June, 2013 – Albada Jelgersma Conversation

Three reasons to change the Internet now

30/06/2013 by Paul

Times are changing and we all need to adapt. The internet has had a major impact on all of our lives and continues to be a growing force in all aspects of society; in personal interactions, in knowledge management and inthe way we do business.

In a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community, this evolution of ‘the net’ is described and put in the context of the additional functionality we now expect from our interactions on the internet. The authors challenge the current technology stack that is making up the many, many connections and network capabilities that have to be served to make the internet do what it is supposed to do.

“The topology of the Internet has evolved through economic and technological optimization decisions to a flatter structure where major content providers and distributors get as close as possible to the access networks used by their customers”

There seem to be good reasons to have a good look at this technology evolution and make some choices to continue to enjoy the internet:

Because of the cloud computing trend, more and more traffic is concentrated between several internet powerhouses; Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The distributed nature of the original internet simply does not exist anymore.
Because of the huge increase in mobile internet usage, the way that information is accessed, changed and presented is different from the past models – the existing networking functionality is not optimized for this type of usage.
Future scenarios predict that through the assignment of an IP address to about any device you can think of we will create a huge peer-to-peer network, where human interaction will be only a small portion of all connections; “the internet of things”. The current internet technology is not designed for this.

These changes raise some fundamental questions and these are described in more details the paper. Most noticeable the authors bring our attention to the fundamental nature of the internet as it is built at the moment, a decentralized web of processing and access points.

“On the long run, the question is raised whether the Internet will durably follow a concentration trend driving it towards a more centralized network or if we will see a new wave of decentralization.”

The whitepaper dives into the technology of the internet and shows where we are facing potential bottlenecks.

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2012/12/03/watch-this-space-three-reasons-to-change-the-internet-now/ ]

How big is your robot?

23/06/2013 by Paul

What do you get when you combine cloud computing, social networking, big data and modern day engineering? You get a kick-ass robot. This was my first thought when I finished reading a published whitepaper by the Atos scientific community on the topic of robots.

Central in the paper is the question: “Where is the mind of the future robot?”, and by outlining the concept of a robot that can utilize everything that is available in cyberspace you may find it difficult to answer that question.

Today it is hard to predict where on earth all of the data about you is stored in the cloud and we have never been able to communicate more easily. It is easy to see that robots will be everywhere, able to utilize all available information.
This will lead to a new class in robot persona’s and capabilities.

“Once the robot is part of a social network, it could virtually interact with humans as well and thus start truly mimicking human behavior.”

When I was (much) younger we had a program on our home computer that was called ‘Eliza’. This program would behave as an electronic psychiatrist. It had some limited learning capabilities and some clever language skills to ‘trick’ you in having an actual conversation.

If you would type things like “I hate talking to a computer”, Eliza would answer with “Hate seems to be important to you, can you explain that?”

If we now multiply the capabilities of this ‘Eliza’ by a thousand or more (using cloud computing scalability) and bring in the analytics of all of your ‘likes’ or ‘diggs’ or even the behaviour of your friends, combined with knowledge about your locations and multiply that by analysing all the things you did 5 years ago, 10 years ago and today …. Well I think you get the picture.

The more a future robot knows or has access to, the more it will be able to fulfil his role in supporting us. This may not sit well with everybody, but if we utilize this capability in a clever way, I believe we can benefit.

Especially if we also take into account that a robot can take different forms, could exist virtually or maybe even be in multiple locations at the same time, with access to the right information and computing power to use that to our benefit. The whitepaper describes some of these scenarios and puts it in the perspective of the role of IT providers and systems integrators.

Based on my reading of the whitepaper I was thinking that maybe the statement ‘I cannot be in two places at the same time’ will soon become a thing of the past.

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2012/11/26/watch-this-space-how-big-is-your-robot/ ]