About this Site

This site is currently a member-only Web site for Task Computing Technology, operated by Fujitsu Laboratories of America, College Park. This site lets you download the binary for Task Computing Environment and provides community support for those interested in Task Computing.

If you are interested in using the Task Computing Environment (TCE) software, pl ease check out How to test drive Task Computing. Currently the TCE software is open only to academic and non-profit research inst itutes. If you have any further question, please contact us at tc-committee@fla.fujitsu.com.

Task Computing - the Technology

Task computing is a new paradigm for how users interact with devices and services.   Task Computing allows users to focus on the tasks they want to accomplish with computing devices rather than how to accomplish them. The research on the underlying technologies is conducted jointly with the MINDSwap team of the University of Maryland.

Task computing fills the gap between what users really want to do and the capabilities of devices and/or services that might be available in their environments.   In contrast to the current, traditional personal computing paradigm, Task Computing presents substantial advantages for non-expert computer users.   It is a time- and effort-saver for all types of users and is particularly suited for the emerging pervasive or ubiquitous computing environments consisting of many interconnected devices.

The "Task Computing Environments (TCE)" is a framework for Task Computing that provides support for workflows, semantic service descriptions, and service management for the end-users. Our TCE consists of Task Computing Clients (TCCs), many Semantically Described Services (SDSs), Semantic Service Discovery Mechanisms (SSDMs), and Service Controls.   The TCE already has several kinds of TCCs using different interface modalities such as textual, graphical, and speech. There are also more than thirty kinds of useful SDSs (services) which are easily set up and used along with those TCCs.

TCE also provides a programming environment for researchers and developers, as its components are accessible as standard Web Services. TCE enables creation of your own Task Computing Clients and integration of the TCE functions into other applications.

We base our technology on standards as much as possible; using a web client for the STEER user interface, UPnP for our SSDM, OWL-S for the semantic service descriptions, and UPnP and Web Services for service invocations. By combining these existing technologies in a framework that enables user-driven discovery, composition and execution of complex tasks, in real-time (as opposed to design time), task computing provides a totally different level of interoperability between devices and services, together with a novel user experience.

With the TCE provided from this site, the user can, for example, display on any display in the environment the slides from her own computer or the results of a remote web service call. She can use the environment to share information with other users (even after the first user left the environment!).  Such a universal and flexible environment is proving to be very useful and powerful in environments like hospitals, offices, and homes.    End-users can seamlessly integrate and manipulate functionalities on their own computer, the devices around them, and remotely accessible web services, enabling them to easily define, execute and monitor complex tasks, in ways that can only be accomplished today by painstaking, design-time integration.

For more technical details, please check out the Task Computing Papers page of this site.