Continuing on the discussion of the McKinsey’s Advanced Institute document and including the figure of the expected impact on Society, biz and economies.

Credits: McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Advanced Robotics presented in the document emphasise the evolution of dexterity in robots making them more and more useful in a variety of fields, including human prosthetics and fields that today are not considered. I concur in this analyses but I foresee that in the next decade we will have robots (in particular micro robots) interacting one another, in some cases forming a swarm. We will see the first signs of full scale automation based on robots, like the one in smart cities, in the same way that today we see completely robotised management of parcels by Federal Express at their Memphis hub.

- Autonomous and near autonomous vehicles will surely increase their footprint.  We already have autonomous trains (underground trains, airport infra terminal transportation…) and autonomous carts moving in warehouses. The Google car shows that technology exists to make this possible. It is very expensive today but the cost will surely go down to the point of becoming affordable. What I am not sure is the cultural acceptance of this sort of vehicles in the mass market. May be a strong economic crunch due to carbon taxes compounded by increased cost in energy may force its acceptance. However, if I have to bet, I would rather bet on an increased availability of energy in the next decade rather than an energy shortage. If there will not be a sort of forced adoption I doubt that the mass market will move to self driven cars.

- Next generation genomics is about applying the knowledge that is being created, and harvested, through the sequencing of genomes, in humans and in other species, to radically improve health care and productivity for crops and derivative products (like ethanol from plants/algae). Here I am fully in synch. Advances will continue at an exponential rate throughout this decade in the sequencing area, lowering the cost below the 20$ per genome and decreasing the sequencing time to a few hours (or less for specific parts of the genome). In turns this is leading to an amazing increase in data that can be processed statistically to create more knowledge. The embedding on sensors will provide for continuous monitoring of the effect of personalised drugs and will sustain the shift of paradigm towards a customised cure. I also see that the additional knowledge derived from understanding the creation of life will bring new possibility to develop smart materials.

- 3D printing is moving from prototyping to real everyday object printing. This has the potential of changing, or at least affecting logistic and distribution. It can stimulate innovation as more and more the “design” part can be sold by anyone and from everywhere through the Web leaving the implementation part to the local premises. I do not see this as greatly affecting the mass market in terms of killing existing mass production that I feel will remain through the next decade competitive in terms of cost and quality. It might supplement the centralised mass production, like home printers have supplemented the printing factories, but still books and magazines are not printed locally at home.

- Advanced Materials are making significant progress thanks to nanotechnology allowing the design of the physical characteristics of materials and to the embedding of electronics. I see an interesting aspect in the advance of materials in the line of smart materials, materials that have the capability of interacting with their environment creating intelligent, adaptable responses to a variety of stimuli. This can represent the building blocks leading in the next decade to ambient awareness.

More on next post.

I stumbled on a forecast released by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute on 12 technologies that will (might?) transform the world in the next decade in terms of impact on life and economics and I would like to share it with you with some comments from my side.

The 12 technology areas identified by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Mobile Internet is already a reality. What is happening is that in the developing world where no fixed lines are available in the mass market (and most likely will not be widespread and pervasive also in the next decade) the access to Internet will be wireless, hence mobile. What I see, however, is the growth of a “mobile culture” in the sense that everybody will get used to be part of the Internet, will consider Internet (its information, services, links) as an integral part of their life. We will likely forget that we used to have manuals, and we will probably forget that we used to learn dates, how to do, and so on. Quite seamlessly we will just get what we need when we need it. Planning will be a thing of the past, in many areas of the everyday life.

