Andy Lippman

I make no distinction between life and work, consistently focusing on using technology in service of personal and democratic expression.

In the 1970s computers dealt with words, in the 1980s they became fast enough to process sound and pictures. In this decade, they will supplant analog radio. Once we speculated that a computer would soon synthesize broadcast RF television directly, now they run at microwave oven rates. Digital radio is more than a question of agility or efficiency; it is a fundamental change in the way we communicate that is as significant as multimedia, interactivity, and the Internet. Wireless communications will become programmable, versatile, and viral. It will become the province of individuals, rather than of centralized service providers or authorization agencies. The World War I-era notion of carving up a spectrum as one would do with a real estate subdivision will be replaced by stunningly simple devices that are ad hoc, automatic, decentralized, cooperative, and infinitely scalable. Radio will function more like an open sea than a toll highway.

The impact will be felt throughout societies. We will be able to design telephone and computer networks that will contribute to network capacity as they join it. Each phone will be, in effect, a "cell tower" for the others who are nearby. We will be able to use this idea to make networks scale instead of saturate. We will make "instant infrastructures" that perform as a cooperative unit and require far less backbone installation. We may be able to show that even broadcasting is best done as a low-power mesh rather than as a high-power central system. At the lower end of the scale, we will be able to make embedded matchbox radios that lace our pets, plants, and push buttons together. The old rules of interference, obsolescence, and bandwidth will gain new meaning in both wired and radio systems. The network itself will do the computing: instead of processing the output of 5000 temperature sensors, we will instead consider asking which windows are open and which rooms are occupied.

We began this work six years ago by considering Internet multicast arrangements where every recipient was a server for computers that were nearby. The idea was real-time audio/video where the information migrated through the network to the people who needed it, in essence a distributed TiVo. By doing this, it became possible to make, for example, a cable television system with virtually unlimited options. The irony is that the same principles apply in the airwaves, in ad hoc networks, and in some economic systems: By cooperating in the distribution of information, goods, and services, efficiency increases with membership. Interestingly, these diverse applications of the same idea had never crossed disciplinary boundaries—only now is cooperative radio and networking emerging as a feasible idea.

Our goals are to explore the large and small impact of collaborative networking. We build wired and wireless devices, we explore protocols, and we make languages that allow information to be automatically distributed, processed and recovered. An example is a camera that never runs out of film: it "borrows" space from others on the net. Another case is a storage method that allows one to cast sounds and images onto the network machines then reel in the bits packet by packet to reconstruct the information at any scale and resolution.

In the coming year, the threshold will be intelligent RF, where routing information is done by the radio itself, with no setup, ultra-low power consumption, and infinitesimal delay.

When the Internet began, it had the potential to democratize communications by migrating control from the network to the (personal) computers at the edges. By this open, end-to-end approach, new ideas could grow organically at the whim of the community of users. We see this work as extending that same principle to the airwaves and to the bits and pieces of everyday life.