One of the scenario addressed in the Europe 2050 group was the one of data playing a major role in the future of Europe.

Clearly there is no doubt that data volume will keep increasing as well as the digitalization of everything because of sensors, and because everything in everyday life creates data.

What may differ in thirty years time is the way data global architecture is seen. Rather than having data in a Cloud (or several clouds) the vision is to have a global data architecture encompassing the world resulting in massive distributed data bases with some sort of uniform access layer (like we have today a uniform resource locator for Internet). In principle, then, data are located where they are “generated” (not necessarily so but you get the gist, the architectural approach is not to move them somewhere to make them accessible). By being kept local, they can be better protected, also enforcing local policies. Notice that by 2050, most objects, devices, ambient will have an associated massive data base. The “sensors” box in the graphic has to be understood in very general terms as means to generate data.

The other important idea is that this huge world of data will be impossible to understand unless we can imagine that what is actually visible is a status resulting from the interaction of the global data and individual brain, similarly to what is happening within our brains: meaning is not an information nor a collection of information, rather a state of the brain, that in turns is influenced by previous state(s).

Just back from the Digital Futures expert group meeting in Brussel. A (wild) bunch of people met for two days to discuss trends, expectations, likelihood and desirability. As you can imagine plenty of disagreement but also a few common understandings.

Some of the experts had an economic background, some a technical one, others a social interest. The first day was dedicated to identify trends, not all of them but some that people, because of their background and interest, were interested in. This is a list of some of them, in no particular order:

- Search engines are personalized

- Life expectation is 120 years in most places on the Earth (less diversity in life expectation)

- Internet will connect and “contain” information, objects and people

- People will communicate using different means (and tools), no more cell phones

- Innovation gets more regulated and the pace decreases

- Robots are taking the upper hand. They are becoming co-workers, some jobs no longer exist because of them

- Health care is self managed

- Production of many items is at the point of sale, end of outsourcing, transportation is for bits and skill

- Individuals get more power than institutions (dynamic aggregation as response to specific needs)

- public values have changed significantly

- stem cells are used to replace whole organs

- immortality is granted for the digital existence with the emergence of virtual identity over physical identity, and regulations start to address digital euthanasia

Along with these trends other, on the dark side, have been voiced:

- Privacy is a nightmare

- the society is much more individualistic

- computers have not made people’s life better

- the digital divide has widened. The interface to the digital society is seamless for some and completely opaque for others

- economic based on cheap availability of energy is gone

- there has been an intensification of conflicts

- nature is spoiled, desertification has increased and people are fighting for insufficient resources.

More in coming posts.

We have got used to a flat rate on fixed lines and sometimes the price is so low that falls below the perception you are paying anything. As a matter of fact, in many instances we find ourselves connected via free WiFi access, and this has also become a sort of habit.

True wireless connectivity on the move is quite a different story. We are told that the spectrum is scarce, that in order to serve zillions of customers the Mobile Operators have to place caps on data traffic and setting high tariff is the way to go. Still, it is just a matter of time and wireless will go the same way of fixed lines, like it or not.

Freedompop is planning to do just that, sooner rather than later.

Their slogan is ” internet is a right, not a privilege!” and they plan to start offering free mobile connectivity based on LTE and WiMax in the USA beginning July this year to further extend to other countries in the coming years. They will be offering up to 1 GB of data download free per month. Over that thresholds you will have to pay something like 1 penny per MB (the exact price has not been disclosed yet).

Their business model resemble the one of Skype, and indeed one of their founders is related to Skype, generating revenues out of ads and additional services. These latter are actually expected to generate most of their revenues.

Interestingly, Tony Miller, FreedomPop vice president of Marketing, is setting as his goal the commoditization of wireless, something that puts them on a collision route with Mobile Operators.

It is clear, however that as wireless capacity increases over this decade there will be more and more opportunities for these ind of proposition and this will stimulate a diversified growth in wireless use. The trick is to make sure that the increased variety of use can generate enough revenues to compensate for the loss deriving from the commoditization of bandwidth. It is likely that the premium charged for high speed connectivity will be paid only by a small fraction of users and that premium will keep shifting towards higher and higher bandwidth and similarly the cap on data quantity will tend to fade away. Hence the true revenues are bond to derive from service diversity rather than connectivity per se.

Yes, you can do it, and at no cost. Not a full master, but you can follow some of the courses, taught by first class professors. Like the one on Artificial Intelligence. This course has been attended by thousands of students worldwide and it marks the beginning of a new era in top education … at low cost!

As you can still read on Stanford’s web site:

A bold experiment in distributed education, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” will be offered free and online to students worldwide from October 10th to December 18th 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford’s introductory Artificial Intelligence course. The instructors will offer similar materials, assignments, and exams.

The “experiment” has turned out a success, as witnessed by the hundreds of enthusiastic comments by students who followed it.

