What the Future is Bringing Us (2009)

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What the Future is Bringing Us entries are grouped by year. Click on the desired year.

(2009)

(2000 to 2003) Golden Oldie News Oct-December 2000 up through Jan-March 2003. These materials were moved from an old Oregon Technology Education Council (OTEC) site developed by David Moursund). Most of links in the referenced articles no longer work.

(1974 to 2001) All of David Moursund's editorials published in Learning and Leading with Technology from its inception in 1974 until he retired from ISTE in 2001.

This page is protected against changes by readers. If you want to add comments, go to Discussion page.

Introduction

All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Special Message for Teachers. Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from the (growing) list given below. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

Still another approach is to raise the following question with your students near the beginning of any new unit of study: What changes are going on around the world that are having a major impact on this unit of study? The idea is to emphasize change and that you are helping your students get an education that prepares them for a changing world.

A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education

The following book is available free on the Web in both PDF and Microsoft Word formats.

Moursund, D.G. (2005). Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Retrieved 12/1/07: http://i-a-e.org/eBooks/cat_view/37-free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund.html.

Quoting from the Preface:

I strongly believe that our education system can be a lot better than it currently is. Indeed, I predict that during the next two decades we will substantially improve our educational system. In this book, I enlist your help in making this prediction come true.

The focus in this book is on two aspects of improving our educational system:

Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
Improving the professional lives of teachers and other educators.

This book is mainly designed for preservice and inservice teachers and other educators. If you fall into this category, you will find that this book focuses on your possible futures of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education. It will do this by:

Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
Helping you to increase your productivity and effectiveness as you work to improve the quality of education being received by your students.

Some Forecasts

This section contains relatively recent forecasts of future technology that are important to our current and future educational systems. For the most part, the newest entries are at the top of this section.

Ten Emerging Technologies for 2010

Clarke, Peter (11/18/09). Ten emerging technologies to watch for in 2010. EE Times. Retrieved 12/26/09 from http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=VUFDEYRMZN2J5QE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=221900117.

Quoted below is the first of the ten forecasts listed:

1. Biofeedback or thought-control of electronics

A number of companies and research institutions have shown how brain waves, captured using sensors on a skull cap or head-set, can be used to control computer systems. The applications are medical — giving communications and control of the environment to heavily disabled people — military and, increasingly, in consumer and computer games control interfaces. This may seem like science fiction but the thought-control human-computer interface is here now and is being promoted by companies such as Emotiv Systems Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.).

Natural User Interfaces

Voigt, Kevin (12/3/09). A vision of computing from Microsoft's future thinker. CNN. Retrieved 12/12/09 from http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/01/craig.mundie.microsoft/. Quoting from the article:

In the next 10 years, the way people interact with computers will wildly change. Hand gestures will be as common as the click of a keyboard, and an assortment of documents will be selected not with a mouse, but with a scan of the eye.

"Today, most people's interaction is through a screen -- whether they touch it, type it, point or click, it's still just graphical user interface," says Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft.

"While that's very powerful and has a lot of applicability, I think it will be supplemented in dramatic ways by what we call a natural user interface," Mundie said in an interview with CNN on the sidelines of November's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO summit in Singapore.

Mundie sat with CNN to discuss his vision of what computing will look and feel like in the decade to come. Much like Nintendo's Wii and Sony Playstation 3 are adding physical interactivity to game play, Mundie believes the next decade will see a revolution in the way people physically use computers.

"This will be the ultimate aggregation of the ability of the computer to emulate human senses of sight, hearing, speech, touch, gesture and couple them together in a different way for people to interact with a machine."

Educational Implications: Think about a computer system as an auxiliary brain. This auxiliary brain is very powerful and it substantially increases in capability every year. However, from a user point of view, this auxiliary brain is difficult to use and difficult to learn how to use. It is not like one's own brain, where one can "think" and this causes things to happen.

However, a large number of researchers are working on this human brain to computer brain interface problem. It is a very difficult problem, but significant progress is occurring. The article forecasts some of the progress we can expect to see in the next ten years. Our educational system needs to be preparing children for adult life in such a world.

Intel Unveils 48-Core Research Chip

Feldman, Michael (12/2/09). Intel reveils 48-core research chip. HPC Wire. Retrieved 12/12/09 from http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Intel-Unveils-48-Core-Research-Chip-78378487.html. Quoting from the article:

On Wednesday Intel shifted its Tera-scale Computing Research Program into second gear by demonstrating a 48-core x86 processor. The company is intending to use the new chip as a research platform for the purpose of lighting a fire under manycore computing.

