I heard this sentence from a friend of mine, Andrea Granelli, in a nice talk he gave last Saturday urging for a broader view when looking at Smart Cities and the application of technology in general.

A technology marvel brought some problems along with it… (Credits: www.cagle.com)

Indeed, it is easy to provide examples of new problems created by technology, by evolution,… by anything, religion included!
If you search on Google for the sentence “problems created by technology” you get 256 million pointers (I didn’t check them all…), a clear sign that it is a topic that has attracted attention (and now after this post there will be 256 million plus one).

However, this is not just an issue for modern technology and innovation, and this is why I liked so much the comment of Andrea. It is a general issue related to whatever is shifting the present environment (and mindset)  to a new one, possibly solving present problems but inevitably creating new ones.

Hence, it is naive to present technology, and solutions, as silver bullet solving once and for all any issue. You might solve present ones but because of that you open the door to new ones. The point, therefore, is not to fight resistance to evolution by declaring that whatever comes in is better but to be ready to face what the new will bring along. This kind of attitude rather than hampering innovation may actually ease its adoption by taking on board those that are pointing out its downsides.

I am attending a meeting this Saturday on the Digital Agenda and I listened to several talks and discussion on how important Internet and the Digital Society are for the well being at Country level. The people at the meeting where seasoned (read “old”) guys like me and they all looked convinced of what they were saying.

Yet, although I concurred in what they said, something made me feel uneasy, there were bells ringing but they sounded fake.

And then it hit me. There is a cultural divide and an economic divide standing in the way as a giant, but invisible boulder, blocking the path so clearly depicted.

Just few days ago Internet went down (the access to Internet) in my home and my two kids still living at home got sad, angry and then “moved out” of the home looking for connectivity “for free”. For them Internet is an essential component of their life, something that cannot be separated from it. As in the cartoons here (credits: http://cramdodge.com/life-when-my-internet-doesnt-work/) there is little life left if Internet is not accessible.

Notice also that for them “free Internet” is the same as “Internet”. They both have a smart phone providing access to Internet for free up to 1 GB (which means I pay for that) but living on Internet requires many more GBs. Hence, from their point of view no access to Internet means life stands still!

In trying to fix the problem I discovered that the issue was a flooded pipe causing a lower impedance in the twisted pair connecting all flats in my building. And I discovered I was the lucky one, since other flats started to experience problems a month ago (and still suffer from it). Well, I talk to the various dwellers and I clearly noticed a trend: the level of “anger” was inversely proportional to the age. In a flat there was a web company and they were really angry and told me they were suing the Provider, but they were copying with the failure using wireless access.

This is what I consider one of the real issues facing any Digital Agenda: a culture divide between those in charge of implementing the Digital Agenda that have lived without it and those that are already living in the digital world where the Digital Agenda has already been implemented. It is tough to build something that you are not really experiencing at a cultural level. You always have the escape hatch saying “well, that can wait, you don’t really need it, we can still do as we did,…”.

The second aspect that was often mentioned in the talks is the efficiency that a Digital Agenda will inject into the overall system with great benefits to all. Actually, this is not true!

Inefficiency is a VALUE! There are plenty of companies and individuals that are making money toady because the processes are inefficient. If you leverage what technology can offer to make processes more efficient you are cutting the grass under those companies and individuals feet. And you can bet they are against this. Having an eGovernment for sure decreases the cost of Government but this saving is due to the decrease of clerks! And you cannot enjoy efficiency if you are the one being downsized to create such efficiency.

Over time both these boulders will be removed. It is just a matter of time. We wouldn’t be able to live in a world as it was 200 years ago, and that world had a completely different set of cultures and efficiencies (and ways of thriving on inefficiencies).

The Digital Agenda is not about designing a new world, is about accelerating a transition towards something that already exist.

As we are flooded by new products, million of apps and technology gadget it is natural to have the perception that we are living in a technology driven era representing the peak of evolution and deriving from this perception that we have reach the end of the road.

Actually my feeling is that we have just started with ICT, Information Communications Technologies.