- Automation of knowledge work is something that has been taking place in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution. The point is that we are shifting the meaning of “knowledge” (and intelligence). Centuries ago knowledge was about how to do things and it seemed at that time that a machine could not learn how to do thing, could only be a prosthetic augmenting the “mechanical” capability of a person, nothing more. Well it turned out that machines learned to do things and would increase their capabilities over time to the point of doing certain things better than an artisan, and for sure in larger volume at lower cost. We felt that playing chess was a matter of intelligence and that a machine would not be able to stand against a good player. We were proven wrong and we decided that actually playing chess is not based on “real” intelligence…. We have psychological problem in comparing ourself with machines because we are NOT machines.  Well, in the next decade the major shift in my mind will be the cultural acknowledgment that we ARE machines developed through eons of evolution. The outcome of the Human Brain project will be disruptive in this cultural sense, even more than in a technical sense (enabling new computational structures…). Hence the automation of knowledge work will just be another step in the increased sophistication of machines. What the futurist Thomas Frey  says “One common fallacy is that people are being replaced by machines. The reality is that machines don’t work without humans. A more accurate description is that a large number of people are being replaced by a smaller number of people using machines” does not resonate completely with me. My opinion is that this was true in the past, for the future I would say that the increased intelligence in machines will on the one hand replace people’s intelligence and on the other hand will challenge people to increase their intelligence, thus enabling new opportunities.

- Internet of Things is again already happening under our noses, although under the thresholds of our perception. More and more things are directly or indirectly connected to the Internet and the data generated are being used to create a larger map of connected objects that is virtualised on the Internet. This process will clearly continue in this and in the next decade and indeed I share the feeling that in the next decade we will have a mirroring of most of the objects made of atoms into objects made of bits and residing on the Internet. This mirroring is opening up a new dimension, the one of the Internet WITH things, IwT. We will be able to interact with both the objects made of atoms and the ones made of bits and the boundary of one vs the other will tend to fade away in our perception. Actually, most services will leverage the object made of bits because it is easier, and cheaper, to work on bits.

- Cloud technology is commoditising a good portion of IT and it will likely continue to do so in the rest of this decade. In the next decade what I see is that the pervasiveness of IT will create a global fabric where a significant portion of services and information will be spread out, thinly, at the edges, in objects and devices, in what is starting to be known as “the fog”.

I’ll continue to examine the remaining technology areas in the next posts.

The evolution of networks resources will be linear: more fibers, particularly in metropolitan and distribution networks, deployed according to economic parameters, hence sensitive to regulatory framework evolution; more wireless bandwidth provided by more spectrum availability, better utilization (both of these factors are real but not revolutionary, given the intrinsic limitation of the available spectrum and of the high efficiency already reached in spectrum optimization), and more importantly by the use of unregulated spectrum, low power impulse radio communications, cognitive radio, device based cells dynamically meshed.

Autonomic Systems taking the upper hand

The tremendous increase in smart devices will expand the number of autonomous networks at the edges and these networks will have globally more processing power, more data storage capacity and more communications bandwidth than todays Operators owned networks.

As already pointed out by Antonio in some of these posts, the Cloud is moving from big data centers to myriads of devices transforming itself into a “fog”.
This fog is going to be an integral part of the communications fabric, acting a a bit like the serotonin and dopamine in the brain, as already pointed out in the previous post.

Any new product produced n the fourth decade of this century, as well as any new born human being, will become an integral part of the communications fabric extending it so that we won’t have a communications shortage due to new users. Every user is at the same time also a network provider.

Like in nature’s ecosystem communications become an emerging property of the ecosystem itself. In the savanna there are no trails as long as there are only few animals. But as the number of animals grow, some cluster into herds and communications trails start to emerge and these change the ecosystem communications infrastructure attracting other kind of animals and changing the vegetation. It just takes volumes and then it all falls into place.

I see a similar evolution in the telecommunications fabric.

In the last century (that’s not so long ago…) we have seen the emergence of CAD, Computer Aided Design, systems. Possibly one of the first impressive result was the creation of the Boeing 777 completely on the computer(s) through parallel work by teams in several companies participating in the project.

There were also many other products, of course, that have been developed using CAD systems and more important many areas started to embed CAD systems in their design processes, including Pharma.

Organovo 3D printer for biotissue creation

Now we have the announcement from Organovo, a company that is offering 3D printers for medical applications, of their partnering with Autodesk, a leader in CAD systems, to make possible the design of body parts through CAD.

You can read the announcement to get full details. What interest me most here is the trend we are seeing, particularly since it is repeating itself in several areas and hence reinforcing itself by creating a culture of virtualisation.