According to Intel, the new chip boasts 1.3 billion transistors and is built on 45nm CMOS technology. It's distinction is that it contains the largest number of Intel Architecture (IA) cores ever assembled on a single microprocessor. As such, it represents the sequel to Intel's 2007 "Polaris" 80-core prototype that was based on simple floating point units. While the latter chip was said to reach 2 teraflops, the company is not talking about performance for the 48-core version.

It's worth mentioning that Intel is not blazing completely new territory here. Tilera already offers 32- and 64-core general-purpose processors (albeit non-x86) and previewed a 100-core version in October. Those chips are aimed at digital multimedia applications, networking gear, wireless infrastructure, and cloud computing.

Educational Implication: Computers continue to get more powerful. This means that the range and complexity of problems that computers can solve or substantially help in solving continues to grow. If the problem being addressed is one of producing a better interactive game, then we can expect better interactive games. Note that it does not take much if any extra informal or formal education to learn to play and enjoy the better game.

If the problem being addressed is one of the many "serious" problems our world faces, such as hunger, over crowding, war, climate change, sustainability, health, and so on, then then the more powerful computer systems make a great deal of difference. Our formal educational system is struggling to prepare studetns to appropriately use this technology to deal with the problems in the disciplines they study.

Exascale Computing (10**18 operations/second)

Merritt, Rick (12/2/09). Cray studies exascale computing in Europe. Retrieved 12/8/09 from http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222000288.

Looking forward to about 2018 to 2020. Quoting from the Website:

"We know there are scientific breakthroughs in important areas such as new energy sources and global climate change that are waiting for exascale performance, and we are working hard on building next-generation supercomputers that will be capable of it," said Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, speaking at a company event in Frankfurt where the initiative was announced.

Cray's deal comes less than a month after Intel Corp. announced it will set up an exascale research center with European partners. Last year, HP Labs gave Georgia Institute of technology a grant to develop virtualization software for exascale-class computers.

Software for Solving Life-Threatening Medical Puzzles

CORDIS (11/11/09). Software for Solving Life-Threatening Medical Puzzles. Retrieved 11/16/09: http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90995. Quoting from the article:

New software is under development that doctors hope will help them identify brain tumours in children that will grow aggressively.

Doctors have not identified what triggers that aggressive tumour growth, despite the vast array of data they hold on their child patients – demographic, environmental, genetic and clinical data, as well as images such as MRI and CAT scans of the developing tumours.

But a new software tool called AITION can integrate all the medical data from a tumour patient and then analyse it to calculate the probable factors that are stimulating tumour development, combining up to 30 correlated variables. AITION provides an overview of the causal relationship across all factors.

Educational Implications: Computational thinking has to do with learning to use one's brain and computer brains to represent and help solve problems. More powerful computers are part of the overall progress in developing computer systems that incorporate a substantial amount of human knowledge and that can help in automating some important aspects of representing and solving complex problems.

Such computer capabilities tend to allow us to divide certain aspects of education into "what" and "how." That is, think in terms of what problems can be solved versus how does one solve them. The computer technology allows us to increase the number of problems that the "how" is completely contained within the computer system, and the computer system can actually solve the problem. A human can learn the "what" and use it if posing problems to be addressed, breaking complex problems into smaller problems that a computer system can solve, and so on.

Of course, this approach to problem solving and building on the previous work of others has existed for thousands of years. What computers and other automated machines do is provide a more powerful way to build on this idea.

As a simple example, we have long known that real numbers can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided. We have known that many different problems of interest can be modeled or represented using numbers. A long standing issue is how much math education time should be spent developing speed and accuracy in doing arithmetic operations by paper and pencil methods, versus how much should be spent in learning to understand and mathematically represent such problems, and make effective use of the results of solving such problems.

Dangers of Smart Robots

Cronin, Mike (11/2/09). Futurists' report reviews dangers of smart robots. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Retrieved 11/6/09 from http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_651056.htm. Quoting from the article:

Scientists are preparing to publish a report this month that examines, in part, whether robots could eventually become so smart they pose a threat to society. [See a previous 2008-2009 report: AAAI Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/AAAI_Presidential_Panel_2008-2009.htm.]

The report will include concerns some researchers have voiced about the legal and ethical use of artificial intelligence.

Most computer scientists don't subscribe to radical visions of a robot-dominated future, said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher in Redmond, Wash., who called the group together to write the report.

