‘It from bit’ is an aphorism coined by the well-known Physicist J. Wheeler: he used these words to argue that anything in the physical world, i.e., any “it”, ultimately derives its existence from “bit”, i.e., “information”.

Today, we may also argue the opposite, which is inverting the aphorism and saying ‘bit’ from ‘it’. As a matter of fact, today’s technologies allow us associating “bits of information” to anything in the physical world.

One may say, this is not the type of “information” meant by J. Wheeler. Yes, this is still information, digital information. For J. Wheeler, who was a Physicist, ‘bit’ is something related to our sensory perceptions, while ‘it’ is something like a quantum field whose existence we deduce from a pattern of perceived “bits”.

For us ‘bit’ could be a piece of mined data (i.e., think about the Big Data) and ‘it’ anything around us (i.e., think about the Internet with Things).

Anyway, the concept of “information” is so profound, that defining it is not that simple. We’ve got several definitions in the past. The same for “networks”, so strictly related to the transfer of information…

A well-known  definition of information is from Shannon, which he also called entropy following a Von Neumann’s advice, by analogy with Boltzmann’s entropy in statistical mechanics. On the other hand, this definition of information is nothing more than a sequence of symbols: in practice binary numbers with their probabilities. The semantic (or even emotional) meaning of this information is up to the Sender and the Receiver, and often them may interpret the information messages differently, depending on their cognitive (internal – external) states.

A challenge that we have today is going beyond this traditional information theory, which considers the exchanges of messages between endpoints.

This has been captured very well by Frederick Brooks 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. . .”

How information, and its processing, in broad sense, can be fully embodied in the structure of the reality ?

This is what happens in Nature: from electrochemical information in networks of neurons, to biological information stored, and processed in living cells, to information enabling self-organization in ecosystems… Just speculations ?

Not only. When imagining the coming of an environment around us, made of an ultra-dense intertwining of processing, storage and embedded communications, we need finding a new definition of information, related even to the cognitive and emotional processes of human mind.

This will bring, also at the same time, to a new definition of “networks” beyond the concept of connecting end-points, towards the idea of a communication fabric embedded into environment: welcome to the real future Internet.

The sequencing of the human genome has progressed at an incredible pace. Just 12 years ago the sequencing of the first 4 genomes took 7 years and several billion $. The promise, after the amazing progress made in this decade is to have the sequencing done in under a day at a cost of 100 $ by the end of this decade.

Well, it seems we my achieve this goal sooner! Several companies are about to deliver compact sequencing machines able to sequence a whole human genome in a day at a cost of about 1,000 $. And this is 2012!

Oxford Nanopore Technologies for genome sequencing

Ion Torrent, a subsidiary of Life Technologies, has announced the availability of their Ion Proton Sequencer able to sequence a human genome in a day now! The sequencing is being done through a disposable chip costing 1,000 $. The current chip cannot perform the whole sequencing (you need more than one) but next year they have promised the availability of a chip that will be able to do just that.

The machine itself cost 149,000$ but of course can be used for sequencing thousands of genome.

As shown in the figure on the left, the chip is based on nanotechnologies that are able to sieve the bases (A-C-G-T) through nanopores and these create disturbances in an electrical field that is read to record the base.

There are actually several techniques being used for reading the 4 bases forming the codons in the genome and several companies are experimenting with them. Illumina is another company that is getting ready to release their system by the end of this year at a lower price point than Ion Proton.

We are really getting close to the moment when all new born will have their genome sequenced at birth and that information will become part of their medical record. It will also create a huge data base to analyse searching for possible problems and for directing the cure protocol.

Such a big data will also be invaluable to scientists to understand the code of life and its many implications on our everyday life.

Image advertising the Tawkon App

Few days ago I run into an article on Wired talking about a new App released by Tawkon that is providing information on the level of radiation you have been exposed during the day (or week, month …  whatever) by using your cell phone.

The article provides an explanation of some basic terms like SAR and also some background on the potential effect of electromagnetic radiation.

