ICT 2008 future directions
ICT 2008 is a big conference and there are great many parallel sessions covering a veritable smorgisbord of technology areas. Taking a helicopter view of the proceedings gives a pretty good idea of the likely direction of travel for EU-funded ICT developments over the coming decade.
I’ve collated a list of all the work packages that were discussed and attempted a crude form of categorisation. Six major themes emerge, although these may not correspond to the EU’s categorisation:
- artificial intelligence: includes robotics and cognition, language processing
- green ICT: includes energy efficiency, smartgrids, climate change modelling
- next generation Internet: includes 3D Internet, new protocols and moving to services rather than devices
- strategic application areas: including learning, supporting creativity, digital libraries, health
- security, privacy and trust in the digital world
- novel computer architectures and electronics: includes nanotechnologies, bio-inspired computation, photonics and quantum computers.
The details of these areas, and their relevance and impact to HE/FE may well be the subject of future TSW reports over the next few years.
Semantic robots
Will we start to see robots in our classrooms and university research labs within a decade or so? According to one of the sessions at ICT 2008 we are starting to see robotic applications move beyond their traditional use in high end automobile manufacturing (remember the Picasso car advert?). There is a push to put robots like this into smaller companies and also a lot of work going on for applications in service industries such as cleaning. There is also considered to be considerable potential in healthcare, even for the care of the elderly in their own homes.
Again, though, the question was raised as to whether Europe could compete. The Japanese and Koreans are strong on robotic development and the USA is ploughing $10 million per annum (on top of various defence-related projects that are kept secret). The three Framework 7 (FP7) calls for research proposals in this area will help and there is a strong commitment to integrate robotic work with that of the semantic Web to deliver knowledge-based robotics. These are the types of robots that may end up in the classroom.
Some of the research questions being posed though may remind older readers of the work of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. These include:
- How autonomous and proactive should a robot be allowed to be?
- How can robots recognise and deal with critical situations and safety problems?
- What level of cognitive skills should be built in?
These are fascinating questions and it may not be too long before researchers (and the general public) has to have a serious debate about these issues. If you are interested in further details then have a look at: www.cognitivesystems.eu
ICT 2008: Panel debate
At the end of day one there was a panel debate on the successes and failures of EU-funded research. It was generally agreed that the EU research environment is fragmented – there is no equivalent of MIT, no EU-wide centres of excellence. Along with that came the statement, from Martin Sadler of Hewlett Packard, that “we should recognise talent, we let down our young researchers. MIT, for example, has regular competitions for young scientists and technologists – it really puts them on pedestal”.
Sadler also noted that whilst Europe produces top quality graduates, these graduates have poor business acumen compared to their American counterparts. He also noted the lack of women choosing technology-related careers, something that was backed up by Wendy Hall from Southampton University.
One of the initiatives aimed at trying to combat some of these concerns is the European ‘blue card’ for talented foreign students. This would make it easy for them to study and take up research-related jobs within the EU.
ICT 2008: plenary report
The opening plenary debate of the ICT 2008 conference focused on trends and directions for the ICT agenda over the next ten years. It was chaired by Viviane Redding, the EU commissioner responsible for ICT and involved a panel including Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent; Harold Goddijn, the founder of Tom Tom and Esko Aho, the ex-Prime Minister of Finland. The panel agreed that there are three major societal challenges for European ICT research and development:
- the green agenda and tackling climate change
- raising productivity and improving skills
- building the knowledge society
Despite the economic downtown it was agreed it was important that Europe should continue to support work that helped with these challenges and not be diverted from the existing roadmap.
Ben Verwaayen argued that the Web and its evolution into a tool for “massive” collaboration and creativity would be profoundly important for these three areas. He predicted: “a whole new era of collaboration with a new eco-system developing”.
There are potential downsides. One is that the economic downturn will turn people against the idea of investing in research and blue skies thinking. The second is that unless we are careful we will not create ICT systems that are robust, secure and accessible anywhere and by anyone. An important part of this is trust. The financial collapse over the summer has shown the vulnerability of complex systems that are not well understood. The panel were in agreement that the complex systems that are being developed in advanced Web and software systems must not be allowed to fail in a similar way. How this would be brought about was a key part of the discussions.
