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.
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.
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.
Semantic Web Technologies – has their time come in education?
In 2005, TechWatch published a report on Semantic Web Technologies written by Brian Matthews who, at that time, was deputy manager of W3C’s UK office. As JISC has recently announced an open call of funding for a study on Semantic Web technologies in teaching and learning we thought we’d use this opportunity to provide a bit of an update on Semantic Web developments.
The JISC call seeks to fund a study which looks at pragmatic aspects of the actual use of semantic applications in real world scenarios. The successful applicant will review a number of case studies of real-world teaching and learning scenarios and look at the potential for use of semantic technologies. The key question they are asking is: “Can you convince us that semantic technologies offer one potential solution to some real problems?”
This is an interesting development. In 2005, the Semantic Web was still seen by many people as very much a computer science ‘Grand’ research project which would take years to reach fruition. Despite some very well worked out visions as to what it would deliver – a more automated Web in which some sense of ‘meaning’ or semantics had been imbued into data held within pages and their links – there were still plenty of practical doubts. Even in 2006, when Tim Berners-Lee and other researchers at Southampton provided an update (The Semantic Web Revisited) they admitted that: “this simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized” (page 96). However, they were optimistic, arguing that the key development was for standards that express meaning to become well established and they reported that this was “progressing steadily”.
Despite this there are still concerns expressed, particularly by the business community, as to the practical reality of doing semantic web. Recent conferences such as Semantic Technologies have highlighted the question again: where are the practical examples? The Tallis Semantic Web Gang have produced a useful podcast of a round-up discussion which reviews their attendance at these conferences in which they debate some of these issues. As they make clear one of the key things to come out of these conferences is that venture capitalists and business development people are starting to ask quizzical questions about what exactly semantic web is, what does it actually do for real users and what is the ‘killer app’?
This reflects the original TechWatch report, which commented that: “people are still asking how they can be used in practical situations to solve real problems” (page 2). However, the report also concluded that higher education was likely to be at the forefront in the use of these technologies. Given that, the JISC open call seems particularly timely. There is an opportunity here for higher education to lead the way in making use of semantics with real users and I think it will be interesting to see the outcomes.
Technology tracking: XML-based office document standards
Last summer TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document formats. The issue was one of standards: increasing pressure, particularly from the EU, was being brought to bear on public sector software procurement practices to only buy software that conforms to open standards. The argument is about how taxpayers’ money should be spent. In essence, that members of the public should be able to have easy access to all electronic documents published in the public sector without being required to purchase a particular software product in order to view or edit those documents. The TechWatch report looked at the on-going debate over the move away from closed, proprietary document formats used by everyday applications such as word processing and spreadsheet software.
The problem was that although everyone agreed that XML was the way forward, there was considerable controversy and technical debate over two proposed XML-based formats: Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML). The former had already been formally ratified as an international standard by ISO, whereas the latter, promoted by ECMA and based heavily on work by Microsoft, was still undergoing a process of being ‘fast-tracked’ towards standardisation. The fact that a scenario was emerging where there would be two international standards was causing considerable consternation.
The report concluded at the time that it was extremely important for HE/FE to keep a watching brief on the developments of these two standards and to start engaging with the debates. It also recommended that institutions should begin planning, pro-actively, for a switch to XML-based formats arguing that:
“although the UK higher education sector has, for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards, it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelines for implementation at the level of everyday applications such as office document formats. As far as higher education is concerned, the use of office document formats has now reached a watershed.”
In October 2007 Becta referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading after talks had failed to secure the agreements needed in several key areas. In the interim, Becta’s advice to schools was that they should not move to Microsoft’s School Agreement subscription licensing model.
Since then things have moved on. Although ISO approved OOXML (a standard they refer to as ISO/IEC 29500) in April 2008, four countries (Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela and India) lodged appeals. This meant that OOXML was immediately ‘unratified’ pending the outcome of the appeal.
In addition to these formal appeals there have been a number of complaints about the process of standardization including:
- In the UK, an application was made by UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) for a Judicial Review of the BSI’s (British Standards Institute) role in voting ‘Yes’ to the standardization of OOXML. This was rejected by a High Court judge, but UKUUG is appealing against the decision.
- The Danish Open Source Business Association lodged a complaint about the way the process was carried out at the national level in Denmark.
In January 2008 the EU announced that it would investigate a number of suspected abuses of dominant market position by Microsoft and that this would include the question as to whether: “Microsoft’s new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products”.
All in all, things are not looking good for OOXML. Also in January, Becta released formal advice to the effect that schools should not upgrade to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 and that existing users of Office 2007 should not save in Microsoft’s OOXML format. In the short term, they recommend that existing Office 2007 users should save files in .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats.