About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

Hi-tech could change the planet as much as it has affected personal life

Andy Hopper, an iconic figure in UK computer history, talks about the next big role hi-tech needs to take on.

Computing has already changed the way all of us live our lives, so it is reasonable to predict that computing will also play a major role in delivering a long-term future for society and our planet.

But first we have to overcome a major disconnection between computing and sustainability. Some people claim that technology has a net negative effect on the environment, and view turning off TVs and PCs at night as simply a token gesture.

We need to embrace a far bigger picture. After all, less than 20 years ago we had not heard of the world wide web, and Google has only been around for 10 years.

it is now time for computer technologists to work closely with other scientific and business disciplines to help ensure the long term future of the planet Andy Hopper

If these milestones can have such a radical impact on our day-to-day lives in such as short space of time, we can surely harness technology and our expanding knowledge to address the international environmental challenges we are facing.

So how can we justify the claim that computing will make possible higher standards of living in a way that does not cause major problems for the planet? There are four areas where we believe computing can have a major impact:

Sensing and optimising

Knowledge is power, and sourcing vast amounts of real-time, accurate data will be invaluable in discovering the impact of human activities on the environment, as well as for optimising energy consumption and other natural resources. The challenge is to harness these data efficiently and effectively using an abundance of sensors.

Social networking has already demonstrated our willingness to share information, so this could be extended to accumulate relevant qualitative and quantitative data, from environmental observations to specific energy use.

Many believe turning a PC off at night is a token gesture

Maybe we will all carry a Personal Energy Meter (PEM), which records and apportions our individual total energy consumption. Future generations of mobile phones could contain a PEM, and social networking sites provide an ideal forum for users to share this information, along with new algorithms to make complex consumption calculations for everyday activities.

Harnessing this information will allow us to create a real-time data map to observe different layers – from transportation that shows congestion on roads to the wasted heat through the roofs of buildings – a sort of infrared version of Google Earth.

This wide-scale sensing and data collection highlights one of many dilemmas of providing functionality whilst preserving privacy. Out of necessity, a suitable, safe, and enticing compromise must be found.

Predicting and reacting

Ever more sophisticated algorithms are being used to study global warming and to produce forecasts of the behaviour of natural systems. But how can we be sure that the software used to generate these models is correct?

By using computer science to develop and apply new techniques for building accurate and verifiable implementations of complex simulations, we can feel more assured that the results are correct. The models and implementations have to produce results in a timely fashion and be able to incorporate data incrementally.

Based on this we can make the right policy decisions on issues from travel planning and energy use to climate change and the spread of disease.

Chasing the energy

Historically, we have thrown power and processing at problems to solve them; but now things are different. Data centres play a vital role in the modern information infrastructure, but require ever-increasing amounts of energy to keep them running.

Prof Hopper co-founded Acorn which developed the BBC Micro

However, constructing server farms close to large-scale renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines, replaces long high-capacity power connections with low power high-bandwidth data connections.

This can be extended by sending computing tasks round the globe to follow the peaks and troughs of renewable power generation as it happens, or even to the placement of server farms in locations from which the transmission – but not generation – of energy would be uneconomical.

Furthermore the shift to "thinner" end point devices and displays will also move much of the energy burden to these centralised, yet "virtualised", server farms.

Computing provides a huge potential for shifting more of our physical activities to digital alternatives. We already work from home, read news make purchases, and download music online, use e-billing, and conduct many aspects of our lives in cyberspace.

This is starting to encompass everyone on the planet, as developing countries are also quickly building digital infrastructures.

Mobile devices now give us virtually zero cost computing power that is with us all the time, with unprecedented communications capabilities and access to a mine of information.

This ubiquitous digital infrastructure will allow us to make intelligent choices about which activities we move to a digital world, enabling us to run our lives and create wealth without a negative impact on the environment.

Making a difference

While technological innovation may not have prioritised solutions to the environmental problems we face today; it is now time for computer technologists to work closely with other scientific and business disciplines to help ensure the long term future of the planet. And there may be another new positive force at work.

While Europe has been at the forefront of early progress in this area, there is growing recognition worldwide – including the major players in America and Far East – that the time has come to work together to address climate change and energy issues.

This will make standardisation easier and where appropriate lead to a reduction in the conventional legal and commercial barriers to collaboration. If this can be done the world is our oyster.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

Some systems to manage water and power are getting smarter

Brendon Riley, chief executive of IBM UK, talks about the big changes that are about to hit the world all around us.

While the world continues to get smaller and more interconnected, something is now happening that holds even greater potential.

Our planet is becoming smarter.

It is now possible to infuse intelligence into the way the world works.

Many are wondering how a challenging global economy will impact life in the UK and beyond. We should look at this time as offering a unique opportunity to change the way the world works.

The financial turmoil has reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technologically and socially. However, we’re realising that just being connected is not sufficient.

In the last few years, global climate change, environmental and geopolitical issues surrounding energy, and the major pressures caused by the scarcity of our natural resources, have taken centre stage.

In the last two decades, we have seen our planet become smaller and "flatter". In the next two, we will see it become smarter. Brendon Riley

Critically, the digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging. Computational power is being put into things we wouldn’t recognise as computers. It’s easy to embed sensors in all sorts of ecosystems, from hospitals to supply chains to natural systems like rivers. Almost anything can have a digital presence in a networked world.