We are in the situation our ancestors where when the cuneiform writing was invented. There they were, at the peak of a technology evolution that managed to convert sounds voiced by people into signs that can be preserved on clay for thousands of years, and can be transported so that other people could make use of that information at later times, in far away places.
Could have they imagined that such a conquest was but a tiny step in what would become a world where many other technologies would expand those revolutionary possibilities of information storage and asynchronous fruition? A world where one could write on any surface, could use writing devices without even thinking about them. A Society that leveraging on that writing invented bureaucracy, laws, finance and of course newspapers, books….

Can we imagine what ICT is leading to?
Where the invention of writing made possible the “persistence” of thoughts, the invention of ICT makes possible the virtualization (digitalization) of atoms and with it the slashing of cost. It virtualizes books into bits that can be moved, duplicated, transformed at a cost approaching “zero”. It virtualizes (more and more) objects by creating mirror images of them that can be manipulated irrespectively of their location and at a minimal cost.

Even our own self is in the process of being virtualized. The implications are so unexpected that we are unable to see them today.

As 4,000 years ago people had to look for a clay tablet and a reed to write down their thoughts or convert voice into something that could be preserved and today we write on the back of a napkin in a careless way without giving a thought to the pen we have seamlessly retrieved from a pocket and without even looking at what we are writing, so today we look for a tablet or a smartphone to access services and information whilst tomorrow the idea of a tool for accessing information, services, and to provide storage and computation will have disappeared from the perception of our grand-grand children.

Since Galileo and the coupling of science and technology the human race is living in an exponential time, so it won’t take 4,000 years to create the gap we have now with respect to the Sumerians. 50 years will do.

I am here at the India Global ICT Forum 2013 in New Delhi, listening to what Innovation means in India and how practical creativity leading to biz and well being is stimulated by the Government. Here a few snapshots I like to share with you.

One thing that impressed me is a nation wide program, in India, to create a data base of biometric identification of all Indians, that is over a billion people, based on finger prints and iris recognition. Interestingly the business motivation is to provide a way to cut frauds (from a Government point of view) making sure that subsidy goes to the person that was intended to be the recipient. At the same time this nation wide person authentication becomes the platform for any business where identity is required.

The project is not just about creating a data base and populating it, nor limited to provide a standard set of APIs to access the identity information.

It is about developing more effective (and affordable) technologies for capturing biometric parameters, analyzing them and make sure of minimizing false positive and false negative.

The expectation is that being able to manage such a huge identity set will create a business opportunity for India to export these technologies.

Whilst one speaker insisted in better education an investor angel said that in his experience the less educated a person is, the more likely he is to become a successful entrepreneur. Those getting Masters and Doctoral degrees are usually looking for security, they do not have the right entrepreneurial spirit!

ICT is a winner-take-all business. One need to fund companies that are able to create the market, not those that aim at competing in an existing market.

A representative of the South Korean Government outlined their plan:

• 90% of population reached by 1 Gbps by 2017
• beginning of 10 Gbps in the mass market
• massive coverage of urban areas with free wifi hotspots
• eGovernment for free to all mobile phones (no charge in using a phone to access Government services)
• Nation wide commitment to prevent hacking and cyber crime on mobile

A representative of Bangladesh explained how ICT can change the life of people and the economic fabric by creating a brand new banking system. In Bangladesh only 22 million people have a banking account, but 99 million people have a cell phone. These latter represent 68% of the population and this figure is rapidly growing.

They can now open a cell phone mobile account by taking a picture of themselves through the cell phone, this is associated to four digits fingerprint that is managed by the Telecom Company along with a voice digital signature. The combination of these biometrics (in different situations) is the passport to access banking services. Notice that a good percentage of people in Bangladesh still do not know how to read and write, but they know how to operate a cell phone.

The transaction price is about 8 paisa, that is one third of the cost of a voice call, hence really affordable.

In India 346 million kids are in the primary and secondary school age but only 220 million are actually going to school. Also, it has been observed that the quality of education (and teachers) decreases as distance from a major city increases. Good teachers do not want to teach in rural areas.