You can watch the lessons on You Tube.

I can see in just a few years a rapid increase in the number of high level – high quality courses offered on line, most of them for free. Possibly, you will have to pay to give the exams or to access labs. It is not just about getting free education, it is about getting “better” education, indecently of where you live. This can change the world, since we will have bright students, that today are out of the top schools because of distance and money, follow these lessons and become an asset for the whole world.

From time to time I post a news tracking the progress in storage capacity, in line with the never relenting Moore’s law that has given us MB, then GB and now TB of storage in our hard drive (that is a factor of 1 million increase over 25 years, better than Moore’s prediction for chips).

One of these advances is the bettering of Millipede, the idea from IBM to heath up a tiny spot on a magnetic disk to store a bit and keep it stable once the heath dissipates. Some progress was made two years ago by engineering a particular reading head.

Now Seagate has announced the availability of an engineered process for heating a spot as minuscule as 25 nm across, something that allows the storage of 1 TB per square inch, opening the way to 60 TB hard discs.

A rendering of a beam of light heating a single bit

The heath-assisted magnetic recording, as shown in the picture, makes it possible to use very low magnetic field to read and write a single bit, thus leaving the nearby bits unaffected. Only the magnetic area that is being heated, with a laser pulse lasting 1/10000 of a second, can respond to that change in magnetic field.

This requires a magnetic compound made of a platinum-iron alloy, whilst current magnetic disc surface is made with a cobalt-iron alloy.

Although a prototype is now available, it has to fight against the biggest brier of them all: the one of economics. It has to become as cheap as the current technology to find a market. That will take few more years. According to Ed Gage, principal technologist of “head and media” R&D at Seagate, this technology will hit the market in 2015, three years from now with products supporting up to 60 TB of storage in the same package of today’s 3.5″ hard discs and from that moment on it will follow the same curve of decreasing price/increasing performances as we are used to.

That will really bring the Big Data into our homes!

Information permeates everything: from electrochemical information exchanged in networks of neurons, to biological information stored, and processed in living cells, to business information, etc.

Our current understanding of information communication is still based on Claude Shannon’s seminal work in 1948 resulting in a general mathematical theory for reliable communication in the presence of noise..

Claude Shannon

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., wrote in “The Great Challenges for Half Century Old Computer Science”: “Shannon performed an inestimable service by giving us a definition of Information and a metric for Information as communicated from place to place. We have no theory however that gives us a metric for the Information embodied in structure. . .”

Traditional information theory considers the communication studying the capacity of channels connecting two endpoints. This approach should be enhance when considering  wireless networks (e.g. for example see the posts on Edge Networks) where nodes which relay information in a multi-hop manner and time-varying topology.

In this direction, interestingly, this paper introduces the concept of the spatio-temporal relaying: information is carried from a mobile transmitter (space) in its past (time) to a mobile receiver (space) in its future (space). Nodes that forms a path in a spatio-temporal space of information transfer: the quality of the transmission depends on the respective spatio-temporal positions of the transmitter and receiver. So a grand challenge is to extend Shannon capacity formula to multi-source wireless networks.

This may have impactful applications: recent researches on MANETs has led to definition of the so-call “space-time capacity paradoxes”. Theoretically, the capacity of a multi-hop wireless network increases with node density and node mobility in spite of the apparently effect of transmission interference.

Moreover, it has been shown that the theoretical capacity of a multihop wireless network is proportional to the square root of the network size (number of nodes). This  promises enormous wireless capacity for ultra-dense networks ! On the other hand if you try testing this on WiFi networks, capacity has a tendency to decrease with the number of nodes, rather than increase as theoretically predicted. This reflects the fact that the WiFi medium access protocol, primarily designed for wireless LANs, does not scale to multihop networks. A breakthrough seems to be possible here.

In these areas of study, National Science Foundation has established the Science and Technology Center for Science of Information to advance science and technology through a new quantitative understanding of the representation, communication and processing of information in biological, physical, social and engineering systems.

Lifebrowser, creating a timeline of your life bits

Microsoft is working of Lifebrowser, an application that access all information on your computer and your connection to the web, analyzing photos, e-mails, search history and more to identify what can be landmark events. Basically, and this is what Eric Horvitz a distinguished scientist at Microsoft and creator of Lifebrouser say, the application is a personal data miner focussing on you and visualizing the timeline of your life, easing your navigation through your life content.

This is a step forward in the path of My-Life-Bits, the other MS project that set the foundation to store all of your life bits into a computer.

Facebook provides you with the possibility of creating a timeline, but the burden is onto you. With Lifebrowser this happens automatically, and it visualize only those events it feels really matters. This is done using some artificial intelligence but you can control the depth of relevance to make some events pass the thresholds of visibility.

