Project Description

The data, applications and devices present in current personal computing environments are fragmented into a complex and hard-to-manage collection of information tools.   The variety of information representations used by these tools further hinders their effective interoperation.  The convergence in time of substantial need, substantial communication infrastructure, and high performance portable computing devices offers the opportunity to explore a better alternative.  We propose to develop a prototype of such an alternative that we refer to as location independent computing.   The Bifrost location independent computing project seeks to provide a uniform and comprehensive information access environment regardless of user location or computing device.  The core research issues of the project are (1) mobility management (how we move data and threads to support user and device mobility), (2) data management (how we represent, access, update, and protect information), (3) application management (how we provide a system-wide common applications base), and (4) user interface design (how we provide a common user interface across all applications).

We propose to design, implement, deploy and evaluate a two-campus prototype of the Bifrost location independent computing system. The Bifrost design represents a new paradigm for information access and manipulation.  We propose to integrate the way in which information is managed with the way in which the applications that access this information are managed.  One of the design principles of Bifrost is that application functionality should be consistent across all platforms, including portable computing devices.  This approach is in stark contrast to the “stripped down operating system plus stripped down applications plus limited data set” computing model currently associated with most hand-held computing devices.  The Bifrost design incorporates a user interface that makes complex application functionality accessible even when  both memory and screen resolution are limited.

A second Bifrost design principle is the idea that users should to the extent possible experience a common user interface across all applications.  While it is not our goal to develop a large suite of applications, we intend to provide a rich, common set of API extensions for user interaction with their information.  A key characteristic of these API extensions will be user-centric data representation.  The way users think about data associations, not the way files happened to be created in some file system, will determine how different pieces of data are associated.  These associations will be represented in Bifrost by affinity relationships maintained by the runtime system.  The security of users’ data is another critical design issue for Bifrost.  In order to provide for this security Bifrost ensures that private user data is encrypted when sent over a network connection susceptible to eavesdropping attack, and that private user data is also encrypted when stored on a device that is subject to theft or compromise.  

This research is sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

Last updated 5/23/2001 by Evan Speight.