ATL is exploring the full range of interactive experiences from traditional, static documents through new forms of rich internet applications. We are examining the different forms of user experience, as well as how designers, developers and end-users may create or modify such experiences, and what tools would help them in these tasks. Other areas of interest are in management tools and web services support.
Adobe has a rich heritage in document technologies. We are now exploring a whole range of new document technologies, for example: layout and reflow algorithms, navigation techniques, approaches to creating documents-of-record from RIAs, new forms of rich-media document, and the interplay of documents and on-line services.
ATL is exploring a number of areas to expand the capabilities of our universal client runtime. Such areas include VMs (their design, performance, security attributes, and instruction set), languages (expanding the capabilities of ActionScript, support for other languages against our runtimes, and native code re-use), and compilers and interpreters (design and performance).
Adobe has a long history of creating innovative security solutions for content and has been providing rights management dating back to 1994. Adobe’s early investments in rights management technology have addressed electronic books, documents and rich media assets such as video. Adobe's Policy Server technology was invented in ATL and now ships as a key component of LiveCycle and Acrobat products, as well as Adobe's new AIR platform and new Adobe Media Player application ATL continues to explore innovative approaches to rights management technologies which will help to drive more content to the Internet more securely while performing at web scale without interfering with the user experience. We are also exploring content watermarking and fingerprinting solutions which protect content even after cryptographic protections are breached. Areas of interest to ATL include: authentication, platform-security services, cryptographic algorithms, secure storage, access control, and DRM.
ATL is exploring a broad range of approaches to developing platforms - and the documents and applications that run on top of the platforms — that are instrumented to enable content creators to have a full view into how their content is being used, and to enable new business models such as advertising. We are particularly interested in automatic content metadata extraction, categorization, summarization, and text mining for unstructured and semi-structured documents and are exploring the processing of images, video, audio as well as textual documents. We believe that understanding non-textual content types continues to be a broader area of research and development, and that ultimately those data types can be described in textual terms and can then be mined like traditional text-based assets. We are also exploring technologies for incrementing applications together with hosted services for collecting data and analyzing the data after it has been collected.
ATL is exploring the technology options in cloud computing, an emerging phenomenon that envisions a grand virtualization of computing infrastructure so that the amount of storage or computing power available is immensely larger than that of the typical computing facility or hosting service. The opportunity is emerging for companies to leverage these clouds directly rather than develop and operate their own costly infrastructure. We are determining which technology options are most promising and how to develop the critical systems-layering technologies necessary to exploit the promise of clouds-based infrastructure.
ATL has the opportunity to be one of the drivers in how rich-media content will be delivered in the next decade. We are exploring the next generation of Flash Media Server – what it will look like and what new and different services it will provide. We are also exploring how to add even greater interactivity to video experiences which operate at web scale.
Adobe is exploring bringing our experience to the next-generation of consumer electronics. With more than five times as many mobile devices (>1B) sold each year as compared with personal computers, the opportunity to impact those devices is huge and continues to grow. We are exploring opportunities with today's smart-phones which will be tomorrow's entry-level phone. We are also exploring next-generation devices and home-focused services which will provide new information experiences in our homes. These devices have multiple network interfaces (Bluetooth, WiFi, WiMax) and device features (GPS, camera, rotational sensors) which need to be accessible to applications and related network services.
