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.

Once in a while you stumble upon a piece of text that you wrote, in your mind, a few years earlier and it feels good to see your thoughts in print.

Hypercities let you learn the past from what you see around you.

This is the case when I read yesterday this article dealing with the Future of Education.

The author reflects on the fact that the MOOCs, the new wave of using on line courses to learn, are just the same classroom we have been used to in the past. The only difference is that rather than going to a brick and mortar classroom you can stay home and follow the lessons.

I don’t think this is completely true, as an example you are completely free to roam in the cyberspace and get much more info, and compare it, than it ever was the case in a classroom.  However, there is quite some truth into that view.

The author then goes on considering how technology could reinvent learning. What if, and this is what brought me back to the study we did at the Future Centre few years ago, you use your cell phone, or whatever can connect the real world around you to the virtual one on the Web? You would be looking at a cityscape and you will get views on what that city was, and how it changed. You might even see, and hear, people talking in 1789 in the street of Paris during that faithful July in front of the Bastille. And one can imagine that what one person sees might be different from what another person may see at that same location, depending on his interest and “major”.
The question, is not technology: we know we can do that today and more so in the future. The question is the effectiveness of learning using this approach. Here I am no expert, but I have to say that I can easily see that this way of learning may very well flank the traditional one and bring several benefits.

We are seeing a number of projects that are leveraging on cell phones and use augmented reality as a way to deliver information, possibly customising it to the viewer.

Whether you agree or not, something is changing and reading that article surely makes you think.

Courses on Robotics at Coursera

MOOCs, Massive Open On line Courses, are changing the education world, particularly in those areas where education is not very good. Nowadays students all over the world have the possibility to enroll into top courses given by the very best teachers in the world. It is, to a certain extent, like attending Berkeley, … and Stanford and the MIT and Cambridge or Oxford, and all at the same time. Of course, without the tuition fees.

I have to say I got curious and I enrolled into a course at Stanford, on Data Analytics, and I should say that it was really good, at least for the first few lessons. Then I gave it up because it was not just good, it was really demanding! I had to fill in forms, show the practice I did, take basically one exam at any lesson to move on to the next one. It was really a serious commitment and I decided I did not have time for that. Still, it reinforced me the feeling that these courses are for real.

Of course, you need to have a good Internet connection and this is not a given in many parts of the world. Just last week I gave a talk at the St. Joseph College in Kerala, India, and I discovered that they had very good Internet connection. Actually, THEY said the connection was very good. It was as good as the one I have back home in Italy, but mine is serving just my home, their is serving the whole college! Just imagine what a student can do in such places if he tries to follow a course from his home. Connectivity is still a dream to full fill in many parts of the world.

Because of this, projects like this one from Microsoft make perfect sense.

They aim at blending real classroom in bricks and mortar where it is feasible to provide connectivity with on line open courses given by the best professors in the world.

So it is clicks and bricks.

This makes the access to high quality education economically sustainable in most Countries. At the same time it will change the way we think about education, and these changes are in synch with changes we are seeing, and will be seeing more and more, in the biz environment with a seamless interplay of bits and atoms.

You will still go to bricks, at the client premises, but you are likely to bring bits along, not just the ones of documents in your computer but also, and more important, the ones of your colleagues brains that will become available through clicks on the customer premises.

Another important twist is the evolution towards continuous education. This will be more and more required to counteract the depreciation of knowledge over time. With a half life in many areas that has now approached 5 years (and keeps shrinking) one has to keep “updating” his knowledge to remain on the leading edge, and in a world that is more and more competitive and demanding, where industry and their organisational capabilities diminish, leaving the single person to take care of his own education and training, continuous education will become a must.

A team of researchers at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz have developed a flexible, transparent, fluorescent panel that can be used to detect images and motion, thus making it possible to support a touch-less interaction.

The panel, as shown in the photo on the left, is really thin, made up of fluorescent polymers. When lights hit the polymer the blue component activates the fluorescence (transforming it into a green light) and the resulting light hits sensors, photodiodes, all around the edges of the panel. As light travels across the panel it dims and a computer can process the different intensity detected by single photodiode to reconstruct the image, in a process that is similar to the one  used to create images with the computer tomography (CT) scan.

You can read the full explanation clicking on the link or get a broad idea here.

What I find interesting is that this panel is so cheap that it can be used and disposed, it is so flexible that one could imagine to wrap it around a can of beans and use it as an interface, and it is so powerful that can only get better over time by using better programs to process the information captured by the photodiodes. Clearly improving the photodiodes would lead to better resolution but that is also increasing the cost.

This is just another step towards the fulfillment of a vision where everything will be able to interact with us.

