For all these years, computation has centered about machines, not people. Computers have been difficult to use. They have required us to interact with them on their terms, speaking their languages and manipulating their keyboards or mice. In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. We will not need to carry our own devices around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will adopt our information personalities. We'll communicate naturally, using speech and gestures that describe our intent and leave it to the computer to carry out our will. The purpose of the Project Oxygen is to bring abundant computation and communication, as pervasive and free as air, naturally into people's lives. Oxygen enables pervasive, human-centered computing through a combination of specific user and system technologies. The device technologies include mobile devices, network and software technologies whereas user technologies include speech, vision, knowledge access and automation. Project Oxygen was begun as a partnership between the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), and six major corporations including the Acer Group, Delta Electronics, Hewlett-Packard, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Nokia and Philips, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.