But at least one scientist believes intelligent machines could pose threats to human beings. Another, Carnegie Mellon University's Tom Mitchell, said most alarming is what people might do with computers that are based on artificial intelligence.

Five New Technologies

Fleishman, Glenn (10/20/09). Five new technologies that will change everything. PCWorld. Retrieved 10/26/09 from http://www.pcworld.com/article/173778/5_new_technologies_that_will_change_everything.html. Quoting the first part of the article:

While sipping a cup of organically farmed, artisan-brewed tea, I tap on my gigabit-wireless-connected tablet, to pull up a 3D movie on the razor-thin HDTV hanging on the wall. A media server streams the film via a superspeedy USB connection to a wireless HD transmitter, which then beams it to the TV.

That actor--who was he? My augmented-reality contact lenses pick up the unique eye motion I make when I have a query, which I then enter on a virtual keyboard that appears in the space in front of me. Suddenly my field of vision is covered with a Web page showing a list of the actor's movies, along with some embedded video clips.

These technologies will come to life in the distant future, right? Future, yes. Distant, no.

Still Larger Capacity Hard Disk Drives

Merritt, Rick (1-0/19/09). Researcher paves alternate path for hard drives. Microwave approach a dark horse in disk drive debate. EETimes.network. Retrieved 1023/09 from http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=RGEWDV1EYHYURQE1GHPCKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=220700085 Quoting from the document:

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University is developing a technology seen as a dark horse in the race toward tomorrow's ultra-dense hard disk drives. Jimmy Jian-Gang Zhu is developing a prototype of his microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technique he believes will pack three terabits of data in a square inch of a spinning disk.

The technique represents a third option in an ongoing debate over the next big shift in hard disk technology expected to emerge in the next year or two.

Seagate Technology has been championing an approach called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that uses a tiny laser light on each drive head to heat a portion of the disk just before a write operation. Rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on a way to pattern tracks and even bit locations on media.

All sides say they are actively exploring both technologies. Ultimately both technologies will be needed to deliver disks that pack 10 terabits or more per square inch.

New Market-Driven Research Center in Berkley

Bourzac, Katherine (10/20/09). Nokia Opens New Research Center in Berkeley. Technology Review. Retrieved 10/21/09 from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24275/?a=f. Quoting from the document:

On 10/19/09 Nokia launched a new research center based on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The company already operates research centers in ten other locations around the world. The research outpost will focus on technologies that can be brought to market rapidly.

At Monday's launch event, the company offered demos of some research projects already under development at its Palo Alto, CA outpost, including a phone playing a 3D movie. As Duncan Graham-Rowe reports today on our site, 3D displays are going mobile. In the Nokia prototype, the effect is created by projecting a different image to each eye and it requires specially-created content. Phones that contain two cameras could allow users to create their own 3D content, said Henry Tirri, worldwide head of Nokia Research Center.

Robot Surrogate for Blind Persons in Testing Visual Prostheses

CIT (10/19/09). Caltech Scientists Create Robot Surrogate for Blind Persons in Testing Visual Prostheses. Retrieved 10/21/09 from http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13294. Quoting from the documnt:

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a remote-controlled robot that is able to simulate the “visual” experience of a blind person who has been implanted with a visual prosthesis, such as an artificial retina. An artificial retina consists of a silicon chip studded with a varying number of electrodes that directly stimulate retinal nerve cells. It is hoped that this approach may one day give blind persons the freedom of independent mobility. …

An artificial retina, also known as a retinal prosthesis, may use either an internal or external miniature camera to capture images. The captured images then are processed and passed along to the implanted silicon chip's electrode array. (Ongoing work at Caltech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory by Fink and Caltech visiting scientist Mark Tarbell has focused on the creation and refinement of these image-processing algorithms.) The chip directly stimulates the eye's functional retinal ganglion cells, which carry the image information to the vision centers in the brain.

Learning from and About Singular University

Young, Jeffrey R. (9/14/09). What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist's University. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 9/19/09: http://chronicle.com/article/What-Traditional-Scholars-C/48369/. Quoting from the article:

For 9 weeks and $25,000, Singularity U. challenges some entrenched notions about learning and technology.

[The founders, Ray Kurzweil and Peter H. Diamandis] are known for thinking big about the future and for starting companies that capitalize on their predictions. And both are, well, out there in their views of how radically different things will be in just a few years. Mr. Kurzweil, for instance, just co-wrote Transcend, a book in which he argues that technology will soon allow us to replace our DNA with tiny computers that we can reprogram to help fight off diseases.