All of this instrumentation generates new data, which advanced analytics can turn into insight – so better decisions can be made in real time.

This in turn leads to increased effectiveness – simply doing what works, faster.

Within our reach we have a platform for reform and a way to become more competitive.

Problems such as spending too much time in traffic, managing financial risk or finite resources such as water can now be approached in fundamentally different and game changing ways.

We have the intelligence, we have the instrumentation – so much of the computing and technical power is there. Those companies, countries even, that put this intelligence to practical use will be those that seize competitive advantage and emerge from the current turmoil as leaders.

This requires that we look at the world in a different way.

If you have a systems perspective of how the world works you can see a great many inefficiencies and in some cases malfunctions.

The whole issue of energy efficiency provides a very compelling and very visible manifestation of the need for the world’s infrastructure to become more intelligent. The International Energy Agency suggests over half of the carbon savings needed to meet carbon dioxide stabilisation goals will come from end-user efficiencies.

Riley: A smarter world means a better quality of life

On the Mediterranean island of Malta, power and water are intricately linked. The nation’s electricity is generated entirely by imported fuel oil, while the country depends on electrically powered desalination plants for 55% of its water supply.

In fact, 75% of the cost of water from these plants on Malta is directly related to energy production. Meanwhile, rising sea levels threaten Malta’s underground freshwater source.

This presents a complex, interconnected series of challenges that require immediate attention to ensure that the country has sustainable resources for the future.

The Maltese national power and water utilities – Enemalta and Water Service Corporation – are making their country the first in the world to build a nationwide smart grid and fully integrated electricity and water system.

This system will be able to identify water leaks and electricity losses in the grid, allowing the utilities to more intelligently plan their investments in the network and reduce inefficiency.

In addition, 250,000 interactive meters will monitor electricity usage in real time, set variable rates and reward customers who consume less energy and water.

Thousands of intelligent sensors will be deployed along transmission lines, substations and other existing infrastructure to manage electricity distribution more efficiently and to anticipate problems.

All of this data can then be collected and analysed to help lower costs, reduce consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Smarter systems in the world look like the net

By addressing the issues of water and power as a system, the Maltese government can provide citizens with better information to make smarter decisions about how and when they use power – and the country can begin the task of replacing carbon-intensive fuel oil with renewable energy for the future.

In fact, the intelligent utility system looks a lot more like the internet than like a traditional grid.

This increased intelligence is also incredibly empowering for consumers. A smart grid allows them to become more involved with managing their energy use.

There are so many exciting and game-changing opportunities if you think about the world from a system perspective.

Not only does it herald the ability to improve the quality of life. It is inexorably linked to improving competitive advantage – a view expressed in the UK government’s Digital Britain report released in January.

In the last two decades, we have seen our planet become smaller and "flatter". In the next two, we will see it become smarter.

We just need to open our minds and let ourselves think about what the opportunities could be. It’s about changing how the world literally works.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

The engine of the internet could come to halt unless security is sorted out

Ken Silva, chief technology officer at Verisign, warns about the dangers that threaten the open internet.

Ask internet users what they want from their service and 99 times out of 100 the answer will be the same: more – more speed, more bandwidth and more flexibility of use.

Nobody knows this better than internet infrastructure providers, who for years have devoted the vast majority of their development budgets to meeting consumer demands for faster, more flexible networks. Security has often been an afterthought.

For the most part, this market-driven approach has been a boon to the internet and its users, but recent events have begun to illustrate the dangers of this single-minded focus.

The openness and interconnectedness that are the internet’s hallmarks ensure that there will always be vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.

In the past couple of years, two serious incidents have sent ripples throughout the global internet, causing real damage and painting a troubling picture of vulnerabilities that could someday bring this vital engine of commerce and communication to a grinding halt, imperilling billions of dollars in commerce and worse, as the internet becomes an ever more critical component of our daily lives.

The simple truth is that our global investment in the security and stability of the internet has not kept pace with our relentless pursuit of greater speed and flexibility. If we don’t correct this growing imbalance, and soon, we face the possibility of a global online incident, the impact of which could be felt for years to come.

In April 2007, a spat between Estonia and Russia over a Soviet-era war memorial erupted into what has been described as the first modern "cyber war" as Russian-based attackers effectively took the entire nation of Estonia offline for a period of weeks.

In February 2008, the Pakistani government, responding to an anti-Islamic video clip appearing on YouTube, unintentionally set in motion a series of events that prevented most of the world’s internet users from visiting the site – one of the internet’s most popular – for a period of hours.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about both of these incidents is how unremarkable they were – at least from a technical standpoint.

Silva: More can be done to secure the open internet

Although remarkably well coordinated, the Estonian attack was not the largest ever recorded, nor was it particularly novel in its methods. More than anything, the incident demonstrates just how damaging even a "typical" attack can be when timed properly to strike vulnerable targets.

As is the case in the hundreds of similar attacks that take place each day, the perpetrators harnessed the power of corrupted personal computers to swamp their targets in a sea of bogus internet traffic, effectively cutting off whole neighborhoods of the Estonian internet from legitimate traffic.

Millions of these infected "zombie" computers exist. Used in concert, they can generate attacks that few systems on earth are capable of withstanding.

The Pakistan-YouTube incident was even more commonplace – the result of two seemingly benign errors and a quirk in an internet protocol designed at a time when most of the global network ran on trust and virtual handshakes.