I am not an expert in the field, although I have been working for several years with researchers studying SAR for cell phones and taking care of the scientific communications, so I do not want to comment on the potential damage, if any, resulting from exposure to cell phone radiation.

What I am interested in is the thin line existing between data and information. Unfortunately, most of the time we tend to mix the two, we perceive data as information and this is misleading.

In this specific case Tawcon App is measuring the electromagnetic field of your cell phone taking data from the cell phone chips (your cell phone has to know what kind of power to use to send signals to the remote antenna) and applies an algorithm to calculate the cumulative effects. However, there is no scientific proof indicating that electromagnetic radiations have a cumulative effect on bio-material (that is your head..) and the cell phone does not know how you are using it (e.g. you may have it in contact always on the left ear, sometimes you switch ear, sometimes it is not in contact at all …).

Hence, the data accumulated are basically meaningless. Tawcon is careful to state that the apps is just to warn you of the use of your cell phone and it is up to you to decide if that usage level is too much (too dangerous). But if the data are meaningless, what actually is the information provided? Zilch!

What is wrong, in my opinion, is that by providing data we create a perception that does not correspond to a scientific fact. And this goes both ways. You may scare people, or you may provide a false sense of assurance.

I guess this is one of the big problems we have always faced, but in the Internet age with the abundance of data the risk of being misled is even greater.

I spent the morning in an event closing the 100 years since the birth of Mc Luhan (he was born on July 21st, 1911) and I presented some thoughts on the impact of technology in our life. I wish to share them on this blog as well.

Technology has become a sort of metronome pacing the rhythm of our life and shaping our habits. In a way it has always been the case but in these last hundred years its continuous and quick evolution has influenced even more social changes and emphasized even more the gap among generations.

It has been estimated that the amount of information produced by human kind since Homo Habilis over a million hers ago and 2003 could be stored in 5EB, 5 billion billion bytes. Well, in 2010, we have produced 5EB every 2 days and the forecast is that next year, in 2013, we will be producing 5EB every 10 minutes.

This is made possible by technology but it really happens because each of us has internalized technology that now has become a sort of prosthetics for our communication capabilities. These EB are by far the result of the production and communications of each one of us, taken all together. The magic of Internet is the capability to transform that individual local communications into a global communications.

All of this happens in background. As a matter of fact each of us think to  perceive technology but we perceive technology evolution, sometimes with awe sometimes with concern. Most of the time we use technology without perceiving it. And this is the technology that really impacts our Society and our life because it has become entrenched in our way of living, is an integral part of our context.

That is why technologies like the conversion of the voice in electrical signals, the telephone, that at their birth were strangers to us became over time part of our world, and we absorb them completely as the way of life. Hence, when in the 70ies a new technology allowed video communication through the phone people did not like it at all. Communications was something that go through the handset, not through a video. This latter felt weird! And this in spite of the fact that our animal communications is visual as well as based on voice, inflections, tone, volume.

For the youngster, that were born with multimedia communications this latter  is to be the “natural” one.

What does technology offer? It offers the possibility to create a correspondence between the physical world mad of atoms with the virtual world made of bits. This correspondence is achieved through sensors, like videocamera, accelerometers, microphone,…All of them can capture our communications, our wandering on the web, images of ourselves and our social networks, our experiences and our emotions. And our cell phone is probably one of the most important tool for creating this correspondence.

These technologies are on the way towards disappearance from our perception and hence they start to affect our way of perceiving reality and the way we interact with it.

There are new technologies appearing but they too will follow the path towards disappearance: augmented reality, tactile interaction both physical and virtual (this latter refers to the possibility of mimicking texture on a vibrating screen), the aggregation of social networks on a point in space, on an object or on a point in time…

They are still in research labs but within a few years they will get out to become curiosity and gadgets  and later on part of them will become part of reality.

Technology, however, really changes the world because it decreases cost and free our time.