We are getting more and more used to work in the virtual space of bits, take all design decisions at that level, cooperate among different partners at that level, analyse potential side effect there and leave the final transformation of bits into atoms to machines (being them 3D printers or robots).

This is going to further lower the transaction cost, is emphasising the value of knowledge since working at the bits level is more about knowledge than about capital availability.

At the same time this easiness makes for an explosion of the offer and decreases the power of an innovation to influence the overall systems. The real influence derives more from changes in the processes (like health care paradigms) than from an innovation.

The Cloud was born out of the possibility of sharing computer resources thus sharing investment and operation cost. Amazon has been one of the first to offer this service and it has been followed by many others.

The Cloud is therefore becoming  commodity but it is now moving to higher sky by providing additional features that, at least for me, were quite unexpected, such as the crowd sourcing cloud.

Enter mechanical turk, a tool provided by Amazon that let people collaborate to a project independently of one another, without knowing each other. Each one works independently and an artificial intelligence based tool, mechanical turk, integrate the individual results in something meaningful.

It is very easy, both to become part of the “crowd” and to exploit the “crowd”.

When you join the crowd you offer your intelligence and when needed you will be asked to perform a certain task requiring basic human intelligence (no rocket science). And you get paid for that, some 12 cents a minute, about 7$ per hour.

There are still many activities that are better done by humans than by machine. For sure one of this activity is to evaluate how a hum a respond to an interface. So if your company is about to launch a product and you want to test your interface, its seamlessness and understandability, you may want to test it on mechanical turk!

It is quite easy to make use of this tool, you just need to register on line, provide the money that will be used to pay the “crowd” (and Amazon) and load your task with instruction. Then lean back and let the “crowd” work on it.

When I checked this morning there were 236,331 HITs available (a HIT is a work item you can take up). And the system let you, as a potential worker, specify what you are good (or interested) at and will thereafter present you with those HITs that match your interest.

Every HIT indicates how much money you can make by participating in that activity. It is just a bit, actually, but most people participate for the pleasure of working on a certain thing. The beauty of the system is that it makes possible to harvest the willingness of individuals and direct it towards a goal.

Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon and Rutgers University have been using this tool to screen various applications on cell phones from the point of view of privacy to provide an intuitive feedback to people using those apps on their possible effect on private data.

New cloud based production infrastructures are just round the corner

Telecommunications have connected the world, people and businesses. They have also made possible new businesses, such as the ones that developed on the Internet. In the coming decade embedded communications will change most businesses by transforming what is now sold as a product into a service. That will lead to a reshape of processes and organizations in many enterprises.

It is also likely to emphasize the transition of telecommunications from being a service to becoming a commodity.

The Cloud will no longer be a tool to decrease IT cost, rather it will become a production and service infrastructure where many transactions will involve, or affect, a variety of enterprises in an ecosystem like marketplace. Tiny changes to a product (the release of  new API) may lead to significant changes in the offer, being this the result of many independent enterprise innovations.

By 2020 many products are expected to:

❏    Deliver functions by connecting to networked providers (servers, cloud, other products).

❏    Change their functionality by updating their software.

❏    Provide customer support via an embedded link to CRM systems.

❏    Be monitored and maintained from a remote location.

❏    Support a variety of service providers and related biz models.

❏    Cooperate with the environment to deliver add on functionalities.

Basically every market segment will take advantage of these capabilities, from car manufacturing to consumer electronics, from airliners (and airlines) to drugs companies, from agricultural products to furniture.

• The embedding of communications in products opens up a large audience to COMSOC. This requires much more attention to vertical markets and to the engineering of the “embedding”.
• The interface aspects are becoming very important as objects become connected and hence can provide a wider variety of functions. COMSOC shall support this area as well.

A world of data being crunched in many ways and many places

As data are becoming the real raw material of the Information Society they will be used by a variety of players and there will be forces to share them and other to restrict access. Data will be everywhere and aggregated in different forms. Most of the time processing will happen at each aggregation point. Other times, processing will require usage of data contained in different aggregation and this requires management of ownership boundaries along with privacy, authentication and much more.

