You want a smart phone， but just how smart do you want it？ How about one that can read your mind？ Well， that phone may well be on its way...
Justin Rattner， chief researcher at Intel， says that technology has developed to the point that “context-aware computing (情景感知计算)”， an idea that’s been around for twenty years， is becoming more of a reality.
That could lead to a phone that acts as a mind reader in your pocket. But rather than simply collect secrets about you， the device could do things with that information， such as predict what you might do next and make suggestions.
Rattner gave a few examples during his speech at Intel’s developer conference in San Francisco recently.
Among them is a software that Intel worked on with Fodor’s Travel， a traveling website. It learns what types of foods you like to eat and what types of places you like to visit， based on searches you type into the phone or places you searched using GPS (全球定位系统). The software makes similar recommendations when you visit a new city.
Tech companies are already working to predict what people want. Search engine Google， movie-rental service Netflix， and online radio service Pandora try to guess what people want even before they know they want it.
Putting those types of functions together with the other information that phones collect about people could pave the way for even more helpful mobile phones， Rattner said.
A challenge is training computers to look at data from “hard sensors (传感器)” (which measure place， movement， temperature and the like) and combining those findings with data from “soft sensors” (such as calendar appointments and Web browsing history).
For example， your phone could tell that you have just left school and seem to be on your way home—a location it might know from your address book. It could then tell you the best route around traffic.
Rattner added that researchers are even making steps toward the final goal—a computer understanding of thoughts.