The details of the incident are less important than the fact that the circumstances that allowed it to occur remain unchanged, as do scores of similar vulnerabilities endemic to the internet’s open architecture.

The message is that these sorts of incidents can – and almost certainly will – happen again. And if history tells us anything, it’s that the next time will be worse. More powerful computers hooked up to more robust internet connections translate into more severe and disruptive attacks.

Also, as we rely on the internet to a greater and greater extent, the likelihood that such an incident will cause real harm to our lives and livelihoods only increases.

Many home computers are part of zombie networks

It would be wrong to suggest that this is entirely preventable. The openness and interconnectedness that are the internet’s hallmarks ensure that there will always be vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.

But we can do a much, much better job of securing the critical internet infrastructure on which we all rely.

Stability and security must become a higher priority for everyone involved in the development and stewardship of the global internet. Companies may not be able to monetise security in the same way that they monetise speed, but nobody in this space can afford to remain ignorant of the costs associated with getting it wrong.

The "choice" between speed and flexibility on one hand, and stability and security on the other is more a product of cost than anything else. The cost of providing secure, stable network infrastructure is equal to, and in some cases, greater than the cost of increasing network speeds.

The good news is that there isn’t, for the most part, a fundamental technological tension between flexibility and stability on the internet. Indeed, one of the most critical components of stability – excess capacity – is also essential to providing greater speed and flexibility.

This challenge doesn’t require technological breakthroughs or dramatic paradigm shifts. We know what needs to be done if we are to bring the security and stability of this global network up to par with its stunning speed and flexibility.

The choice is so simple that it isn’t a choice at all: invest the time and resources necessary to safeguard the internet against known dangers, or face the sort of failure that could permanently change the face of the internet for the worse.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

Good use of technology could bring the past much closer

Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Century Rain, wonders if we could do a better job of looking back into history.

If there’s a silver lining to the dark cloud of CGI-dominated blockbusters that seem to infest the cinema lately, it’s this: the same digital technology that can make Spiderman or Hulk leap around the screen in a singularly unconvincing fashion, can also be used to create something infinitely more interesting: the past.

Imagine if you could actually walk around in a simulated version of a scene from history? Wouldn’t that be worth an hour of anyone’s time?

I’m not talking about the Star Trek holodeck here. I’m talking about something we could have sometime next week, if the appropriate technologies were combined.

For a start, we’d need a computer system capable of running the simulation – but in these days of super-powerful games consoles, that surely isn’t too much of an ask.

Imagine fast-forwarding through entire centuries, watching buildings rise and fall, the Great Fire of London coming and going in a convulsive flash, transforming half the city

We’d also need a display device, feeding a constantly moving three-dimensional viewpoint to the participant, something like a virtual reality headset. We’ll call them goggles, but they don’t have to look any weirder than Bono’s last pair of wraparound shades. You don’t want to look like a complete berk, do you? Actually, let’s not go with Bono’s shades.

The problem is, virtual reality is so Lawnmower Man, so 1990s. Can’t we go one better than that? Can’t we integrate the simulation with the real world instead?

Easily enough, as it happens. We certainly don’t need any kind of motion capture suit or scanning rig, because that’s not how it’s going to work. The system isn’t going to track how you move; it’s only going to track the movement of the wraparound goggles.

With differential GPS receivers embedded in the goggles, that’s all the data it needs.

You’re not going to be trapped in some windowless room somewhere, prancing around like a demented mime artist. You’re going to be walking through your favourite city, perhaps the place where you actually live. Simultaneously, the goggles are feeding you a one-to-one overlay derived from the computer simulation, integrated seamlessly with your view of the real world.

Wraparound shades might be all you need to see the past

The key is that the goggles don’t have to feed you the view of the present day. They can feed you the past.

Imagine you’re walking through London. There’s a slider on the left side of the frame; you can reach up and adjust it as you walk. By moving the slider, you can dial all the way back to the Blitz, or the time of Samuel Pepys, or the Londinium of 45AD.

It would be a fascinating – not to mention disorientating – experience. Imagine fast-forwarding through entire centuries, watching buildings rise and fall, the Great Fire of London coming and going in a convulsive flash, transforming half the city. You’d feel like HG Well’s time traveller, hurtling through time. You’d get an entirely new perspective on a familiar neighbourhood.

Of course, there’d need to be a certain amount of fudging. Streets and rivers re-align themselves; what was once passable becomes impassable. Ground levels change dramatically. But all of that could be accommodated; the aim would be to educate and illuminate, but that wouldn’t mean that the simulation had to be rigorously correct at all times.

Speaking of education, it seems to me that one of the earliest applications of such a technology – if it doesn’t already exist in embryonic form – would be in museums, especially those dealing with the buried past.

Imagine visiting an historical site a few years down the line, something like the Roman spa in the city of Bath. Instead of being given the option to hire a handset with a pre-recorded commentary, you get given a pair of goggles, with an associated earpiece.

They’re a bit scuffed from repeated use, but they’ve been thoroughly cleaned since the last person used them. You put them on and move into the museum proper. The goggles are preset for 45AD, but you can move the left-hand slider up and down to surf through the ages. If you wish you can even skip to post Roman times and stroll around the greening ruins.