Buying a banana today means paying 20-50c, in spite of the fact that such banana in our hand is the result of a value chain started by a farmer who tilled the tree, harvest the banana and loaded it on a truck. The truck took it to a ship that traveled thousands of miles to deliver it to another truck for delivering it to a grocery store where somebody placed it on  a shelf for us to pick it up. And all of that is part of the 20-50c price! This magic happens because of the huge amount of technology, including information and communications technologies.

Technologies frees our time from chores. Lighting a room for one hour in Babilonia required sesame oil in a lamp and that implied over 50 hours of work. Lighting a room for a hour in the seventeen century with a tallow candle required 6 hours of work but lighting a room with a kerosene lamp in the XIX century required only 15 minutes of work. And today? Lighting a room or a hour with a light bulb requires about 0,5 seconds of work.

It is clear that the availability of a huge set of affordable goods and the availability of more time to dedicate to other activities expand our possibility to live in a digital world. And this is a virtuous circle. As more people connects to the digital world, the more market for that digital world will expand its capabilities and decrease it cost making it affordable to more and more people.

The digitalization of the “person” falls into this framework and today we have already moved beyond the imagination of McLuhan futures. We already have services that create a partial clone of a person in the digital world (if you think about it the gramophone was in a way a first example of extending the life of a singer by recording his voice and playing it beyond his physical life). Artificial intelligence is now brushing close to the Turing challenge and it is bound to beat it soon, thus resulting in a digital person that can live its own life departing from the one that mirrored at the time it was created. Read the book “Mind’s I” to see what I mean.

Do we want these evolutions? Surely NO. We live, culturally, in the past. However, the new generation, the young people 10 years old, are living in what, for us, is the future but for them it is the present, it is every day life.

Sure, they will get older and will look with some concern at the future, but for them too there will be a new generation more than willing to live such a future.

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.

According to Twitter, there are over 2,200 tweets per second (based on August 2011 stats) and they are handling 1.6 billion queries per day. But how do these tweets connect people?

Get the zoomable version from the referenced article

This is what a number of companies are trying to find out. Companies like SocialFlow. SocialFlow analyses the connections generated by tweets, the response a tweet generates, the forwarding of a tweet to another community of followers and so on, trying to understand how much viral a tweet can become. An article on Technology Review shows the kind of relationships that can be created by a tweet. The figure is taken from that article and it shows an aggregation around two hubs, one created by a US general, the other by a journalist. The graph depicts what happened  when the general twitted about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, about an hour before the official announcement by President Obama. His tweet generated a lot of traffic and part of that was the consequence of a journalist re-twitting it to his community of followers.

By understanding the instantaneous Social Graphs being created it is possible to target messages to specific community by hitting the right “hub”. This is what SocialFlow offers its customers.

It is just another example of the value of data once you start digging into them to create information.

Visualization coming up strong as biz advantage

More and more we are seeing interaction based on visual communications. Thanks to ever better (and cheaper) displays we are exploiting what is easiest for us to capture information: our sight. Give me a page of text and it will take me 3 minutes to go through it, give me an image and in under a second I get it. And very likely what I get as an image will have a more profound effect on me.

As data multiply we will need to coalesce them into images, something we can capture at a glance. New ways of converting data into images are under study and new ways to animate information are proving their effectiveness.

Smart and easy visualization is becoming a competitive advantage and we are going to see plenty of innovation in this area. As books move into eBooks and pages become interactive expect a brand new experience.

By 2020 we can expect to:

❏    Have widespread 3D visualization through a variety of technologies

❏    Have large, paper thin displays

❏    Have bendable displays

❏    Have color reflective display supporting video

❏    Have resolution beyond the human eye

❏    Have widespread haptic displays

❏    Have many applications to display complex data set

Display technology keeps delivering better images in a better form factor. Screens by 2020 will come in many forms, and some of them will be dirty cheap so that they will become part of many objects.

