The 1990 ' s View of the National Information Infrastructure Current

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) that will evolve in the 1990's and beyond will impact many institutions of life. These include the way we learn and do science, self{caring, access to civil/information infrastructure systems & services, and management & control of manufacturing processes. The future scenario for the NII assumes wireless networks used by walkstations realizing the dream of truly ubiquitous access to the information superhighway. Some of the current obstacles in building such a ubiquitous access system on mobile high{performance platforms include the user interface for these walkstations, the ability of sniing information across heterogeneous geographically distributed information systems, the ability of processing sensoring data for monitoring and control, and the dynamic reconngura-bility of computations between the mobile unit and the stationary servers. Our eeort in the area of ubiquitous computing involves the design and implementation of intelligent models and techniques to address the aforementioned obstacles. In this paper we present the architecture of an intelligent electronic notepad, called SciencePad, to support a scientist in the research environment of the future.