Hence Education is a crucial strategic priority for India and the approach is to use ICT through “frugal innovation”, that is by dramatically reducing ICT cost so that it can become pervasive. Now they have a computer for school, Aakash selling for 2,500Rp (less than 50$) based on the microprocessor used by Apple for the first iPad. At that time (2010) it cost 38$, now it cost 4$.

For connectivity they use GSM making sure to format content in such a way that a few kbps are enough, so that the data service can be provided for free.

Nature has kept evolving for at least 4 billion years on Earth, transforming random interactions into progressively more complex “random but probabilistically directed” interactions that all together create emerging behaviours that in turn increase probability and in a way decrease randomness.

The basic steering force in this evolution can be seen as Darwin said “the survival of the fittest” or as other biologists put it “the success of the most adaptable”. A physicist would probably say “the drive towards lower and more efficient power consumption against the second law of thermodynamics”.

Indeed, if we look at biological systems we see an amazing success in minimising the power requirements, from the flight control system of an insect that selectively activates just what’s needed in a specific moment to the automatic temperature control in termite nests.

A network of hundreds or thousands of dissociated mammalian cortical cells (neurons and glia) are cultured on a transparent multi-electrode array. Activity is recorded extracellularly to control the behavior of an artificial animal (the Animat) within a simulated environment. Sensory input to the Animat is translated into patterns of electrical stimuli sent back into the network. (Credit: Thomas B. Demarse et al./Autonomous Robots)

Engineers are trying to reduce as much as possible, nowadays, the power budget in their systems and the overall power budget in system aggregation. This latter is much more challenging since the aggregation results from a multitude of systems, each one optimised but those optimisations when aggregated do not necessarily result in an overall optimisation. We need to move from local optimisation to an overall optimisation and that requires that each individual system can evolve and adapt over time. A very big challenge indeed. So why not learn from Nature that had billion of years to perfect strategies and went through billions of missteps eventually coming to good solutions?

This is what many scientists are actually doing. More specifically, this post is originated by having read a news from the National Science Foundation reporting on the work of a team at the   Real Power and Intelligence Systems Laboratory at Clemson University.

This is a team of neuroscientists that have decided to approach the problem of controlling the complexity of electrical grids using live neurones grown in a culture dish. By leveraging the ability of neurones to process complex data (and understanding patterns) the neuroscientists hope to create a “smart grid”.

According to Venayagamoorthy, the team lead researcher:

“What we need is a system that can monitor, forecast, plan, learn, make decisions. Ultimately, what we need is a control system that is very brain-like. The brain is one of the most robust computational platforms that exists. As power-systems control becomes more and more complex, it makes sense to look to the brain as a model for how to deal with all of the complexity and the uncertainty that exists”.

Our understanding of “our” brain is still very crude, although we know so much more than just few years ago. In the next few years, within this decade, there is a strong consensus by scientists that we will be able to understand most of the fine mechanisms regulating the way our brain manipulate the information coming from our senses, compute it and store it generating thoughts, perceptions and emotion.

A memory implant to stimulate the brain for activating long term memory processes.

Through implants we will be able to detect what is going on and “help” the brain to process information. This clearly opens some very positive possibilities but it also brings us into unchartered worlds.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist working at the University of Southern California, is working on something that just few years ago classified him as a looney: helping the brain to convert short term memory into long term memory. All our experiences are temporarily stored in what is called a short term memory, short term because in the space of a few minutes, hours sometimes, it vanishes and we forget. That is, unless our brain has been able to move those memories into a different space (not a different “place”) aptly called “long term memory”. This is accomplished by the hippocampus an area on the lower part of our brain.
A person suffering from Alzheimer or who had a stroke affecting the hippocampus loses its capability of creating a long term memory, which means that he lives in the present, he has no “past”. A terrible situation if you think about it.

What Theodore has been working on has been trying to understand how memories are transformed from short to long term. He felt he understood a bit and then he moved on to experiment. He, and his team, developed a chip that can mimic the workings of neurones and then set up an implant (shown in the photo) to detect neuronal activity and to stimulate neurones.

He has proved that his mathematical model of what causes the transfer of a short term memory into a long term memory works well, and that was demonstrated by stimulating the neurones of rats and monkeys and showing that such a stimulation increases the capability to retain memories (i.e. they become long term memories).

In an interview, reported in the article linked to this post, Theodore says that what once was a pure, and unbelievable speculation, now is scientific work and the question is no longer if we will ever be able to increase our brain memory capabilities but it is about when we will succeed.

The first goal is to address the disabilities of those suffering from Alzheimer or to overcome the impairment provoked by a stroke. And again, it is no longer a matter of speculation but of making it happen soon.

A friend of mine just sent me an email of concern, after the data published by several info providers on the growth of WhatsApp and other short message services at the expense of the SMS offered by Telcos.

Actually, the fact that data based messages would have grown significantly is no news. Already three years ago the forecast was quite clear (see graphics).

Credit: http://news.netsize.com/2012/05/16/thumb-culture-and-ott-hazards/

What was wrong in this forecast (published at the beginning of 2012) is that already by the end of 2012 OTT messaging services overtook Telecom SMS! According to Informa, the average of 2012 was 19.1 billion OTT SMS vs 17.6 Telcos SMS.

This year, 2013, the expectation is that Telco SMS will basically stay flat whilst OTT SMS will reach 41 billion a day, that is they will double the Telcos SMS. And in the coming years we are likely to see a decline of the Telco SMS, and hence the vanishing of revenues (that are already suffering from the competition resulting in lower margins…).

I guess this is unavoidable.
However, the good news is that SMS are morphing into a new way of communications, that is the continuous presence in the cyberspace. I can see that in the coming years the generation of messages will be partly voluntary (as it is today) and partly a side effect of “being alive” and part of a community.

Google glasses (and many other devices) are bound to become common and their result is to bring each on of us in the web, in their social and biz circle. Hence, many more messages, clips, context sharing…

The game has just started. I feel that the Operators by providing secure and trusted environment can make a valuable proposition that can “top” the one of the “over the Top”. But this requires shifting gear and be part of a new world where connectivity is a given, and the value has shifted from the communication infrastructure to the communication fabric weaving together like a quilt ambient and contexts.

4k televisions have now hit the market, at least in some parts of the world and rumours have it that Apple is considering a new line of products – an iTV- based on 4k standard.

What we are missing is content. There is some content in the movie industry filmed in 4k (actually the cinema standard is 4k) but the transmission capacity required to bring that content to your home is scarcely available (it basically requires a fibre to the home connectivity to bring the 100 Mbps required – slightly less, actually, but in that range) and DVD and Blue Ray are out of the question.

Actually we do have sensors able to pick up video with 4k resolution: the ones in our digital cameras. 4k means 8Mpixels resolution and that is well within the range of most consumer cameras today, at a price that is often as low as 100$!

True, most cameras will not be able to support a 25 frame per second filming at an 8Mpixels resolution but we know that the microprocessor industry is just there to produce faster and faster chips.

This Compact Flash support 4k resolution recording

What we are still missing is a flash memory that can store at the hight bit rate required for 4k filming. Actually, that is what we “were” missing, because Toshiba announced at the end of 2012 a new series of Compact Flash able to support 4k resolution recording and yesterday they have started selling them.

According to their press release:

“The EXCERIA PRO™ CF cards integrate Toshiba’s high performance NAND flash memory and specially developed dedicated firmware. They achieve a read speed of 160MB/s and write speed of 150MB/s⁴, the highest level yet reported.

