<incom> Conference: looking ahead 10, 20, 50 years

[Steve Cisler]

I am attending a program at Institute for the Future
<http://iftf.org> 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 (www.computerhistory.org/)
 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 Antony 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.
<http://www.calit2.net>

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 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, but the other post will be on the
digitalcommons web log at
http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons

-Steve Cisler

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