Reynolds: computer graphics could help us visualise the past

Importantly, there’s a second slider on the right side of the goggles. This one is preset to low immersion: when you first don the goggles, it displays the simulated overlay as a ghostly tracery, a bit like the vector graphics of old arcade games. You can see where walls and floors used to be, but you’re still firmly anchored to the real world.

Turn the slider up a bit, though, and the overlays become progressively more solid, more photo-real.

Turn it up a bit more and the glasses begin selectively deleting what they don’t want you to see – the modern walls that are in the wrong place, the modern ceiling that should show the blue sky and clouds of Roman Britain instead. What’s more, the slider goes even further up the scale.

There’s no reason why the software can’t drop in a few authentic-looking Roman citizens, going about their business. As you walk past them, your earpiece picks up snatches of murmured conversation in Latin. A subtitle tells you what they’re really saying.

While you’re at it, why not have the option of deleting some of your fellow visitors? You came to see Roman ruins, not a gaggle of exchange students ticking off another item on the itinerary.

Depending on the software, the goggles could overlay a “Roman” over each visitor, or render them entirely invisible until they came within a certain collision volume. At which point, they could be progressively de-erased, or perhaps flagged with a graphical outline. It would be up to you how far you adjusted the slider.

I don’t know. I think this would be pretty fantastic, but who knows? Perhaps it would be yet another reason not to exercise the imagination; yet another reason not to have to think too hard.

After all, you have to think to make sense of schematic diagrams and dioramas, the usual stuff of museums. You have to work at it a bit. And maybe that’s a good thing.

But I definitely wouldn’t mind finding out…

About Technology – The Tech Lab:

About Technology –

CCTV and face recognition is helping create ‘wholesale surveillance’

Bruce Schneier is the chief security technology officer at BT and a celebrated writer and speaker on privacy, cryptography and security issues.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It’s a natural by-product of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we’re ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.

Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day. Once you walked into a bookstore and bought a book with cash. Now you visit Amazon, and all of your browsing and purchases are recorded. You used to buy a train ticket with coins; now your electronic fare card is tied to your bank account. Your store affinity cards give you discounts; merchants use the data on them to reveal detailed purchasing patterns.

Bruce Schneier has written widely on security, privacy and technology.

Data about you is collected when you make a phone call, send an e-mail message, use a credit card, or visit a website. A national ID card will only exacerbate this.

More computerised systems are watching you. Cameras are ubiquitous in some cities, and eventually face recognition technology will be able to identify individuals. Automatic licence plate scanners track vehicles in parking lots and cities. Colour printers, digital cameras, and some photocopy machines have embedded identification codes. Aerial surveillance is used by cities to find building permit violators and by marketers to learn about home and garden size.

As chips become more common, they’ll be tracked, too. Already you can be followed by your cellphone, even if you never make a call. This is wholesale surveillance; not “follow that car,” but “follow every car”.

Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These conversations – with family, friends, and colleagues – can be recorded and stored.

It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was once ephemeral is now permanent.

Who collects and uses this data depends on local laws. In the US, corporations collect, then buy and sell, much of this information for marketing purposes. In Europe, governments collect more of it than corporations. On both continents, law enforcement wants access to as much of it as possible for both investigation and data mining.

More and more people are scattering their personal data online

Regardless of country, more organisations are collecting, storing, and sharing more of it.

More is coming. Keyboard logging programs and devices can already record everything you type; recording everything you say on your cellphone is only a few years away.

A “life recorder” you can clip to your lapel that’ll record everything you see and hear isn’t far behind. It’ll be sold as a security device, so that no-one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cellphone at home as evidence that he didn’t want to be tracked?

You’re living in a unique time in history: the technology is here, but it’s not yet seamless. Identification checks are common, but you still have to show your ID. Soon it’ll happen automatically, either by remotely querying a chip in your wallets or by camera.

And all those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where you won’t even see them. Ephemeral conversation will all but disappear, and you’ll think it normal. Already your children live much more of their lives in public than you do. Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

Future generations will look back at us – living in the early decades of the information age – and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data

Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don’t have to justify every word they utter.

Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating “terrorist tendencies” is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinised undermines our social norms;
furthermore, it’s creepy. Privacy isn’t just about having something to
hide; it’s a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.

We’re not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.

Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us – living in the early decades of the information age – and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.

We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

Currently the web reflects a crude representation of ourselves.

Science-fiction writer Ian McDonald reflects on the digital doppelgangers that our growing use of the net is bringing about.

I’m in bits. Pieces of me are all over the place.

My history is on Wikipedia, my photos are on Flickr, my petty rants are on Livejournal, my indiscretions are on Facebook, my globetrotting is stored on half a dozen travel sites, my likes and dislikes profiled and my reading recorded on Amazon.

And I’m a part-time mage in World of Warcraft. Well, I’m not. But it might be fun. More fun than Second Life, where I could be some tedious avatar and hang with boring people.

And I don’t actually Facebook or network either because I don’t want to get into the whole 21st Century social minefield of who to friend and who not to friend and who to unfriend. But I reckon I’m half-uploaded already.

Brain games

One of the great science-fictional toys in the sand-box is the uploaded personality.

It’s the i-version of the 1950s brain-in-a-box; pure intelligence freed from the messy human body.

The idea is that within our lifetimes chip design will reach a stage where we can construct a computer with as much processing power as a human brain. That’s somewhere in the region of 100 million MIPs, which are Million computer Instructions Per Second.