3D visualization will be common, although a significant portion of the content will remain 2D, but with a resolution exceeding the one of the human eye. This means that the bandwidth required to feed these screens will be higher than the one we used in 2010. A 10 fold increase in bandwidth demand both in wireline and wireless can be expected.

4k resolution will likely have the same penetration that HD had in 2010. This requires bandwidth over 50 Mbps. Portable screen will be HD or exceed 300 dots per inch.

Progress in reflective technology will make screens usable in full daylight and the availability of bendable screens, at a very low cost, will bring display capability to many common objects, from table tops to walls, to some products’ labels.

Most screens will enable interactions (either directly or by coupling with a gesture or voice recognition device). Additionally, paper thin display will change the feeling of ambient and can provide, along with effective communications, the feel of presence.

Screens are probably the most important factor in driving the expansion of broadband in this decade in the mass market. Along with them, software will provide new ways of displaying complex data set, as an example in visualizing health related issues, safety concerns, the working of enterprises and cities and so on.

Education and training will make substantial use of visualization in all fields.

• The evolution of display technologies will impact the demand of bandwidth and will steer towards new communications architectures. This will have to be considered by COMSOC. Many display producers will embed communications capability in their products hence becoming a potential audience for COMSOC (it has already started).
• Education products produced by COMSOC should ride this wave. Visual and Interactivity are the characteristics of any future education program.

Metadata will be the huge asset for generating value

Data are valuable but their value is depreciated by their abundance (generally speaking). The abundance of data is basically hiding many hues: Google is possibly the best tool to hide data. If your data is listed on the 100th page in a Google search it becomes basically invisible since no-one will ever browse the 100th page.

What is needed is a dramatic syntheses of data, their transformation into a much smaller subset that is reacher in semantics and that can be perceived.

There are many companies (intelligence agencies of many forms) that create metadata as their value proposition. Tools will become available to to extract meaning out of huge data sets, and to create metadata.
Metadata will consists of layers upon layers and will create an increasing value, masking the value of the raw data.

By 2020 we can expect to:

❏    Have creation of meta data at creation, on demand, as a service, as a pre-processing

❏    Have significant data correlation

❏    Have data abstraction

❏    Have semantics derivation

The Data Tsunami makes possible on the one hand to create new information by processing and correlating data and on the other hand it forces to sieve through data, effectively creating new data. These are usually addressed to as Meta Data. Most of future fruition of data by end users is actually fruition of meta data.

The creation of these meta data may be further refined to derive the semantics and by packaging it in ways that are most effective, or meaningful, to the user, in a way hence creating a meta semantics level.

There are many approaches to this data “refinement” and adaptation, including data correlation, abstraction, semantics derivation.

Telecommunications, being aware of certain aspects (like location, usage history, terminal being used, ambient characteristics, social community of the user…) can deliver, or provide the necessary parameters to third parties to enable many kinds of data refinement.

It can also act as an independent and trusted party to provide access to raw or semi processed data for global analyses by third parties.

In doing this a Network Operator enters into the data service domain. This can be seen as a major shift from the present role of Operators and involves a lot of regulatory issues. At the same time it requires a lot of technology, e.g. for data neutralization.

By 2020 it may be expected that a number of “Data Organizations” will have been set up and this will be a most important area both for enabling biz and as a biz in itself.

• The Data Management is an important part of the future business  and  some Telecom Operators will be involved in that. Beyond regulatory aspects there are many technological aspects that COMSOC can support through its technical groups.
• The availability of contextual, emotional, expectational data can drive new ways to control communications flow and the networks may need to negotiate with those capturing the semantics of communication. It is a completely new space that COMSOC needs to consider.

Construction of metadata can provide an intelligent layer to data communication, leading to new “intelligent network architectures” above the signaling layer.

