Today, cell phones are a menace to safe driving, as they distract operators who should otherwise focus on the road. Tomorrow, cell phones could actually improve our driving, and help drivers avoid traffic congestion, use the road system more effectively, and manage the parking supply.

Li-Shiuan Peh says that the key to these services are future mobile devices that will have the computer power equivalent to today’s large servers in data centers. Combined with rapid advances in wireless networking, these mobile devices will be harnessed to provide new apps, like next generation transportation programs.

"Since all of these architectures will all use meshes of some sort to communicate between devices and cars, why don’t we use them for computing as well? As we add multiple hops … perhaps we could actually run some application software on our individual cell phones, on our neighboring cell phones and use that as a single big distributor and parallel computer." — Li-Shiuan Peh


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