My geographical location is unimportant: Ian2 is global, spread across thousands of servers.

We might reach machines with that level of complexity in the 2020s. Then we’ll be able to record every detail of a human brain, memory for memory, neuron for neuron, like for like and dislike for dislike, every emotion and value and want, onto that computer.

What we’ll have is a copy of a personality in a box. It’ll be you in every detail that makes the meat-you you. You2. Only it’s technically immortal as long as the hardware keeps running and is regularly updated. This sounds great, until you realise that the original you still goes down that dark valley from which there is no return…

Memory man

Come back with me Ancient Greece. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the epic poems of the siege of Troy after its aftermath, are keystones of Western literature. They were oral history long before Homer; recited – or more likely sung, it was easier to remember the rhythms of song – by rhapsodes who had committed them to memory.

A modern reading of the Iliad takes 14 hours. This was a prodigious feat of memory. The same was true for many great epics: the Finnish Kalevala, the Irish Cuchulain cycle: all recited from memory.

All Homer did was find a way of externalising that memory and making it permanent: he wrote it down.

Much of our subsequent history has hinged around our attempts to offload our memory on to material things. Few of us today have the skill necessary to memorise 24 books of verse, much less the inclination.

Printing liberated writing; photography gave us the ability to materially record a moment in time. Sound recording converted vibrations in the air into first grooves in wax, then patterns of magnetism and now numbers: ones and zeroes.

The more we use the web the more we transfer of ourselves

Digits are now our tool of choice to offload our memories: words, images, sounds, stored first on our own devices but increasingly online, where they can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

I find that I’m increasingly carrying around just a memory dongle: not a laptop, not some widgety iPhone thing, just the memory. Computers are ubiquitous and easy, memory is what’s important. My next stage is to store it purely online.

I can load photographs, blog entries, make comments, assume avatars from anywhere in the world. My geographical location is unimportant: Ian2 is global, spread across thousands of servers.

Long before computers reach the same processing power as humans, there will be an uploaded me out there in cyberspace. There already is. It’s cartoony and unsophisticated yet, but it’s achieving a life of its own. It speaks and is listened to.

There’s been much to-do recently over targeted adware on social networking sites and the big ISPs. Phorm is the preferred black hat: it analyses your net data to better target advertising at you. Netizens instinctively bristle at this, but another way to think of it is the first stumbling speech of your You2.

Phorm and similar adwares are asking You2: “What would you like?” Your You2 is telling them. RSS feeds, Google alerts are all part of the initial, halting dialogue carried out independently of you by your You2.

Our You2s will ever more closely resemble us, and become more and more intelligent as they make linkages between the information we placed there. They’ll take decisions without our interference -and they’ll increasingly talk to each other. It’s no coincidence that the net is shaped like a society.

Perhaps there will never be a single moment when computers become aware. Maybe it will be a slow waking and making sense of that blur of information, like a baby makes sense of the colour patches and patterned sounds into objects and words.

Why should artificial intelligences – our You2s – take any less time to grow up than us?

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

Much more needs to be done to make the web cater for local needs

Aleks Krotoski’s research into online communities has left her wondering if the web is fulfilling its claim to be world wide.

I live a life saturated in technology. I research it, write about it and broadcast with it. I consume information from the internet on the train, in the coffee shop and even, thanks to my laptop and a wi-fi connection, in bed.

Until recently, I thought this was a common experience, that the 12.6 million people in the UK with broadband access grabbed the web when they needed to find out where they’d seen that guy from Lost before, or used Wikipedia to solve a domestic argument.

The rest, I imagined, were technophobes or luddites who remained so by fiercely protesting the entry of cold, mechanical machines into their lives. It had never occurred to me it might be technology’s fault.

Language barrier

But recently, I was uncharacteristically surrounded by people who had never used computer technology. When I explained what I did – that I studied the online social networks of friends who’d never met in the flesh before – they looked at me with what I took to be a little bit of pity.

Why bring Microsoft Windows to the field when people there don’t do desktops? Aleks Krotoski

Expecting the standard, “what’s wrong with reality?” quip, I hastily explained that I was also a well-rounded individual with many interests outside the internet, but that I found it supported my offline activities in a life-changing way. In particular, I was able to answer questions outside my frame of reference instantly, and with the click of a button.

They suddenly looked befuddled. How did I control this savage beast called the internet? How did I extract what I needed in fewer than three attempts?

It turns out that they didn’t go online because it didn’t understand them; a so-called simple search on Google produced nothing but 30 minutes of fruitless frustration.

The web spoke a different language of fact-finding than they did, and they didn’t have the time or the inclination to learn it. They didn’t know the first place to start.

This experience and others in similar company reminded me that the technologies I use have been built by people like me: Western, middle class, urban.

For all our apparent differences, the international information-searching norm has converged form the experience of a population of technophiles.

Ms Krotoski studies online communities such as Second Life

My experiences with Google are likely reflected in the search patterns of people in countries I’ve never been to, by people I’ve never met, but who share similar philosophical approaches to work, life and knowledge based on our desktop culture, our the way we structure our knowledge and even our architecture.

We know that these differences exist by looking at the adoption patterns of different technologies around the world. For example Baidu’s home advantage has taken the search engine to the top of the pile in China; Yandex is the dominant search engine in Russia.

