Radios are going to be an integral part of our future – right from RFIDs to wireless. They are getting smarter and more software-driven. Writes Newsfactor:
A personal digital assistant (PDA) falls from its owner’s pocket during lunch. After a little while on the restaurant floor, it awakens, calls home, and notifies its owner that it has been left behind. That’s all in a day’s work for a “cognitive radio,” a wireless device that’s aware of its environment and learns from its user.
Cognitive radios don’t exist yet. But Joseph Mitola, a computer scientist at Mitre, in Bedford, MA, aims to make them a reality by exploiting the added processing power that will be built into tomorrow’s wireless devices. Mitola is one of the pioneers of “software radio,” which gives users of cell phones and other two-way radios the ability to use a single device to communicate over a range of frequencies.
Now Mitola is thinking about other applications — such as artificial-intelligence — based learning for wireless devices stuffed with software. “A cognitive radio learns the preferences of its user without being explicitly programmed,” Mitola says.