In particular, the consensus was that Governments will not be building the next generation Internet and ICT systems themselves by a top-down process of ‘grand visions’. Instead, technology will evolve organically and be built by independent researchers, large companies and SMEs. What this means is that the EU and other Governments and agencies need to do is to give “content” or concrete form to the understanding and meaning of trust. Ben Verwaayen said that there will need to be some element of control and regulation. Aho agreed that we need trust in our ICT systems and agreed that there can’t be grand designs, but argued strongly for systematic approaches and the importance of architecture. There is a huge amount of digitization taking place in many areas of life but, he argued, we need some kind of overarching architecture process to make it all fit seamlessly. This fits strategically with JISC’s work on architecture at the enterprise and inter-institutional level and could be seen as EU level confirmation of its efforts.
Service-Oriented Architecture and the future of the CMS
In a previous blog item I talked about the future of the institutional CMS and why TechWatch wasn’t going to commission an update to its 2001 report. You may remember that I focused on two of the main concepts from the CMS report: processes rather than products, and blurring the boundaries between systems. At the time I said that the future of the CMS is actually caught up in technological reinterpretations of these concepts, so I thought I should explain a little bit about what I meant by that.
In order to do that I need to take you back to TechWatch’s 2001 CMS report. In it, Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes, the report’s authors, list some of the processes that a CMS should facilitate (page 3). These include:
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“Engendering the re-use of information by allowing the ready integration of data from diverse sources”
“Permitting the efficient re-purposing of information”
“Allowing information maintenance to become devolved but at the same time preserving central control”
In fact, as they later acknowledge, these processes/benefits are not exclusive to CMSs and they go on to say: “The emergence of ‘portal frameworks’ (open source or otherwise) has done much to highlight the overlap and convergence of document management systems, knowledge management systems… There is a pressing need, in our view, for institutions to think holistically (reinforced by their work on information strategies) and to invest in and develop open and extensible information systems” (p.12).
This is the crux of the matter. What they are saying is that it’s the processes that are important, not the software applications per se. We need to shift the emphasis from thinking about kit to thinking about what it is we need to do and how that fits in to the bigger institutional picture.
As always, of course, this isn’t straightforward. One approach that’s being road-tested is Service-Oriented Architecture (’uppercase soa’), but this has not been without its detractors. The heart of this is for another day, but to start the ball rolling you should have a look at a case study that the e-Framework programme has just published and you’ll hopefully get a feel for how the big picture concerns raised by Paul and Mike are tackled through this particular technique.
Visions of computer science’s future
I attended the British Computer Society’s Visions of Computer Science conference which took place in London, earlier this month. The idea behind the event was to provide inspiration for the future development of computer science as a discipline and, as such, offered a unique chance to feel the pulse of current computer science research agendas. There was a wide range of topical issues and some great keynote speakers including Turing medal winners like Robin Milner, Tony Hoare and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.
So what pointers can be picked up for the long-term direction of ICT in tertiary education?
• The Internet is starting to show its age and much work is going on behind the scenes to improve capacity, security and its overall architecture in order to cope with developments such as the rapidly increasing number of mobile devices that are being connected. Efforts are underway to map out what the next generation Internet may look like. The sobriquet ‘Web Engineering 2.0′ has been coined for some of this work.
• The introduction of multi-core processors into standard desktop PCs means that making software work in parallel has become a very high priority. For many years attempts have been made to solve the issue of how to easily and efficiently ‘parallelise’ code to work on multiple processors. This is continuing, but there is a debate between those who favour using a few complex CPU cores (the present situation) and those who argue for the use of many simple CPU cores.
• Computer science needs to ‘get a grip’ with regard to ubiquitous computing. In a few years computers will be leaving our desks and merging into our physical environments, cars and even clothing (as TechWatch has reported). There may well be millions of these computing devices spread out across our urban environments and this will obviously include schools and colleges. Understanding how these devices will all interact with each other and with us, in essence, how they will ‘behave’, is one of the big research questions at the moment. They will create an enormous information space and Robin Milner argues that understanding this space is likely to be the greatest challenge for computer science in 21st century (for more on this see the 2006 TechWatch report Will we cope with the invisible computer)
• Mobile phones are starting to incorporate forms of sensor, e.g. location-based sensors (GPS), awareness of user’s status (walking, running, sitting etc.). These devices will form networks with other devices in the near future and exchange information via the Internet, forming a global mobile sensor network. There are potentially many applications (and social implications) for this in the education arena.
• There is a lot of work going on into human facial recognition and expression/emotion detection which, in the long run, will feed into the kinds of human-computer interfaces that we will be using at home and in the educational setting.
• Research is being undertaken into what’s called the outlier detection problem. This is the process of automatically detecting anomalies or unusual events from massive streams of real-time experimental data that can now be generated by scientific experiments. This work will have obvious implications for the research community as enormous data sets become more common through the work of the e-science community.
• Understanding how the Web is working at the large scale, for example when social networks have millions of users and billions of interactions, requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Foundation work in this area is being driven by Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and colleagues at Southampton University under the title of Web Science.
New report commission: 100GB Ethernet and the future of networking
Last week I attended the BCS Visions of Computer Science conference in London. We’ll be posting a more detailed look at the event later on, but I thought I’d just mention Vint Cerf’s speech as it relates to a TechWatch report we’ve just commissioned.
Vint Cerf is often referred to as the ‘father of the Internet’ (although he’s always quick to point out that he worked as part of a team and doesn’t deserve this moniker), thanks to his pioneering work on ARPANET and the protocols for the ‘network of networks’ idea that became the Internet. At the BCS conference he spoke about those days and the excitement of early experimentation. He also covered some of the issues that now face the Internet as the number of users passes the billion mark and the number of devices or ‘terminators’ attached to it passes two billion.
He outlined several areas where there are ongoing or need to be major developments:
• A new addressing standard, IPv6, which will be able to cope with the billions of mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that are rapidly being connected to the Net.
• Internationalisation of domain names to handle non-English and non-Latin character sets such as Chinese.
• A massive increase in the use of geo-spatial and location-based information thanks to the increasing use of mobile-based access to the Web.
• The preservation and longevity of Web-based materials. Vint warned that: “our century may well be invisible to historians”.
• The energy used to ‘drive’ the Internet is becoming an issue of major concern, especially because of the large data centres that companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are using.
• Capacity of the Internet has been an issue discussed in the press. With the advent of widespread use of VoIP, Web 2.0 services and Web-based video (through the likes of YouTube), there has been growing concern that the Internet may not ‘cope’. Some commentators have referred to this as the “exabyte” Internet problem – how to build a network that can handle exabytes of information. One area of interest is the networking and routing equipment that provides some of the backbone of the Net.
The capacity issue was also the concern of the recent EARNEST foresight study into the future of the technologies that are used to build research and education networks and TechWatch has commissioned a report provisionally entitled 100Gb Ethernet and beyond: preparing for the exabyte Internet. More details on the BCS conference will be forthcoming over the next few days.
Open call: Data mash-ups and the future of mapping
In the Web 2.0 report we published last year (What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education) we noted the importance of geo-spatial data in the development of mash-ups and we’re now planning to return to this subject with a new open call.
The growing interest in the use of geospatial and geographical information in combination with Web-based information sources and services has been driven, at least in part, by the emergence of new and low-cost technologies such as high-spec digital cameras, handheld GPS location equipment and vehicular SatNav. Alongside this, increasingly popular Web-based mapping applications and 3-D mapping tools have supported the mash-up approach. On the social science research side there have been many developments in graphical visualisation and simulation using location-based data.
After a number of discussions with experts across the education sector it is clear that this will be a complex report to commission but interested parties should have a look at the full open call, on the TechWatch website.