We had today the Kick off of the first ICT LABS Master School in Stockholm and I addressed the students with these remarks that I like to share with you:

We live in a world that is full of promises, because it is changing a lot and in any change there lies opportunities.

>>> half time knowledge today is 5 years and getting shorter. In 5 years time what you know today will be of marginal value.

>>> You are likely to have 5 different jobs in your life and 4 of them have not yet been invented yet.

>>> Universities should teach for creating people able to change the world, since the world will be continuously changing and university should create the leaders of change, not the followers!

Three main forces are reshaping the world:

1. Technology: Moore’s law doubling every 18 months, meaning in the next 18 months we will see changes of the same magnitude of what happened in the last 50 years. You were not here 50 year ago but believe me, it was quite different! The equivalent of SMS was telex and it cost a thousands fold as much and took a day to be delivered.
   Moore’s law will hit physical barriers in 400 years from now… Nothing to worry about “now”! However, the real barrier to Moore’s law are in economics. It is costing more and more to go smaller and smaller on silicon. We are actually seeing today a slow down (a delay of 2 years in the shift to extreme ultraviolet light for etching wafer.
   At the same time we see a faster than Moore’s law evolution in genome sequencing, 2 times faster and accelerating. And make no mistake: this is the new ICT.
   The genome code is even better than Java: you have a library of applets that has been refined over 3 billion years of testing and experimentation…
   Hybrid of bio and silicon are already being used.
2. Economy: the cost of invention and innovation is going down. Transaction cost, that is how much it cost to involve different players on a value chain, is plummeting. This is what has enabled thousands, million of youngster to turn their creativity into biz.
   And we have just started. Economic forces in an open competitive market stimulate diversity, differentiation (as it happens in Nature). Don’t be misled by those who speak about convergence. It is all about creating new things that will be selected through the market sieve.
   This is your world. You don’t need enormous capital for doing great things. You need creativity, a sound understanding of technology and economics and the capability to exploit the ecosystem. And here is where the ICT LABS come to play, in supporting you, but they cannot do what only you can do.
3. Crises: there are big issues facing the world, and they go beyond religious clashes, cultural diversity, politics and even economic inequalities. I was at the STS Forum in Kyoto, just few days ago and the focus was on these big looming crises and the way to tackle them.
   The raising sea level will displace 1 billion people in the next 40 years. Along with that the geography of agricultural production will shift. Many of the most productive areas in the world ill be submerged. The warming of Siberia will make agriculture possible where now it is not, but at the same time it will disperse in the atmosphere trillion of tons of methane that is now frozen in the tundra, further increasing the world temperature and decreasing the absorption capabilities of CO2 by the oceans.
   The so called energy crises is real, but it is often misrepresented. Today we use less energy than what is available. However we are using it at different rate in different parts of the world. In Europe we use about 2.5 times the energy available in the whole Earth, were all people on Earth use as much as we do here. In the US they use 4.5 times as much, in the Arabian peninsula 16 times as much. Clearly there are other place in the world where people use much less energy.
   The world is spinning with US consuming, China producing and Germany developing the tools China uses for production. All the rest is ancillary in production and consumption.
   China this year will be using as much energy as US, but the pro-capita level is one sixth of the US. One Chinese uses one sixth of the energy of an American citizen. But this comparison is hiding the fact that a large portion of China energy use is for producing goods for the US citizen. The average Chinese uses one twentieth of the energy used by the average US citizen for himself and you know that energy use is a good way to gauge the well being of a population. We cannot expect Chinese, or any other person in the world, not to increase its hunger for energy.
   We have the technology for increasing energy availability (you cannot produce energy, just transform it so that it becomes easier to use and more affordable) but this does not solve the problem: the more you use energy, the more you dissipate. If we would have to provide all the people the amount of energy being used by the average US citizen the oceans will start to boil, as result of energy dissipation, and this is the second law of thermodynamics. You cannot work around it. And this is a thresholds we may reach within this century, assuming we are really working to increase quality of life everywhere and in particular where quality of life is today very low.
   Hence, the solution lies not in making more energy available but in needing less energy to sustain our quality of life. Nature uses less than one thousandths of the energy we use in a chip to do the same thing. As Richard Feynman said, there is plenty of space at the bottom.
   This is where biotech, bioengineering, nanotech, ICT have to work. And this is the challenge we have when we talk about Smart Energy, as well as Smart spaces, Digital Cities, Clouds, Security and all the areas we are addressing.

So if these are the challenges, or at least some of them, what can the solutions be?

