By Jon Van,Chicago Tribune
In just a few years, personal technology may be following us everywhere we go

Soon consumers will carry devices that sense their location and tell them what’s available to buy. So says Northwestern University expert Kristian Hammond, co-inventor of “intelligent” software called Watson.



As consumer products gain more computer intelligence, how will they change?

Three trends are at work. Wi-Fi connects our portable devices at tremendous speeds. These devices sense where you are, so you get media associated with that location. All products are getting radio frequency ID tags. Soon I’ll carry a device that will know what I am wearing, what I am near when I shop. It will connect to the outside world with high speed and will display video, identify where you are and what you are touching. It will tell what you’re looking at and give you information about it. There’ll be complete empowerment of the consumer. Your device tells where you are, the products available.

How does computer intelligence come into this?

It’s all about systems anticipating your needs. The location-based capabilities (of the device) act as sensors, figuring out where you are, what you’re doing. Artificial intelligence says: given this, what might you need? It gets information to people based on the context of their activity. The Watson software does that with computers.

Give an example.

I pick up a book in Barnes & Noble, and I can get a display of reviews of the book. Here’s a place I could get it cheaper. Here are other books I might like.

Is this available now?

Prototypes could be available in a few years. Certainly the TV application will be available within 18 months. You watch a snippet on headline news, you push a button to find out more. The system figures out what kind of story it is and finds everything out there that’s on point.

So in the near future, we’ll carry machines that know more about what we want than we do?

The notion is that in order for the machine to genuinely serve us, it has to understand us. That comes from being embedded in the world, hooked to the network and using that to make inferences what would be useful to us. I look forward to a world where my video iPod has Wi-Fi connections. I walk into Starbucks and watch the Starbucks channel.

And all this could be on the market soon?

<>There are no technological impediments. These are all applications where it’s a matter of bandwidth of the people developing them.

Does this raise privacy concerns?

<>Yes. With any forward step, there are concerns that have to be addressed. With cars, it’s speed and accidents. With the phone, crank calls and telemarketers. With aware systems, our privacy. But this is not a general problem so much as a problem that has to be addressed with each application. Is “one-click” shopping worth Amazon keeping your credit card information? Is finding the perfect date worth risking (knowledge of) your sexual preferences? The solution is for consumers to understand that they own their own information and have to expose it only when they know that it is both safe and worth the return they get on it.