Direct vs Indirect content creation: http://www.joelamantia.com

Data are being created at an ever faster pace, a significant portion of them by individuals. We can expect this share to increase in this decade  and to become the lion share in data creation. Clearly, these data will be for the most part, let’s say 99.999%, in the long tail in terms of access. In fact, most of these data will result from video recording from single individuals that may be seen (if ever) by his small circle of acquaintances. The majors, on the other hand, will be producing content that will not be significantly larger than the one they are creating today but will continue to be seen by million (billion…) of people. This asymmetric share also applies to the economic value generated (but again, it is difficult to pinpoint this value: is the indirect value created by the increased demand for broadband to be ascribed to the content or not? Is the value derived from search engines to be associated with the content created?).

It is also difficult to gauge the content being created. Shall we measure it in terms of MB, in terms of units, in terms of storage, in terms of transmission (and in this case shall we multiply it by the number of viewers…) and so on.

Still in this fuzziness we can expect that by 2020 we will:

❏    Have plenty of devices that will make data creation an integral part of their operation

❏    Have localization as a ubiquitous function providing a tagging that complement time stamping of any data created.

❏    See a wide variety of data, from simple, once in a while, messages requiring a few bytes, to continuous streams of HD video.

❏    Have Research Centers creating staggering amount of data, be it in physics or in bioscience.

❏    There will be more data created than storage capacity to store them (cross point in 2013)

As more and more electronics permeates objects and more and more sensors are deployed the amount of data generated will keep growing. Object that in 2011 are already generating data, like vehicles, will generate even more in ten years time and will likely transmit them.

People will actively use data creation as part of their everyday life (recording a lesson in a class, a meeting, an excursion…) exploiting the easiness provided by terminals. Additionally, people will create data indirectly, e.g. by wearing sensors for health monitoring.

Security cameras will be ubiquitous creating a huge flow of data, some restricted to a local area, some dispatched far away.

Data will not just “be created”. They are likely to be contextualized, adding time stamp, location, identity of the entity that has generated them, aggregated with other data and possibly may be encapsulated into a service governing the access to the data.

A data, once created, can be accessed in a variety of ways and this broadens the meaning of communications.

• Data are an integral part of communications and COMSOC will have to consider the evolution of data creation as a core business.
• Processing and abstraction (see Metadata 4.3.5) are needed to solve the problem of insufficient storage and consumption capacity. This will create a host of functionalities to digest data that will shift the value perception of the end user. COMSOC will need to ride the wave as the basic value of information collapse.

Big pipes for big data

The explosion of data we have seen in the last 20 years and particularly in the last 10 has not peaked. We can expect further growth in the coming decade with a leveling out in the subsequent decades. The amount of data created and available is changing the rules of the game in many sector as enterprises, and individuals, learn to exploit them. At the same time we start to take for granted a world where bits and atoms are just two facets of reality and where it makes no sense separating one from the other.

Big data does mean big repositories and bigger processing capacity. Actually, it means much more and it is going to impact the way communications networks are laid out and used. It opens up completely new architectures and it is going to shift the focus from network centric architectures to data centric architectures.

The data carried by the telecommunications networks have steadily increased over time but in the last 20 years their growth has become exponential due to the advent of multimedia communications. The growth has been tackled and supported thanks to optical fibers network that scaled of 3-4 order of magnitude the network capacity and through new architectures (Content Delivery Networks).

This growth is going to continue in this decade, and the following ones with an expectation of 100 fold growth from 2010 to 2020 to reach 10+ ZettaBytes (compare to the 100 Exabytes estimated in 2010).

The network capacity will continue to scale and support this flow. New architectures for CDN will be required, and will affect particularly the network edges taking advantage of distributed storage and storage capacity in the home, in the terminals and at the edges.

The data tsunami will change significantly the way society, enterprises and individuals perceive, produce and interact. The seamless support provided by the network infrastructure will make these data always available as if they were local, shifting the focus from the communications to the interplay with and among data.

• This can shift the audience interest towards data and data centric networks further contributing to fade the boundaries between COMSOC and the Computer Society. It does not diminishes the importance of networks and related technical issues but makes these servant of the others.