The Case for Recombinant Computing

Interoperability among a group of devices, applications, and services is typically pred icated on those entities having some degree of prior knowledge of one another. In particular, they must be written to understand the type of thing with which they will interact, including the details of communication as well as semantic knowledge such as when and how to communicate. This paper presents a case for "recombinant computing"—a set of common interaction patterns that leverage mobile code to allow rich interactions among computational entities with only limited a priori knowledge of one another. We have been experimenting with a particular embodiment of these ideas, which we call Speakeasy. It is designed to support ad hoc, end user configurati ons of hardware and software, and provides patterns for data exchange, user control, and contextual awareness.