Content Management Systems: why we’re not updating the TechWatch report
Back in September 2001 TechWatch published a report on Content Management Systems, written by Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes. At the time it very quickly became one of the most popular TechWatch reports ever published, and is still a steady favourite, even today.
I can’t take any of the credit for the report as it was published before I took over TechWatch, but one of the first things people asked me for, back in 2004/2005, was an update to the CMS report; particularly the CMS product list. I did think about this, and even went as far as approaching the original authors to see if they were interested in a reunion. However, as I started to think about what the report would cover I had a crisis of remit.
The most important factor for me was what this was no longer a ‘future’ issue. As well as being a very practical report, exploring the nitty gritty of procuring a CMS, Paul and Mike’s report was also conceptual, outlining the bigger issues such as: “In reality a CMS is a concept rather than a product. It is a concept that embraces a set of processes”, and “… the boundaries of the CMS space are blurred. Substantial overlaps exist with document management systems, knowledge management systems, enterprise application integration systems, e-learning systems and portals”. In 2005 these concepts just hadn’t moved on far enough to warrant a new ‘future-facing’ report.
In addition, although there was a lot of demand for an update to the CMS product list, this isn’t within our remit. The purpose of the TechWatch reports is to start the ball rolling and hopefully stimulate interest/uptake elsewhere – we just don’t have the resources for ‘maintenance’.
However, this decision keeps coming back to haunt me, and when I was in Keele for the JISC Innovation Forum 2008 meeting last month, someone, once again, asked why there hadn’t been an update to the TechWatch CMS report. In fact, what this person was really saying was: “I want to procure a CMS but your report’s out of date”, and that’s really quite a different matter.
This got me thinking and revisiting the notes I made in 2005. My conclusion is that the answer is: “things have moved on a lot since then and perhaps you shouldn’t be buying a CMS”. I will elaborate on this in future blog items, but for now, suffice it to say that there is a paradigm shift brewing in institutional ICT provision, of which the institutional CMS is only one part. The future of the CMS is actually caught up in technological reinterpretations of the big concepts that Paul and Mike identified in 2001: processes rather than products, and blurring the boundaries between systems.
E-books: open standards déjà vu.
TechWatch has recently been asked to contribute its thoughts on future technology developments that are likely to have the most significant impact on library and information services in higher education. It’s for Update, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, and one of the interesting questions they’ve asked us is about developments that we didn’t initially anticipate or whose impact has been greater than might at first have been expected.
This is not actually a straightforward question – just because we don’t publish a report on something doesn’t mean we didn’t anticipate it – but it has prompted quite a bit of discussion. I think one of the things TechWatch may be in danger of missing is the whole e-reader development, which will present challenges in integrating e-books into academic library acquisition, discovery, and delivery systems.
At the moment there are three main devices squaring up for domination of the market: the Sony Reader (from Sony, of course), the iLiad (from iRex) and Kindle (from Amazon). One of the big issues for HE will be the document format standards used by each device.
Work is underway on an open, XML-based standard called EPUB through an organisation called the International Digital Publishing Forum. The other key standard is PDF, which is now an ISO standard. Sony’s reader supports PDF and the company has just announced that they will support EPUB in a forthcoming e-reader. By contrast, Kindle only supports Amazon’s own standards, MobiPocket and AZW. It does not support Adobe’s PDF although it provides an ‘experimental’ converter. The iLiad supports PDF and Mobipocket.
There is more than a hint of déjà vu, here. Last year TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document standards which focused on the arguments around open and proprietary standards and the difficulties that would be created by the imminent approval of a second ISO standard within the office document standards domain. You really need to read the report to get the picture, but my concern is that there may be another ODF/OOXML-type situation emerging, with Amazon taking on the role of Microsoft.
For those who would like to know more about e-readers there was a long piece in the Observer newspaper on the 27th of July, with an abridged version published online. A more technical look at matters relating to e-books, rather than the readers themselves, is provided by the team undertaking JISC’s own major investigation: the National e-books Observatory project. There is also an interesting paper, What Happened to the E-book Revolution?, by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Heather L. Wicht, which looks at the history of e-books and some of the barriers to their widespread adoption.