These market leaders in their countries suggest that these technologies do better at adapting to the needs of the local citizens than the Western-developed applications.

We Googlites are probably the people least-served by the real power of the Web.

Currently, under the tutelage of Western technologists on-site from organizations like Geek Corps and VSO, people in rural villages are building communication infrastructures that will support radio because that is the primary information source of the people who live there.

Why bring Microsoft Windows to the field when people there don’t do desktops?

Local heroics

What if there was a search facility that had not only been developed with the local philosophy in mind, but adapted into its own unique tool that best served the people who used it? A semantic search facility would learn from a user’s unique approach to information so that the user wouldn’t have to change his or her behaviour.

The web betrays its origins in who it serves best

There are many companies and movements that believe they hold the answer. For example, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s W3C Semantic Web project uses a design infrastructure that aims to automate human social linguistic processes so you’ll have the answer before you’ve even thought to ask it.

True Knowledge, a search facility based in Cambridge, relies upon a team of researchers to populate a database that learns and assesses the information it delivers. Rather than using indexes and returning results in sentence form, it has a Wikipedia-style belief in the intelligence of the masses.

Yet even these approaches are hopelessly dogged by Western mentality; the people who will contribute will understand the paradigms with which information needs to be designed or uploaded into databases, and won’t naturally recognize the shortcomings simply because the other isn’t within their frame of reference.

When we have the means to create an intelligent search system that is able to adapt to local paradigms of information organization, we will have opened up the web to millions of people who can truly benefit from the lessons hidden in its inscrutable depths.

Only then will we be rid of the ghost in the machine, and only then will we have achieved the potential of what the World Wide Web can offer.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

The key innovation in Second Life is its underlying grid, says Philip Rosedale

Philip Rosedale is co-founder of Second Life. Here he talks about the technologies that he is excited about.

What’s the coolest technology you’ve seen? What does the future of the internet look like? What technology is getting you excited right now?

These are questions I get asked all the time. It’s flattering that people think my answers may be any more insightful than the next guy but the answer might surprise some people.

Let me explain.

When we created Linden Lab and launched Second Life it created a real buzz among individuals and businesses.

A lot of companies started doing some pretty cool stuff in there, from demoing prototype cars to running educational seminars and recruitment fairs.

But beyond the big picture stuff it was often the tiny, almost imperceptible tweaks which people made to the virtual world that got me most excited.

One guy created virtual “wind” – a movement of virtual air – bestowing a genuine atmosphere within Second Life. Come on, that’s cool. It might not change the world but it does get you thinking.

Good foundation

And this is the very heart of the matter. At Linden Lab we created a Grid, a platform on top of which people could develop whatever they wanted. A total blank canvas on top of which the only limitation was their imagination.

So, what’s the coolest technology I’ve seen? Anything born from the right we should all have to innovate. Philip Rosedale

Giving people licence to develop, to build, is incredibly empowering and the root of real innovation. This grid model is all about democratisation of innovation and now as a society we have to look at how we take that and make it truly democratic by engaging with the digitally excluded.

In the Western world innovation has happened at an incredible pace since Thomas Edison flicked a switch in 1880. Next came the first computers, IBM, the home PC, Microsoft Windows, the internet, Apple Macs, broadband, Google, the iPod, wi-fi, Second Life.

If you blinked during the last 10 years then the world changed around you while your eyes were closed.

And that spirit of innovation will continue in the West but we haven’t even tapped into the potential of more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

We’re a planet using only 20% of its brain. The echo of Edison’s innovation has not yet reached all corners of the Earth.

And this is what’s getting me excited right now. Think of the potential and think of the change that technology could bring about in some of the world’s poorest areas.

And for how we make this happen we need to look at another type of grid – the electricity grid.

Unlike the Grid I’ve already spoken about the electricity grid is fundamentally restrictive. It’s an obstacle to development and to innovation and to democracy.

Small-scale power generation is starting to take off.

But I genuinely believe the decentralised production of electricity will change the world; will provide that platform for unbridled development.

Right now the price of putting solar cells on your roof in a sunny area has dropped to the point where the monthly payments for the cells is balanced out by the cost benefit of the electricity generated.

Power play

This is an important tipping point. It’s exciting.

In the coming years, people are going to start coming off the electricity grid in considerable numbers. Incremental drops in pricing will be driven by new technology and manufacturing will bring cheap electric power to remote areas of the world.

Digital exclusion will become less of a problem, especially with the work of charities like Computer Aid International taking reconditioned PCs to Africa and getting children to experience a faster pace of education and learning tools that take them to a whole new level.

Bringing these populations online will only be possible with the true democratisation of the electricity supply.

At a time when the West is looking at alternative fuel and power supplies for reasons of cost and ecology, the developing world is nearing an opportunity to embrace decentralised power generation as a means to survive and thrive and ultimately to innovate.

The global talent pool is set to boom as incredible minds start to look at world problems through fresh eyes and start to envisage the ways in which technology can make a difference to their lives and their surroundings.

So, what’s the coolest technology I’ve seen? Anything born from the right we should all have to innovate.

What does the future of the internet look like? It looks like a world map where even the furthest corners of the planet are able to get online because of the decentralisation of power generation.

What technology is getting me excited right now? Electricity.

We’ve come full circle but second time around is going to be even better.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

More processors will make computers smarter, says Andrew Herbert

Andrew Herbert is head of Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Here he takes a look at the changes that multi-core computers could usher in.

If you’ve been looking at buying a new computer lately, you can’t fail to have noticed that multi-core technology is the “next big thing”.

The latest PCs have suddenly sprung two cores while servers rejoice in four, and we are promised yet faster computing.

So why the excitement? After all, if a multi-core computer opens a document a millisecond faster than my old PC, it’s hardly going to change my life, is it?

I’d like to suggest that the answer to this question is both yes and no. In altering the way in which we interact with computers, technology has the capacity to become ever-more helpful, and ever-less invasive.

List processing

Before multi-core, the PC was a sequential machine that executed a set series of tasks – much like a flow chart.

The thinking behind multi-core is relatively simple, following the principle that two heads (or four, or 32, or 64) are better than one.

The principle might be simple but it offers a significant change in potential -there are now multiple flow charts being executed and the way they interact is far more exciting.

Today we set computers tasks; tomorrow we will ask them questions and set them objectives. Andrew Herbert

For exciting, also read “complicated”; this presents huge programming challenges as we have to address the immensely complex interplay between multiple processors (think of a juggler riding a unicycle on a high wire, and you’re starting to get the idea).

The pay-off is that your PC suddenly has time on its hands, with one processor doing what you’ve asked it to do and the others free to do other things.

Exploring what these “other things” could be is now driving software research. The effects are difficult to predict, but let’s start by looking at what it might mean for our hardware.

We’re thoroughly familiar with the technology that lets us interact with the computer, but we’re still not comfortable with it. Voice, gesture and handwriting recognition have been available for a number of years but the keyboard and mouse remain by far the most pervasive tools.

The advent of multi-core, however, means this is set to change.

Handwriting recognition systems, for example, work by either identifying pen movement, or by recognising the written image itself. Currently, each approach works, but each has certain drawbacks that hinder adoption as a serious interface.

Now, with a different processor focusing on each recognition approach, learning our handwriting style and combining results, multi-core PCs will dramatically increase the accuracy of handwriting recognition. So, don’t get too attached to your keyboard.

Clever tools

A computer’s ability to gain this kind of knowledge, and then intelligently apply it, is made possible through the combination of two research techniques: “speculative execution” and “machine learning”.

At the moment my computer is just a tool – I tell it what to do and it does it. This means that when using my computer to book regular business trips, I have to enter my preferences each and every time.

Herbert: Computers could get genuinely useful thanks to multicore

A multi-core computer can learn what I’m like- and what I like- and through speculative execution, start making educated guesses about how I want to travel and what I want to do next. Like the perfect PA, the computer will be able to anticipate and know what I’m about to do, even before I do.

This has important implications in internet search- our window on the world.

At the moment we search based on keywords, so if I want to find a quote that I vaguely remember, which might have been in a book by a particular author, I will enter keywords into the engine – and hope.

With speculative execution I will be able to ask the computer the question directly and it will deliver exactly what I want, not just a list of websites that contain my keywords. Today we set computers tasks; tomorrow we will ask them questions and set them objectives.

Predicting how we will live in the future can be the technologist’s graveyard, but I’m going to have a go. In five years’ time I will walk into my office (I predict there will still be offices) where there will be multiple screens – all an extension of my PC.

There will be a screen on my desk, a whiteboard style screen on the wall and a screen embedded in the surface of my desk. I will be able to manipulate these through my keyboard (despite what I said earlier, I predict there will still be a keyboard!), my voice and my finger tips.

Smart help

The PC will automatically begin communicating with my personal, portable devices – updating contacts, diary information and downloading any pictures I have taken.

When I show my computer a letter that arrived in the post, it will immediately scan it into the digital world.

The computer will know that on most mornings I check my e-mail, look at BBC Online and access an Excel spreadsheet to check my lab’s accounts- all this will be ready and waiting for me.

We could be spending more time talking to computers

I will deal with my e-mails by voice, with the computer intuitively knowing addressees when I mention their forename. Technology will just “happen”.

Sounds good, doesn’t it, but what’s the catch?

Computers that learn from and anticipate humans may remind some of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, running amok in the deeps of space. But my answer is that technology is amoral.

I can use a spade to dig a hole or to hit someone over the head with – the choice is mine (and for those wondering, I would use it to dig a hole, mostly).

Our objective, as computers play a greater role in our lives, is to ensure that they are imbued with human concepts such as ownership, privacy and personal freedom. What is important is that as humans, we are aware of technology’s implications and given choices on how we interact with it.

At its worst, technology today can be invasive as well as pervasive – clumsy and unwieldy it can demand a lot of our time and attention.

My vision of a multi-core future is not some science fiction extravaganza where we use a vast array of gadgets in a world substantially different from our own. In fact, my hope is almost the exact opposite – I see the potential of multi-core computing being the ability to take the hard edges off technology.

In my future, technology will be less visible, more human and simply make our lives easier.

About Technology – The Tech Lab

About Technology –

The challenge to understand the brain could be helped by computer models

Professor Steve Furber is one of the pioneers of the UK’s computer industry. He was principal designer of the BBC Micro that gave many of Britain’s current computer bosses their first taste of technology. He has now turned his attention to mimicking the human brain.

