - Traffic for Treo wouldn't launch automatically, but you could schedule an exception if you plan on going in.
• When you walk into a movie theater or when there's an entry in your calendar that you're going to a Blue Man Group show, the ringer on your phone should automatically change to vibrate mode.
• When you arrive at the office, your device would automatically switch the ringer to vibrate mode and forward important calls to the phone on your desk. You could have a list of important calls and to-dos presented to you on a special today screen to remind you of what needed to get done that day. If you check certain stock prices regularly at work instead of the clock application, the launcher screen could display the stock prices of your favorite ticker symbols.
• Combine location and context awareness with an application like HandyShopper, and you could create shopping lists for different stores that would pop up whenever you went to those stores, or as reminders the next time you drove near them, say on the way home from work. If your spouse's birthday or your wedding anniversary is approaching, you will get reminded and notified when you are in or near stores for which gift shopping lists have been made.
• Who do you call most often, when do you call them, and from where? Are they a friend, family member, or business contact? This information could automatically generate custom "favorite numbers" lists that change when you're at home, in your car, or at work depending on the time of day and the day of the week.
• If your device has multiple wireless radios, and you are constantly moving in between different wireless networks, your device should detect which network it should join and which network services and applications should be launched, depending on when and where you are, and what you'll be doing.

How?

Intelligent features like those in the Newton's "Intelligent Assistance Architecture" as well as the examples mentioned above will come through software that can accurately recognize patterns, make predictions, and understand context. It just so happens that Jeff Hawkins, one of the minds behind the original Palm Pilot, the Handspring Treo, and who no doubt has a hand in Palm's "third business", is interested in understanding human intelligence and has created a software company called Numenta. His latest startup, which was also co-founded by Donna Dubinsky, is working to commercialize and license technology with "real intelligence" based on the research going on at the
Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (RCTN). The RCTN was formerly the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), a research institute founded by and based on the theories of none other than Jeff Hawkins as discussed in his book On Intelligence. He talked about Numenta's products during the same interview in which he first revealed a secret "third business" at Palm:

"Our products are a set of tools that allow you to configure these memory systems, which we call HTM, hierarchical temporal memory. You can interface them with a thing like a camera or a microphone or sonar and it learns about its environment in the same way you learned about your environment when you were a child. It can model the environment, recognize things in it and make predictions about the future. What we're building is actually a platform. It's like a new type of operating system. It's a platform on which people can use our tools to create new applications for solving different types of problems."

As Palm's Chief Technology Officer and the co-founder of Numenta, Jeff Hawkins splits his time between the two companies, a fitting arrangement when you consider his passion for both handheld computing and creating intelligent machines. If his two passions don't influence one another and Jeff Hawkins doesn't plan on combining the two - handheld computers and intelligence machines - I would be extremely surprised and disappointed. Will this mean that Palm could become a licensee of Numenta Technology at some point in the future and Palm's mobile computing products will become much more intelligent? Once Numenta's technology becomes ready for commercialization, it would be logical for Palm to become a licensee. I can't predict the future, so only time will tell. In the meantime, expect more context aware applications, like the Treo 700w's "friendly SMS", to be added to Palm's products.

What intelligent features would you like to see for your PDA or smartphone? Please post your thoughts and ideas about intelligent handhelds.

Related: Palm's "Secret Third Business" isn't the LifeDrive