MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science


"As We May Think" --

A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision,
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished,
and What Remains to Be Done


Thursday, October 12, 1995
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Augmenting Bush's Vision with Digital Technology

Robert E. Kahn

Although Vannevar Bush in his classic paper "As we may think" described the importance of sharing information, his horizons were necessarily limited by the technology of the day. In particular, the digital computing and communications technology which we now take for granted had not even entered his frame of reference. This talk will explore the possible evolution of computer and communications infrastructure and the role of architecture, technology and intelligence in the system. Connectivity, along with an almost unlimited array of digital objects, universal services and applications will stimulate the sharing of ideas, joint activities of all kinds, virtual entities and teamwork in the network. The role of software agents both within the network and outside will be considered in the context of distributed task execution. Finally, the prospects for intelligent distributed systems will be explored.


To the symposium Agenda.
To MIT EECS home page. Your comments are welcome. Rev. PP Oct 5, 1995.