Most of the frontiers of science, from particle physics to radio astronomy, seem to be concerned with the incredibly small or the unimaginably large.

But there is a lump of stuff inside each of our heads that we could easily hold in our hands and look at, yet we have no idea how it works.

We know that our brains are built from a hundred billion small cells called neurons, and these cells sit in a biochemical bath and send electrical pulses to each other every so often.

It is a strange thing to realise that everything that we see, smell, hear, think, dream and say – indeed our very being – is just a consequence of those billions of cells inside our heads going “ping” from time to time.

We now have a fair idea of how those neurons are organised into major functional areas within the brain. Hi-tech scanners give us ever-more detailed glimpses into which brain areas are active, and in what order, when we receive particular inputs or think particular thoughts.

But we still have no idea of the spike “language” that the neurons use to talk to each other, nor how that spiking activity becomes coherent thoughts and actions.

Brain power

Prof Furber is currently looking at ways to mimic human brains.

Understanding the brain has turned out to be far more difficult than anyone imagined. Early AI focussed on symbolic logic, which computers are very good at but people aren’t so that wasn’t really getting at what it means for a human to be intelligent. Can we expect computers ever to begin to emulate the achievements of human intelligence?

There are two ways to look at this question: Firstly, to ask when computers may be powerful enough to simulate the detailed workings of the brain, to which the answer seems to be that we aren’t there yet, but we are getting close.

Secondly we can ask when we might know how to program those computers to perform this task, to which the answer is still unknown.

At the dawn of the computer age 60 years ago machines were a million million times too slow to model the brain in real time, but Petaflop supercomputers have closed that gap.

The programming challenge remains immense, though initiatives such as EPFL’s Blue Brain project in Switzerland are addressing this head-on.

That is gathering huge quantities of biological data on the types and behaviours of neurons, and building high-fidelity biological models on a high-end IBM supercomputer.

As for improvements in computer software that might emerge from the quest to understand the inner working of the brain, the potential for improvement in natural language interfaces is almost limitless. Steve Furber

Neurons are very complex living cells that have evolved to perform an information processing function within a living organism.

One of the great unknowns in understanding the brain is the extent to which the finer details of a neuron’s structure is important to its information processing function, as opposed to being required to stay alive, maintain chemical balance, take up energy, or just being an artefact of evolution and the way the cell has developed within the organism.

Model makers

At Manchester we make the assumption that most of the phenomena we are interested in arise at the network level, so we discard much of the biological detail in favour of modelling larger numbers of simpler neurons. But, as the famous paraphrase of Einstein insists, “everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

How far can we go before we risk losing some vital aspect of the neuron’s information processing function? This question will only be answered as we begin to understand the operational principles at work inside the brain – as we begin to learn the language of the spikes.

Researchers around the world are using computer models to test the hypotheses of brain function that have emerged from work by neuroscientists and psychologists. What today’s “brain modelling” computers offer is a platform that enables those models to be scaled up and to become increasingly accurate, and to enable scientists to get ever closer to the “big picture”.

WHAT IS THE TECH LAB? The world’s leading thinkers give a personal view of future technologies

Where will this research lead us? The ultimate goal is the Grand Challenge of understanding the architecture of brain and mind but this is still some way beyond our grasp.

In the nearer term we can expect to see a growing understanding of brain subsystems, and from that understanding new computational approaches will emerge with applications in control, robotics and elsewhere.

Data damage

The benefits of success in this research endeavour will be considerable, in directing therapies for brain injury and mental illness (it’s always easier to fix something when you know how it works) and in the design of computers and computer software that will be less stupid and more able to cope with component failure (the adult brain loses a neuron a second without obvious ill effect).

We have recently begun collaborating with psychologists to build a computer model of normal human language capable of learning to read, comprehend and speak basic English words.

After training the model can be selectively “damaged” in ways that reproduce the patterns of behaviour observed in individuals who have suffered brain damage.

The model will then be used to test the effectiveness of various different speech therapies, and its predictions checked against the results of using those therapies with stroke patients who have language problems.

As the computing platforms used for this work scale up in performance, the accuracy and scope of the models they can support will scale up too, and we hope to gain an ever-deeper understanding of how the brain support language, how it can fail, and the best ways to achieve recovery from those failures.

Research could help those suffering speech problems as a result of serious injury

The need for computers to become better at coping with component failure is underlined by the trends in the semiconductor technology from which they built.

As transistors approach atomic scales there is an inevitable degradation in the consistency of their operation and designers are searching for ways to build microchips that can tolerate high rates of transistor failure.

The brain is an existence proof that it is possible to accommodate high component failure rates without significant loss of functionality, and there is much to be learnt from biology about building reliable systems on unreliable technology.

As for improvements in computer software that might emerge from the quest to understand the inner working of the brain, the potential for improvement in natural language interfaces is almost limitless.

At present you have to put a lot of effort into learning how to use your computer effectively. Imagine if this changed around, and it became the computer’s job to learn how to be useful to you, just like a good human personal assistant. This would require the computer to build a model of how you – and in particular your mind – work.

The fear you may have of humanoid robots taking over the world as a result of computers approaching the capability of modelling the human brain can be dispelled relatively easily.

Any computer capable of running these models will be large, expensive and very power-hungry for the foreseeable future.

Biology will continue to offer the cheapest way of making portable, low-power brains (in highly dangerous embodiments) for a long time yet.