Education is the first answer. Through better education we can hope for solution by harvesting the collective intelligence of human beings. But the feeling is that today’s education is not able to be up to the challenges.

At the STS a specific session focussed on University in the 21st century and there was the clear vision that they have to be different.
Today courses are moving on line. Coursera has attracted 1.6 million students in its classes from all over the world… Someone is even looking far into the future and imagine brains reaching seamless into the Internet with no need for studying thing: get a chip implanted, update it once in a while and all knowledge is within you!

It is still science fiction but the boundaries with science are getting blurred.

However, what is needed is action, people like you that can turn creativity into ideas and ideas into actions to change the world, and create economic wealth in the process.

There was a consensus at the STS that globalization, going abroad, mingling among students and among students and industry is key.

Universities have to become a mingling place, and as knowledge life time shortens we need to have continuous education, and therefore continuous mingling. Learn and create was also mentioned as the crucial role of student at university.

Learning, mingling, creating. Those are the key ingredients of the ICT Labs Master School. Leverage  on it and create your and our future.

Gaming has reached levels of fidelity with reality that the same approaches are starting to be used for simulating real life job. This is true for aircraft piloting, as well as driving cars and more and more in surgery training.

This is the case reported by a paper published by Wolters Kluver few days ago on the use of a simulator for training future neurosurgeons.

NeuroTOuch – National Research Council of Canada

Researchers have developed a brain surgery simulator with 3D graphics able to match what a surgeon would actually see through the microscope used for surgery. The simulator makes use of haptic interfaces shaped as the surgical instruments used during the operation to recreate the exact feeling to the trainee. A consumer PC is now sufficiently powerful to support this kind of simulation and precise force feedback in the interaction.

The graphics make use of the same “engines” being used in games, and also the engagement of the students follows the same paradigm. Students gets points determined on the accuracy and speed of the operation, when they remove cancerous tissue they get penalties if they touch healthy parts of the brain…

Using the gaming paradigm in education (gamification) is now becoming common in several areas, from learning physics and math, to chemist. And it is likely to be adopted also in other subjects.

Take a look at a video clip of the simulator at work (if you are not faint of heart):

I read an interesting article (and you should read it as well) that compares the past with the future of education. What interested me is to see that distant education started over hundred years ago with the advent of an effective postal system! Universities could print their courses material and send it to students all around the Country by … mail, and, I am quoting:

Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed University of Wisconsin historian, wrote that the “machinery” of distance learning would carry “irrigating streams of education into the arid regions” of the country.

Doesn’t it sound like  a sentence someone could voice today referring to the electronic connectivity made possible by Internet?

Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOC, a new acronym to remember) have already seen the participation of over one million students (based on stats from Stanford, Harvard, Priceton and MIT alone). One of the driver for this success is the ever increasing cost of education. In that article there is a cost estimate for a bachelor degree averaging at 100,000$.
Indeed, I remember that one of the motivation to launch remote education for university students in Argentina at the turn of the century (I was there on a World Bank program to bring innovation leveraging Internet) was to make education economically affordable to students living far from Buenos Aires, where everything goes and everything is expensive.

It is somewhat sobering in the general rush towards online education to go back to the “revolution” in the 1920ies, based on correspondence courses, to note that by 1930 that drive was no longer there and on campus study took, again, the upper hand.

Is today’s technology so much better that on line education is here to stay? For sure technology is better, can provide real interactive engagement of students, can support virtual classroom and virtual campus (FaceBook is being used for that). but still doubts remain. The first statistics indicate a far bigger drop-out from on line courses (only 5-15% may finish the course, and that is way lower than an average course on campus, but of course out of an average course on campus at the MIT they get 175 students finishing it, on line out of 155,000 they got 7,000, lower percentage but much higher absolute number).

The jury is still out for the long term success but a few companies are already betting on this way of getting educated. Companies like Udacity, Coursera (for profit) and eDx (non profit, initiated by MIT and Harvard and now joined by Berkeley) are already in the game.

Interestingly, some considers that one of the advantages that will come from these initiatives is the possibility to track every single interaction generated by students thus generating Big Data on the education process as never before. EDx is seen by Harvard and MIT as both an education platform and as a research platform on education. Some researchers are starting to analyse the huge amount of data (when are students stopping a lesson, when do they make comments, what is that confuses them…) and to develop applications for providing customised and better education.

I really wonder if the Industry should’t jump on this new way of educating people, considering their need for continuous education and if they shouldn’t start to provide teaching material for their employee and for others based on the day by day work going on.

May be this can become a way for a much stronger integration of industry and academy in education.

