Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing in a Corporate Conference Room

This paper discusses pervasive and ubiquitous computing in a smart room environment. The system we describe resides in an operational conference room at The MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia. This environment is currently used by a small number of volunteer participants in order for us to accommodate user input early and frequently in the development cycle. In this environment, an embodied agent assists meeting participants with operating room devices, including those used for video teleconferencing (VTC). Primary system components include an interaction manager, avatar, speech recognizer, text-to-speech engine, room control application, macro player, biogate (face recognition) system, and context model. We are also introducing location-tracking and vision-based gesture recognition in the near future.

Who should pay for global health, and how much?

Roman Carrasco and colleagues propose a "cap and trade" system for global health involving a cost-effectiveness criterion and a DALY global credit market, mirroring global carbon emission permits trading markets to mitigate climate change