Challenges in autonomic personal computing with some new results in automatic configuration management

Autonomic personal computing is personal computing on autonomic platforms. It shares the goals of personal computing - responsiveness, ease of use and flexibility - with those of autonomic computing - simplicity, availability and security. The challenge of autonomic personal computing is to simplify and enhance the end-user experience, delighting the user by anticipating his or her needs in the face of this complex, dynamic and uncertain environment. We motivate the need to deploy autonomic computing carefully on personal computing systems, and report on recent work in automatic management of the software and data configuration of personal computing platforms. This work identifies remedial actions automatically, but takes care to explain and motivate them to the end user and never acts without approval.