Many of the 40 students who made up the inaugural class said they agreed with some (though not all) of the founders' beliefs, but they appeared far more interested in learning what makes them tick as entrepreneurs. Spending quality time with Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Diamandis—and with the famous professors on the summer program's roster—was a key reason several students cited for shelling out the $25,000 for tuition.

Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.

Memristors

Barras, Colin (9/14/09). Electronics 'missing link' united with rest of the family. NewScientist. Retrieved 9/17/09: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17783-electronics-missing-link-united-with-rest-of-the-family.html. Quoting from the article:

In the 18 months since the "missing link of electronics" was discovered in Hewlett-Packard's laboratories in Silicon Valley, California, memristors have spawned a hot new area of physics and raised hope of electronics becoming more like brains.

Now the same team have upgraded a standard silicon chip with a layer of memristors to show that the novel component can play nicely with existing computing hardware.

That suggests it may not be long before they reach the market. And that in turn is good news for manufacturers, who need to find a new way to keep computer power growing: the methods that have shrunk computers in recent years look to have reached their limits.

Innovation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

NSF (9/4/09). Future STEM Innovators Expert Panel Discussion. Retrieved 9/9/09: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115543&WT.mc_id=USNSF_62. Quoting from the Website:

The STEM Innovators discussion brought together experts from a variety of relevant disciplines to provide input to the National Science Board's development of recommendations for NSF and the Federal Government to increase the pool of talent that will produce the Nation's future STEM innovators. Follow the link for more in-depth information on the Board's efforts, including the summary and presentations from the STEM expert panel discussion.

Please visit the STEM Education page.

Please visist the Expert Panel Discussion on Preparing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators page.

Summary

Though many current Federal initiatives focus on raising the base-line performance of all students, very few focus on the educational needs of our Nation's highly talented and/or highly motivated students. If properly identified and developed through the education system, these students have the extraordinary potential to become future science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) innovators.

The STEM Innovators discussion will bring together experts from a variety of relevant disciplines to provide input to the National Science Board's thinking in developing recommendations for NSF and the Federal Government to develop the pool of talent that will produce the Nation's future STEM innovators.

What Comes After the Transistor?

Markoff, John (8/31/09). After the transistor, a leap into the microcosm. The New York Times. Retrieved 9/3/09: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html?_r=1. Quoting from the article:

The transistor is not just another element of the electronic world. It is the invention that made the computer revolution possible. In essence it is an on-off switch controlled by the flow of electricity. For the purposes of computing, when the switch is on it represents a one. When it is off it represents a zero. These zeros and ones are the most basic language of computers.

For more than half a century, transistors have gotten smaller and cheaper, following something called Moore’s Law, which states that circuit density doubles roughly every two years. This was predicted by the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart in 1959, and then described by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, in a now-legendary 1965 article in Electronics, the source of Moore’s Law. …

In fact, this year, the chip industry is preparing to begin the transition from a generation of microprocessor chips based on a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers (a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width) to one of 32 nanometers — the next step down into the microcosm. But the end of this particular staircase may be near. …

Both Intel and I.B.M. are publicly committed to a new class of transistors known as FinFETs that may be used as early as the 22-nanometer technology generation beginning in 2011 or 2012. Named for a portion of the switch that resembles a fish fin, these transistors have the dual advantage of offering greater density because they are tipped vertically out of the plane of the silicon wafer, as well as better insulating properties, making it easier to control the switching from a 1 to a 0 state.

Forecasts of improvements in parallel programming

Merritt, Rick (8/24/09). Researchers report progress on parallel path. EE Times. Retrieved 8/26/09: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219401095. Quoting from the article:

Researchers at UC-Berkeley, University of Illinois and Stanford University have been at work for a little over a year with grants from Intel, Microsoft and a handful of other backers mainly from the PC industry. All three are forming ideas about the future of chips with dozens or hundreds of cores and coding prototype parallel software to harness them.

…

"We believe within four years we can show companies like Intel and Microsoft how they can make their offerings better support parallel programming," said Marc Snir, co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) at the University of Illinois. "There is no silver bullet, but we hope we can make developing parallel software as easy as developing today's software," he said.

The industry expects processors with 64 cores or more will arrive by 2015, forcing the need for parallel software, said David Patterson of the Berkeley Parallel Lab. Although researchers have failed to create a useful parallel programming model in the past, he was upbeat that this time there is broad industry focus on solving the problem.