The sheer number of data demands, in many cases, huge processing capacity, in other cases it will be a matter of coordinating and aggregating several local processing. We are heading to a very complex framework in terms of processing and processing will be more and more intertwined with networking.

By 2020 we can expect to:

❏    Have increased 100 fold the performance, using multi-core, multi parallel systems.

❏    Be based on new widespread distributed, clustered processing architecture (processing cloud).

❏    Be performed in a variety of objects, as tiny as sensors and tags and as big as supercomputers clusters.

❏    Have seen the flanking of alternative processing paradigm, namely molecular and quantum computing. Whilst it can be reasonably predicted that molecular computing will be used in specific niches (like genomics) it is difficult to make any prediction about quantum computing. If it pans out, issues like new cryptographic systems will have to be addressed.

The cost of processing will continue to decrease in this decade, at the same rate it did in the last four decades. The processing capacity for mass market will reach a plateau since it exceeds demand, probably in this first part of the decade. Some mass market processing needs, however, will continue to put pressure on processing performances, such as the chips for the rendering of video signals. As video will move in this decade to the 4k standard higher performances will be required for signal processing in television sets, in video cameras and related devices.

Increasing performance will be seen, coupled with lower energy demand, in handheld equipment and sensors. This latter will change some processing architecture (processing is cheaper than transmission in terms of energy bill). Particularly, sensor networks are likely to exploit local sensors processing capability for decreasing the number of data transmitted.

Also, signal processing in terminals may become much more demanding, particularly towards the end of the decade once the terminal can be asked to employ more sophisticated signal analyses to increase spectrum efficiency. In turns, this will lead to a change in the communications protocols and architectures (see 4.4).

The massive distributed processing where the “cloud” becomes a giant computer brings to the fore issues of latency and this in turn may push towards optical networks architectures not requiring an electronic signal manipulation (passive optical add drop).

• Processing and communications impact architectures and COMSOC should be involved in this.
• The processing at the network edges displaces the intelligence and affects the current network architecture. It can result, as some are claiming, in a transparent network or in a diffused network control. This latter may be the case once we consider the network as spanning beyond the present boundaries to include the networks at the edges. The problem in this expansion, of course, is the ownership domain  that does not span across these networks.
• Sensors networks cannot be considered separating the aspects of communications from the ones of processing. A unified view is required.
• The cloud is going to be distributed over the network, over the edge networks, over the terminals (in many cases indistinguishable from edge networks) and over objects. Its processing is coupled with its inner and external communications capabilities (especially when latency is an issue) and shall be an important area in COMSOC.

The next decade will see, eventually, the failing of the Moore’s law applied to silicon. This will create a major earthquake in many industry sectors. It is likely that the overall processing power will continue to increase but such an increase will be based on carbon rather than silicon.

Often I hear people tailing of the “network” as the “computer” and the Cloud as its implementation.

Now I happened to read a few data on supercomputers that I’d like to share with you and that convinced me of the enormous distance between what can be done by a Cloud and what can be done by a supercomputer.

In the Cloud you can have an enormous processing power by adding as many computers as you please. However this processing power cannot be equated to speed of processing. It is like saying that the Amazon river has a tremendous water transport capacity, although the “speed” of the water it transport is a few meter per second. If your goal is to get a water stream at 100 meter per second the Amazon is not a solution.

Now, going back to the Cloud and the Supercomputer.

IBM Blue Water, the faster it gets...as of today

The IBM Roadrunner (2008) has a 1 PFlop capacity, that is it can perform 1 million billion floating point instructions per second. It is not a single processing unit but a cluster of units (as it is the case for any supercomputers today), so you cannot equate capacity and speed. However it ha 50 thousands channels, each working at 5GBps, connecting the various processors. In a Cloud you have channels with a connection speed that is at least 5,000 times slower.

If you take Blue Waters, the most recent IBM supercomputer delivered this year, it has a ten times higher capacity (10 PFlops) and 5 million optical cables each running at 10 GBps. By 2014 supercomputers will expect to reach 1 EFlops (1 billion billions floating point instructions per second) and optical connections will total 1 billion at a channel data rate approaching 50 GBps. Interesting to note that the cost of the optical interconnection in today Blue Water is 10% of the total supercomputer cost, whilst in the EFlops supercomputer it is estimated to be 40% of the total.

This kind of speed, infrastructure and even more important pace of evolution is a world apart from the Cloud. The two will live parallel life with no one superseding the other.

The Internet of Things is a whole new world as shown in this Beecham Research diagram

Recently also Cisco has announced dedicated routers for the M2M market, stating that it believes it will become an important mass market. This is just the latest announcement of a series of recent initiatives in the M2M market, both in the US and in Europe.

In April of this year Ericsson (another OEM!)  announced the acquisition of long-time  M2M platform provider Telenor Connexion, while in July TeliaSonera announced that it had signed the cooperation agreement with France Telecom-Orange and Deutsche Telekom to increase the quality of service and interoperability for M2M services.

In May of this yeat the operator T-Mobile USA announced that it had cast-off its M2M operational business to long time service partner Raco Wireless, although in July T-Mobile USA struck a partnership with asset protection provider IContain and Asset Protection Products LLC (APP) to help reduce operating costs in the US$7 billion US rent-to-own (RTO) sector.

These and other initiatives signal that the M2M market is deemed ready to become a truely mass market, and players (from hardware providers to M2M specialists passing through telco operators and sytem integrators) are trying to position themselves to reap the benefits.

Does eveyone have a clear strategy? For telco operators a few ideas:

• The market is exploding now (Yankee Group forecasts that SIM volumes will almost triple from 23 million in 2011 to 61 million in 2015, a CAGR of 22%.), the time to have a clear vision on the M2M market is now, tommorrow could be too late… Cisco stated it wanted to position itself as a trusted hardware provider, but others have more ambitious plans…
• Being a complex market, where it is highly improbable to have all the competencies required for a complete M2M offer in one company, it is essential to form partnership and reinforce a balanced ecosytem for all the actors involved. Each party should be able to bring its distintive skillset – Telco operators should be able to leverage its tradition of network building & management – to build a complete offer.
• Using their experience in the Cloud, and continuing to develop their distinctive offers for that market, Telco operators can leverage that experience since many of the problematics of an M2M service can be solved and/or alleviated by using Cloud technology. One offer could reinforce the other.

Any other ideas?

I was reading an interview to Microsoft Chief Researchers, Craig Mundie, on the evolution of the office and I was struck by his prediction about tge future of computing devices. Now the focus is on tablet but by the end of the decade the room will become our computer.

Any surface is a window into the world of bits

What struck me is not the prediction per se, I started to voice the same vision in 1999, but the fact that Microsoft is approaching the point where they see the PC disappearing into a cloud. Their new Office 365 is clearly a step in this direction.

I have posted the nice video from Corning, A world made of glass, some time ago, and there you see exactly this same vision, an environment that becomes a seamless interface to information and services.

According to Mundle:

“We will see a lot more displays in the office, and they will be built into surfaces horizontally and also be on the walls or in the walls. I think that a kind of completely continuous model, where you are using speech, gesture, and touch in a more integrated way, will become more commonplace. There will be a subset of that fixed environment that you will want to take with you, called the portable office, and the evolution of the laptop will be that. And there will be a mobile environment, which is the phone and other devices [including] tablets of certain types.”

This is clearly a vision that extends to any ambient, including the home. There are still significant hurdles in creating an effective “ambient” interface. One thing is to have a screen on a surface (this is a technology challenge and we see how to tackle it), quite another is to transform a complete ambient into a “coherent” interface.

Another point in his interview is the way he refers to the cloud: as an infrastructure and as a commodity. You don’t even realize it is there, as you no longer pay attention to the wires providing energy to your lamps. Now this is something that I resonate with but it is not something that would create a significant business for the “Manager of the Cloud”. I think that Operators, as they embark on providing Cloud related biz, need to create a portfolio of services that are much more data related and less infrastructure related.