digitalcommons

Forecasts not Predictions

Inside the IFTF the word 'predictions' is only used in a dismissive way. They prefer 'forecasts' and attendees were asked to come up with a long term forecast and express it succinctly. Here's a wall chart from the first evening of the recent meeting with just a  few forecasts.  Click on the thumbnail for a legible image...

FXPAL

Laurent Denoue of FXPAL is showing the pbox.  It records any presentation at a conference, stores the video and audio (different formats) and then it can be exported to other formats or other places. It's very like TiVo for conferences.  "I didn't go to that session. It's been Pboxed! I'll catch it later."

Erick Wilhelm of Squid Labs and Mark Frauenfelder of MAKE: Magazine are on stage talking about the DIY (do-it-yourself) culture and what challenges and opportunities it has for large organizations: how to make use of this creativity and why many innovative people want to work independently of such large groups. Squid is doing a large number of fascinating projects: drive over solar panels, Instructibles a site where you can learn about all sorts of processes that are complete (shelving, beermaking) or are modular that can be reused, a universal nut-sheller for a village in Mali (or anywhere that harvests nuts), howtoons--cartoons for kids to encourage them to make stuff, penny eyglasses--a system for making cheap eyeglasses for developing countries, e-rope, magic window.

Day 2: A quick drive into the future

On Wednesday, one of the attendees, Ian Wright of Wrightspeed, gave others short and very fast rides in his X1 electric car. It is the fastest car for under $1.25 million and goes 0-60 is 3 seconds. Here's one shot and the rest are blurs, but you can see a short video on YouTube.com

IFTF Conference, day 1

I am attending a program at Institute for the Future entitled "Science & Technology in Ten, Twenty, & Fifty years. It is held at a hotel is San Mateo midway between San Francisco and San Jose, California. It kicked off with a reception where I met a few old colleagues from Apple. Tim Oren, managing director of Pacifica Fund explained to me how venture capital is working these days. Their firm's expertise is in technology, as opposed to marketing or finance.  I also saw Harvey Lehtman who helped run the first Network Information Center (NIC) of the original ARPANET in the late 70's.  He has been volunteering at the computer history museum where a mix of old-timers and younger people are running Plato, one of the original online learning systems and Doug Engelbart's NLS/Augment.

At dinner I sat next to Anthony Townsend of IFTF who is also on an advisory committee for the new wireless network that Google/Earthlink are hoping to build--assuming the city council approves the deal. He thinks there will be compromises in what Google wants to do in the realm of privacy before this will happen.   Another interesting person was Tom Zimmerman of IBM Research.  He invented the data glove and other VR items.  He is working with a high school for latino youth in San Jose and has begun to set up a tech club with the help of other volunteers from IBM Alamaden in San Jose. I suggested some projects at other Latino and South American schools that might interest him.

The keynote speech after dinner was by Larry Smarr. He's the guy who headed NCSA in Illinois when it was doing all sorts of supercomputer research and of course they did the first graphic browser for the web: Mosaic back in 1993.  Now he the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology at UC San Diego.

Smarr is, as he puts it, living in the future--when it comes to bandwidth and computing power. His center has 1.8 miilion feet of gigabit cabling.  UCSan Diego has one ten gigabit connection for the whole student body, but his institute has 10,000 gigabit drop in the building. Every researcher has way more than most countries.  Most of their experiements and tests are between centers in Japan and Korea and California.  He tracked the history of telepresence from a 1956 Isaac Asimov story "The Naked Sun" to Star Trek and Bellcore labs to current develop;ments.  The onlyh commercial one is from HP and is called Halo.  At a cost of $500,000 per room it only uses 45 mbit/sec and by the end of this year only 40 will be installed. Smarr's lab systems have 100 and 200 million pixel video walls and can project sat. images of all of New Orleans at one foot (~.3 meters) resolution. He seems to equate more resolution with more reality and stated, "You are looking at this on a one megapixel projector. What we did was six megapixels or six times as real."  He emphasized the reasons for not being in actual proximity with others (cost of transport, time, and annoyances like bird flu pandemics).

I sat there thinking of the reality of the places I (and some of you) have worked in other countries, and I don't share the view that every developed country is moving toward this single point of unlimited bandwidth and computing power. And even further away are the countries with much much less infrastructure or just oases of connectivity in some parts of capital cities.  Smarr also feels that the most efficient communications and collaboration is asynchronous, not synchronous (chat/ cell phones).

I'll try to post at the end of each day of this three day meeting.
-Steve Cisler

Complore

Complore is a beta version of a collaborative research network where students, faculty and others can share links, notes, lectures, and papers. It incorporates Google Scholar search, and so far the topics being posted are tagged and highlighted at the right part of the main page. It was opened to the public just one day ago, so it may have to aggregate a lot more to seem useful to you.