Wearable personal sensing
The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Geospatial Science recently held a workshop on wearable personal sensing. First up was Evtim Peytchev of Nottingham Trent University who explained how GPS-enabled mobile phone technology is catalysing a new range of location-based services and applications. He outlined how this might be used, for example to enable road traffic data to be crowd-sourced as people move around.
There then followed a number of talks outlining different aspects of location and sensor-based work. Notable with respect to possible implications for education were Jan Feyereisl and Gobe Hobona. Jan outlined a project that was trying to develop a teaching tool for skiing. The system used in the research included a wearable sensor ski suit with video capture, various physiological sensors and location technologies. This then generates an accurate, replayable record of a ski run that can be used in teaching.
Gobe detailed his work on the JISC-funded SPACER project, which aims to enable mobile phones with built-in positioning technologies to query catalogue services conforming to Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) standards to researchers during fieldtrips.
The implications and possible uses of GPS on mobile phones is only just beginning to be explored. If you would like to learn more about the educational implications of all this, then have a look at our 2005 TechWatch report Future Location-based Experiences and of course there is our forthcoming report on the geo-web and geo-spatial data mash-ups.
A roadmap for low carbon computing
Climate change minister Ed Miliband likens the challenge facing us over climate change to the Apollo mission which landed a man on the moon. And it’s not just the technology that we need to get right – a huge collective, society-wide endeavour is required. We are, as they say, all in this together, so what role will education have to play? A new report from JISC TechWatch, Low carbon computing: a view to 2050 and beyond, attempts to answer that question, outlining a technology roadmap for moving to a more energy efficient information systems infrastructure.
Driven by the UK’s Climate Change Act and the proposed carbon accounting system the education sector faces stiff energy challenges. Whilst business workplaces in general will be expected to provide an overall reduction of about 13%, the public sector is expected to reduce by 30% of 1999/2000 levels by 2020. The TechWatch report explains that it is likely that data-intensive sectors such as tertiary education will probably find themselves facing even harsher targets and argues that the impetus will fall not only on reducing demand but also on generating supply. In summary, the report covers:
- best practice measures and standards for metrics (section 3)
- short term ‘quick fixes’ based on simple staff actions and/or low cost investment (section 4)
- longer term solutions that either represent a more costly investment, or are based on more experimental technologies (section 4)
- discussion of the factors that are likely to affect how these technologies develop in the future
- a first attempt at a Low Carbon ICT Roadmap, which puts these issues into a framework that also takes into account what is currently known about the targets associated with the Climate Change Act (section 6)
- a discussion of the factors and technologies that are likely to feature in the long-term plans and decisions that senior managers in tertiary education will need to make (section 5).
100G Ethernet and beyond: preparing for the exabyte Internet
TechWatch has just published a report on the future of Ethernet, 100G Ethernet and beyond, which explains the background and technical development to the next upgrade of the thirty-year-old family of networking standards, which will be formalised in 2010.
The key thing is that, traditionally, Ethernet has developed in incremental steps of ten. This means that the next step should be from 10G (the current standard) to 100G and indeed, JANET recently undertook a trial of some of the technology that will be used in 100G networking. However, there has been a lack of consensus over whether to move to 100G or a less ambitious target of 40G. The report reviews these debates and explains why the next IEEE standard will be for both 40G and 100G.
As far as institutions are concerned, larger universities and major research centres are likely to be the first to face these questions and there is a lot of money at stake: a typical 224-port switch with 10G on every port is of the order of £250,000 (and of course they’re not bought singly). Newer equipment with 40G or 100G is likely to be more and early adopters often pay over the odds for being at the cutting edge. Taken together with the buying cycles of academia, the message is that network managers have to look ahead to what the demands on the network are likely to be over the next three to five years and plan for the likely levels of traffic in the distribution and core network equipment, allowing for depreciation, in accounting terms, and suitable levels of return on investment.
The TechWatch report explains why there does not appear to be a consensus for a single target and looks at the implications that may have for network managers in HE, particularly in light of JANET’s recent announcement of trials into 100G transmission. It also looks ahead to the development of terabit Ethernet and predicts a period of ‘chaotic’ development before the standards bodies catch up with the new technologies that will inevitably emerge to fill the gap between 100G and 1T Ethernet (the next increment of ten). All this will happen in the context of re-engineering the basic architecture of the Internet and the report argues that layers 1 and 2 of the Internet, which Ethernet handles, will need to be ‘re-virtualised’ to take account of this.
The International Standard Text Code
A couple of weeks ago I spotted an article about the ISTC, a new publishing standard. What was particularly interesting was that it seems to have potential for much wider application: Ted Nelson’s ‘transclusion’ came to mind and there would seem to be the potential for using an ISTC to identify and make micro-payments for texts that you might want to transclude; it could even be useful for realising aspects of the Semantic Web. However, this is big picture thinking so in order to understand the basics we asked Richard Gartner to explain it to us.
Introduction to the ISTC
by Richard Gartner
A new standard has recently been approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to enable texts to be uniquely identified. The International Standard Text Code (ISTC) is a sixteen-digit number which applies to a text itself rather than the forms in which is it published or disseminated. It takes the form of a sixteen-digit hexadecimal number looking like this:
0A9-2002-12B4A105-7
whose parts (separated here by hyphens) represent the registration agency, year, a code for the text itself and a check digit (a single digit calculated from the others in the number to allow the detection of any errors in typing) respectively.
