NIST CO-SPONSORS PERVASIVE COMPUTING 2001 CONFERENCE.

In May 2001, NIST, with NSA's Advanced Development Research Activity, cosponsored its second annual pervasive computing conference. As an open forum for the IT industry, the conference offered key perspectives on pervasive computing, including the latest in technologies, real applications, and business views.

Presentations centered about the need to understand the nature of change and opportunity associated with this new computing environment. A noteworthy conference benefit to industry will be reflected in its ongoing collaboration with NIST in such critical areas as multimodal industry standards, interfaces, privacy, and security. Pervasive computing topics discussed included health care industry applications, business-wide applications, intelligent environments, applications in mobile commerce, software and services, networking technology infrastructure, concluding with a technology update on emerging standards for pico-cellular wireless communications and dynamic service discovery.

Pervasive computing refers to the emerging trend toward numerous, easily accessible computing devices connected to an increasingly ubiquitous network infrastructure composed of a wired core and wireless edges. This trend likely will create new opportunities and challenges for the IT marketplace, placing highperformance computers and sensors in virtually every device, appliance and piece of equipment, in buildings, homes, workplaces, and factories, and even in clothing. Pervasive computing will require innovative approaches to human-computer interaction and information access technologies, as there will be a shift toward interacting with small, distributed, and often invisible devices. More information about the conference is available at www.nist.gov/pc2001.