Searching can identify events and cluster them around a landmark. Obviously you can manipulate the landmarks automatically generated by adding some new and deleting others but the application is pretty good in coming up with something reasonable.It is also pretty good in analyzing photos, detecting how many people are there, correlating faces from one photo to another and hence creating relationships. Photos with the associated EXIF (the information about the photo at the time it was taken provided by the camera) are rich information sources allowing to timeline our relationship with other people.

It all depends on the volume and range of data it can mine, of course. Up to few years ago we used to delete (or just lose) data but with storage getting cheaper and cheaper and an easy transfer of data from the old computer to the new one it is more likely that data will keep growing over time. In perspectives, we will be synchronizing data in the cloud and (as Google said several years ago) we will never need to delete data anymore. That will really create a digital shadow of our life and applications like Lifebrowser will come handy.  If you like to try one of these applications, try MUSE. It will look into your email and highlight the ups and down in your life, pop up some forgotten acquaintances, and identify patterns in your communications.

It is really amazing what can be done once you have a huge collection of data, and we have just begun.

The European Commission Information Society area is coordinating research on the future of Internet and more generally the future of our Society in relation to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). From time to time it sets up forecasting studies to get the perception of possible horizons and hence discuss the direction to follow. Now it is starting a project, Digital Futures to:

(1) Create a paradigm change in policy making practices to be more proactive, agile and anticipatory

(2) Inspire future Commission’s strategic choices related to ICT and beyond

and the team of people clustered to work on this project has been given the question:

What do we imagine life in Europe to be like in 2050?  What are the digital futures we imagine will allow us to co-create relevant and adaptable policies for Europe – with citizens, member states, sectors, regions, Europe wide?

I am involved in this group, we will be having the first meeting this week and I’ll blog the ideas that will be popping up. A few are starting to circulate and are published on the web site as “Visionary Statements“. There is one on the possibility of having devices with embedded electronics and NO battery, able to scavenge the energy required from the environment, another envisaging the possibility of mastering the complexity of living systems, … and so on.

I will try to discuss each on them in future blogs, and you are welcome to comment thus participating in the overall discussion.

We’ve got used to using Google Earth and see the world from above at an incredible detail and we have got used to see some street-view in a growing number of areas. THis is something that just 15 years ago was out of the question and most people would have claimed to be impossible since the cost of harvesting, manipulating and storing all those data was staggering. Yet, it happened.

Now Google has moved a step forward by letting us surf the Amazon river and channels to look at the forest and landscape. Just look at the photo here, taken from what I would call not “street view” but “canal view”

True, it is just a fragment of the Amazon basin, and a nano particle of the world. But it is a first step. I am starting to think that in the “not so distant future” we will be able to be “there” regardless of where we are and where “there” actually is. And I also think that we will be able in many cases to be there “right now”, that is see the place as it is at this very moment.

I can easily imagine that most people will be moving around with cameras always on (a bunch of them already do this) and those pictures will be creating an ever changing mosaic of the world that we can access. Applications will neutralize sensitive objects (like changing dresses and faces of people being captured in the photo so that privacy is preserved) but nevertheless this will give us the feeling of ubiquity.

This will become another june platform for business, as maps and Google Earth are today.

DNA: a fractal globule

It looks like a ball of thread, but, mathematically speaking, it is a very special ball: a fractal globule. And it represent the DNA forming a chromosome.

So far we have been used to see the DNA as “the double helix”  a ribbon containing the pairs with the code of life. Now scientists have managed to look at the real 3D structure of the DNA forming the chromosome and have discovered that the ribbon is bended and wrapped to form a sort of sphere, but a very particular one. You might expect it. The various portions of the “ribbon” need to be readily accessible to be copied and this requires that the ribbon part you are interested in is visible. This would not be the case in a normal ball of threads, but this is exactly what happens in fractal globules.

In spite of the very complex appearance, as shown in the figure, each portion of the ribbon can be easily isolated and once used can return to its original position in the ball. It is not knotted (in a way it is similar to the Peano curve).

The result was obtained by researchers from the Broad Institute (Harvard and MIT) and has been published in the Harvard Gazette. To discover the structure of the DNA in the chromosome the researchers have used a new probing technique, HI-C, that basically measure the number of collisions among atoms. Nearer atoms are likely to bounce up more frequently and this is certainly the case for atoms in nearby places on the DNA ribbon. However, there the researchers have discovered many places of high bouncing for atoms that in principle should have been quite distant from one another in the DNA ribbon. By computing the distance in terms of bouncing frequency the researchers have been able to construct the structure of DNA, and it turns out that it is a fractal globule.

What I think is interesting is to notice how processing of data can reveal the inner structure of our world, beyond what is the physical limits of optics. It is sort of magic: detecting quantities and being able to derive meaning out of that. GEt ready to see much more along this lines in our Digital Societies. Data are really at the core of everything.