In the early days of computing, the focus was clearly on data and using the power of technology to perform computations. Only later was there a shift towards using computers as a means to store and drive information exchange and communication. Ramesh Jain believes that, in order to address the requirements of today’s emerging network-based applications and a society dominated by the mobile handset, the focus needs to shift again. This new focus will be driven by experience and insight. Most important of all, however, will be our relationship to events, which are central to our understanding of experiences.

With the boundaries between cyberspace and the physical world increasingly blurred, it is essential for our technical infrastructure to reach beyond objects and to deal with events as well. The representation of events requires dealing with time and space as primary attributes and recognizing data sources not only as informational but also as experiential. In the new world of Computing 3.0, a site which gives details of events but provides no immersive representation, or allows no live or retroactive experience of the events themselves, will be regarded as incomplete.

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Ramesh Jain is an entrepreneur, researcher, and educator who can be best described as a pioneer in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems. He is currently the Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. Prior to this he was a Rhesa "Ray" S. Farmer Distinguished Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.

While a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of California, San Diego, Jain founded and directed artificial intelligence and visual information systems labs. He was also the founding editor-in-chief of IEEE MultiMedia magazine and now serves on the editorial boards of several magazines in multimedia, information retrieval, and image and vision processing.

Jain has co-authored more than 300 research papers in well-respected journals and conference proceedings, as well as co-authoring and co-editing several books. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAI, IAPR, and SPIE. His current research interests are in experiential computing and its applications.

Resources:

• Ramesh Jain's blog

This presentation is one of a series from the Where 2.0 Event held in Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, June 29-30, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Graham Stewart
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani
• Series Editor: Graham Stewart