A research program of DARPA, Auto-Text to Knowledge is about to release its results. By the end of this year the project will provide the Pentagon with almost real time summary of articles being published all over the world in many languages. The summary will be in English and will look like one written by a good journalist able to get the gist of what is being discussed in the article and summarizing it for a quick brief.

The point is that no journalist is involved. The work is being done by computers that keep scanning news sites, analyze articles and summarize them, also establishing cross connection to get the overall picture.

We already have programs, like FlipBoard, that are able to do a very good job in extracting articles from many sources and publishing them in an online magazine like form. Now it will be possible to have the summary of articles for a quick scan.

The technology involved is quite complex and push the boundaries of computer intelligence. The computer has to make sense of what is being written and has to put that into a context. Furthermore, to compare what is being written in different places about a certain topic it has to understand the different points of view. There is basically no limit to the sophistication involved (it may go beyond the capabilities of a human journalist….). Think about comparing a political news as reported by a Syrian newspaper (tied to the present government) and one reported by a European newspaper that is opposing the Syrian government. The fact might the the same but the way it is reported may be completely different!

I am really curious to see the extent of “smartness” that is achieved in this very ambitious project. Notice that they target “knowledge” and that is a very tricky area. You understand immediately what knowledge is but as soon as you start looking into it it becomes very fuzzy indeed…

It is clear that this is the way to the future of browsing the web, having automatic oils that can do the browsing and present a summary of what is out there. The question is how can we trust them? Already today Google claims to be transparent in its reporting of links to your query but is that really the case? Having placed a link in the 10256th page is probably the most efficient way of hiding it, rather than disclosing it! Formally they can claim they are giving the information to you, but in practice by choosing what goes in the first (few) page(s) they are steering you to very specific places… and it is their decision, not your.

Tools that will summarize news will pose even greater issues, particularly if they claim to provide us with “knowledge”. New possibilities are around the corner, and new challenges we never considered before will need to be faced.

Telecommunications has become so important in the last century that many Countries have established the principle of it being a basic right to citizen and asking Telecom Operators to provide basic connectivity service under the banner of “Universal Service”. This is reflected in several regulations the incumbent Operators have to comply with.

In this new century wireless communications has taken (is taking) the upper hand over fixed line access and Internet has become a crucial information infrastructure. There are already several voices demanding the extension of the “Universal Service” principle to mobile Internet, particularly in developing Countries where the wireless connectivity is the only one available.

It is right in this line of thoughts that the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project, Wikipedia Zero, to provide free internet access to Wikipedia in emerging Countries.

On April 4th services has started in Uganda, on April 24th in Tunisia and on May 21st in Malaysia.

The access is provided free of charge through agreement with mobile Operators in the Country and let people access the mobile version of Wikipedia in a variety of languages. More Countries are already in the roadmap for this year: Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Serbia, Montenegro and India.

The access to information has the potential of changing the way people live in these Countries bringing them in the Information Societies. Wireless communications has brought people together as never before, in the last century television has made the world aware of its variety and has fostered cultural evolution. Internet and easy access to information, so far hampered by economic affordability is the next step for enabling a better future to billions of people.

We see this happening through many signs, from the free availability of top notch education material on line, produced by the best world universities, to the embedding of free access to Wikipedia in Kindle.

I remember the times when I discussed if a classroom with more than 20 students was too crowded to get an effective education. Well, that was then, now is now. And now Harvard and the MIT have jointly announced the EdX program to “revolutionize” education in the world (their words).

Take a look at the announcement:

The announcement to join forces and provide an extensive set of courses taught by their best professors to be used, for free, by people all around the world, follows a first experiment that has demonstrated a strong interest. A course in electronics has been attended by 120,000 students, ranging from university students to college ones. One  ”pupil” was 80 years old.

The courses are not just nicely presented material. They include tests and ways to find out if you really understood and learnt. We are really moving towards a world where if you just want to do it, you can do it. And this is affecting also the roles we are playing. It used to be that you either were a student or a professor. Now the distinction fades away. My youngest son, 15 years old, was asked to prepare a lesson on rational numbers. I started to hand some help and then I showed him how to use iBook for preparing his lesson and organizing the material. In less than a week he along with a few classroom friends has prepared a book on the topic. And if they decide so that book can be published and become available to anybody in the world (for free or at a price, up to them to decide!). If you look at the result you wouldn’t tell it comes from a few 15 years old students! I can easily imagine millions of book being created in the coming years by students.

Barriers are crumbling as everything becomes accessible and affordable.
At the same time, many players will need to rethink their position in the blue chain since a good portion of it is fading away.How can companies charge for something that is readily available, in quantity and quality, for free? This is the big challenge most industries will have to confront themselves with.