The ISTC is designed to perform a similar function to the well-established ISBN (International Standard Book Number), but will apply at the level of a text itself, a higher level of description than that of the publication (which the ISBN is designed to identify): it would, for instance, be assigned to the text of a work such as Bleak House itself rather than its different published editions. Where a text may have multiple ISBNs, for example where it is published in multiple editions, or in both hardback and paperback, it will only have a single ISTC to identify its textual content and allow these different editions to be linked together.
The ISTC is designed to operate within the FRBR (Fundamental Requirements for Bibliographic Records) framework. FRBR is a model for bibliographic information which sets out a number of levels for bibliographic description from the most abstract (known as the work) down to an individual physical item. The ISTC is designed to identify what FRBR terms the expression of a work, the specific form that it takes when it is realized in some way, such as a given edition of a text, or a version in a given language. It therefore operates on a level one higher than ISBNs, which identify the physical forms that a work takes when it is published or otherwise made concrete in some way (called the manifestation in the FRBR scheme).
Within the education sector, the ISTC will clearly have an important role within libraries, and also in repositories or any other area where textual objects need to be unambiguously identified. Its prime function will be to allow the identification of an item as a textual intellectual entity more precisely than is possible at present. For the library user, it will allow for more precise bibliographic searches, by, for example, distinguishing texts with similar titles from each other. It would also allow the greater recall of relevant texts by allowing users to find the same one published under different titles: the manifold titles under which Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels appear, for instance, could be linked together neatly by an ISTC, allowing the user to trace all other editions of the text from a single record containing this number.
It certainly seems that the ISTC will become a key part of a bibliographic record, particularly once the new RDA (Resource Description and Access) cataloguing rules standard, which is based on FRBR, is fully adopted.
Horizon Report 2009
The sixth edition of the Horizon Report, a USA-based collaboration between EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium has been published. The report is a summary of the latest thinking on emerging technologies and practices that will affect education over the next few years and is a useful read for all those involved in technology in the UK’s HE/FE sector.
The report features six emerging technologies and places them along three adoption time horizons of: within a year, two to three years and four to five years. These timescales are slightly shorter than JISC TechWatch’s usual remit of five to ten years but many of the issues discussed in the report have strong resonances with our existing and planned work. The report also provides discussion of what it terms ‘critical challenges’ that are facing education in the next few years.
The six emerging technologies are summarised below, together with a note on work that Techwatch has already been involved with in these areas:
Mobiles (within a year)
Mobile technologies have featured in many of their reports and its reappearance emphasises how this is a rapidly evolving area both technically (through new devices like the iPhone) and in its huge uptake by students. The report suggests that providing content and delivering teaching and learning via these new devices is one of the critical challenges for HE/FE.
TechWatch produced a report on mobile devices and PDAs in 2005.
Cloud Computing (within a year)
The report notes the rapid rise of large-scale data farm facilities and the attendant increase in the use of remote storage and Web 2.0 related applications and services. The report argues that this is causing a shift in the way educators think about how they use software and data – freeing them up from the existing paradigm of the one-per-desk PC and use of licenced, shrink-wrapped software.
TechWatch is in the process of preparing a report that looks at the environmental impacts of data centres and will be producing a report on cloud computing later in 2009.
Geo-Everything (2 – 3 years)
There is an increasing interest in the provision and use of location-based information. This is being driven by the growing number of gadgets that automatically provide some form of location information (e.g. GPS built into mobile phones) and also by an increasing interest in the use of geo-related data, visualisation and mapping systems. The provision of automatically generated location data is having an impact on research and data acquisition in sciences, social observation studies, medicine and other areas.
TechWatch is in the process of commissioning a report on GeoWeb.
The Personal Web (2 – 3 years)
The report notes the increasing propensity for users to organise and aggregate their Web-related content in their own, personal ways using a growing range Web 2.0-style widgets and services. iGoggle, tagging, micro-blogging (twitter etc), use of group wikis, data mash-ups and social network aggregation all come under this broad area of development. The authors use the term ‘personal web’ to describe these emerging phenomenon and note the emergence of “highly personalized windows to the networked world” (p. 19). It argues that the online tools that provide for this are also ideal for research and learning.
Semantic-Aware Applications (4-5 years)
The Semantic Web, in which some element of meaning (semantics) is applied to Web-based data, has been discussed and researched for a number of years. The Horizon report argues that we are beginning to see the emergence of applications that make use of semantic data (are semantically aware) and that this will be a growing area in the next few years. Perhaps somewhat controversially the report argues that the provision of such a capacity will happen through what it calls a top-down manner via the use of natural language processing of existing content and not through provision of a new layer of semantic-related metadata.
TechWatch reported on the Semantic Web in 2005.
Smart Objects (4-5 years)
The report defines smart objects as any physical object that includes a unique identifier and which can track information about the object. Such objects can communicate with each other and to the wider Internet. Technologies like RFID and wireless networking are involved. Although there are few applications for education as yet (apart from the use of RFID in libraries) the authors predict that such applications will emerge within five years.
TechWatch reported on RFID in 2006.
Critical Challenges
It is always important to place technology development in the wider context and the Horizon report outlines some of the wider challenges that the authors believe face education. These are:
- Growing need for formal instruction in new media skills such as information and visual literacy
- A need to radically update existing learning material, some of which is decades old and does not reflect new ways of learning and interacting with information
- The manner in which academics, researchers and students are measured and rewarded is out of sync with emerging new practices in scholarship, innovation and dynamic information flows.
- There is a growing expectation that education will make use of mobile technologies and provide ‘anywhere, anytime’ education.
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
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.