New development could greatly improve crisis communications accuracy and speed

IBM engineers are developing a system termed ‘Mercury’, which will track people using GPS technologies and will plug them into the appropriate messaging medium for their current location, whether it be cellphone, e-mail, instant messaging, pager or landline phone. Mercury can also be made "context aware", by detecting whether a laptop or cell phone is turned off, for example.

Anand Ranganathan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Hui Lei of IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, developed Mercury as a follow-up to the Intelligent Notification System (INS) that Hui developed in 2002 and which IBM has commercialised. INS gleans information about someone's activity by monitoring which software is running and the events in their electronic calendar. It also obtains location information from GPS receivers. After combining these factors, it decides whether to deliver any incoming messages as an e-mail, a pager message or a voicemail.

Mercury combines INS's context-aware capabilities with the ability to control a range of communications devices. The technology could be very helpful in speeding up crisis communications calling-tree systems by accurately pinpointing message recipients and avoiding unnecessary communications attempts.

Mercury is still a lab project and is at least three years from realisation. And before it can become a commercial reality, phone companies, equipment providers, Internet providers and computer makers will have to agree on common protocols.
Despite Mercury's Big Brother overtones, communications experts are convinced that this kind of smart system will soon be in demand.

Source: www.newscientist.com

•Date: 5th February 2004 •Region: N.America/World •Type: Article •Topic: Crisis comms
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