The new cards are compliant with the CompactFlash Association (CFA) standard CompactFlash^® Specification Revision 6.0 and compatible with the UDMA7 high speed interface, ensuring they can support high performance DSLRs to the full. The cards are also compatible with the latest Video Performance Guarantee standard, VPG-20. VPG-20 secures Full HD video capture streams at a minimum write speed of 20MB/s for compatible host devices and recording media. VPG-20 enables high quality Full HD video capture at high frame rates with no dropped frames.“

Hence I feel that a real push to 4k will not come from the Majors but from each of us. By 2015 I expect many televisions will be 4k and many of us will be using them to watch our own clips.

3D printing is already being used in health care for skin and more recently bones. Scientists have promised that by the end of this decade technology will allow the printing of whole organs. And, looking at the news appearing on scientific journals it looks like they are going to make it.

Cross-section of multi-cellular bioprinted human liver tissue, stained with hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) (credit: Organovo)

In a NewScientist article we can read that Organovo, a California company, has announced the availability of  liver tissue printed using a 3D printer (and related software). It is the first time that a perfectly working liver tissue has been created.

The photo on the left hand side shows the liver cells and the space between the cells that is formed by cells that are on the internal lining of blood vessels.

So far Organovo has managed to create a thin layer of liver cells half a mm thick and 4 mm in length. It has been obtained by growing hepatocytes and stellar cells in culture and then using them as the “ink” for the 3D printer that has created the liver structure (also inserting the lining to allow perfusion). The 3D printer prints one layer over the other, a total of 20 of them, creating the correct 3D structure.

Up to now aggregates of liver cells where all what was available to researchers studying the effects on drugs “in vitro”. Those aggregates, however, are not really working as a liver and survive for just two days.

On the contrary, the liver tissue created by Organovo behaves like a normal liver, processing metabolites and producing albumin, cholesterol and a few enzymes and can function normally for 5 days. This is ideal for researchers experimenting the effects of drugs.

The company is selling this tissue to pharmaceutical company but the long term objective is to produce a normal liver for transplant. The idea is to use a few cells, still working properly, from the person needing a new liver and culture them till there is a sufficient number to “print” the brand new liver.

If this is likely to require at least 10 years, they expect to be able to produce a part of a liver that can be implanted to supplement the fading functionality of a compromised liver.

Last century medicine made organ transplant possible. Not all of them, of course. The brain transplant remains out of the question (also because this should be better called body transplant since you feel the “self” through the brain, change the brain and you will become a different self…) and will remain so for several decades…

A rat kidney depleted of all kidney cells. What remains is the collagen structure.

In many cases organ transplant has become a routine, there are over 65,000 transplant in the world every year (for US statistics up to 2008 click here) and kidney transplant top the list. However, the number of people waiting for a transplant largely exceeds availability, In addition, transplant involves risk of rejection that are lowered by daily use of immunosuppressant drugs.

Hence the quest for alternative solutions to transplant from donors.

In this century, and most likely by the end of this decade, we will see transplant of organs using artificially created ones that use cells of the person being transplanted. This will solve once and for all the problem of histocompatibility, since the cells implanted are from the patient himself.

Scientists have just announced a successful creation of a rat kidney through a procedures that use the kidney (a faulty one) from the rat that is being stripped of all its cells. What remains is a collagen structure (shown in the first photo) that can be used to create a brand new kidney.

The procedure calls for taking a few cells from the patient that still work fine, taken from the other kidney, or, but this is further down the lane, and was not used in this experiment, taking stem cells and driving them to become kidney cells. These cells are implanted on the structure and the whole is immersed in a nutrient liquid where the cells multiply colonising the structure that becomes a brand new functioning kidney.

A brand new functioning rat kidney

You can see the result in the second photo.

The scientists at the Mass General Hospital have demonstrated that this procedure indeed works. They managed to create a brand new kidney and implant it with success in the rat.

Clearly, as anything in medicine, this procedure will require several more years of experimentation before it can be applied to humans, and a few more before becoming an everyday procedure.

However, the path is clear and we can really expect that in the next decade kidney transplant will use artificially created kidneys.

For other organs, like the skin and some bones, this approach is already a reality.

In the case of skin, there is no structure issue, but in case of bones a 3D structure is required and first human transplants of artificial bones have been done with success last year.