Communication Devices in 2033

Langnau, Leslie (7/14/09). What will communication devices look like in 2033? Design World. Retrieved 8/9/09: http://www.designworldonline.com/articles/4331/What-will-communication-devices-look-like-in-2033.aspx. Quoting from the article:

Twenty-five years after the creation of the cell phone, designers at Motorola imagined what cell phones might look like in another twenty five years. The Consumer Xperience Design (CXD) team created a portfolio of sketches that look beyond what is possible today and imagine the possibilities of the future. …

In 2033, the “cell phone” could be an extension of our bodies and senses, where information could be exchanged and communication could be achieved through universal gestures. Moreover, embedded technology could become more accepted, designs could be more varied and shape-shifting technologies could enable people to adapt devices for different needs. …

By 2033:

— Communication could be ambient, always on, and people could live online

— Computers and mobile devices could be embedded in the ordinary

— “Using Software” could vanish; only interface and human interaction would remain

— Device interaction could become natural, predictive, and fluid

— Mollecular manufacturing could revolutionize production

— Objects could access ‘The Cloud’ at will

I find it interesting to think about te challenges such changes are bringing to education right now, and will bring in the future. We need an education system that pays careful attention to ubiquitous and steadily improving communication between people and between people and machines (such as computers).

Data Collection and Modeling for Sustainability

Hooper, Andy and Rice, Andrew (7/22/09). Computing for the future of the planet. ElectronicsWeekly.com. Retrieved 7/25/09: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2009/07/22/46568/computing-for-the-future-of-the-planet.htm. Quoting from the article:

At the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, we are examining the ways computing and digital technology can be developed to help reduce the ecological footprint of society and improve the way we live.

This research ranges from looking at the benefits of co-locating data centres with wind farms to the use of sensors to help optimise our transport network.

The research has four main themes:

providing an optimal digital infrastructure that makes the best use of the energy it consumes during manufacture, operation and end-of-life processes;
developing a global data collection network to sense and optimise our consumption of resources and our impact on the environment;
predicting and reacting to future events in natural systems by developing dependable and trustworthy implementations of the complex models provided by scientists; and
finding digital alternatives to our physical activities, building on the success of e-billing, downloadable music and online shopping.

Japan's Planned Supercomputer

July 20, 2009. Japan's Next-Generation Supercomputer Configuration Is Decided. HPCWire. Retrieved 7/22/09: http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Japans-Next-Generation-Supercomputer-Configuration-Is-Decided-51225557.html?ref=557. Quoting from the Website:

Fujitsu and Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, known as RIKEN, today announced that RIKEN has decided to employ a new system configuration with a scalar processing architecture for its next-generation supercomputer. The supercomputer is being sponsored by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) as part of its project for the "Development and Use of an Advanced, High-Performance, General-Purpose Supercomputer" (Next-Generation Supercomputer Project).

RIKEN decided to pursue a scalar configuration after assessing the prospect of the project, aiming to reach its original goals of achieving a LINPACK performance of 10 petaflops and being completed and ready for shared use in 2012. The next-generation supercomputer will utilize what is presently the world's fastest CPU (128 gigaflops), developed and manufactured by Fujitsu using 45-nm process technology. The network between the system's nodes will consist of a direct-connection network with wide-band communications channels. This system configuration will ensure both energy efficiency and massive parallel computing capability.

To learn more about "FLOPS" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS. To see a list of the world's current fastest computers, see http://www.top500.org/list/2009/06/100. The proposed new machine would be a significant step upward in speed.

Robots

NSF (7/14/09). When Robots Invaded the Senate. Retrieved 7/18/09: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115211&govDel=USNSF_51. Includes a short video showing some of the robots and robotic devices that are pushing the envelop in various disciplines such as medicine. Quoting from the document:

Scalpels that a surgeon uses to excise small tumors but never actually touches. Robots that can take the place of lab rats in clinical trials. Cars that can drive themselves through busy streets. These were just some of the cutting-edge technologies on display at the Hart Senate Office Building last week as the National Science Foundation (NSF) presented a luncheon briefing and open house for Senate members and their staff on cyber-physical systems (CPS), an emerging technological field that incorporates computing power to improve virtually every facet of modern life.

Some Forecasts from Microsoft

Gohring, Nancy (7/13/2009). Microsoft's Mundie describes computing shift. Retrieved 7/15/09: http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/microsofts-mundie-describes-computing-shift-177.

Quoting from the article:

I've lately taken to talking about computing more as going from a world where today they work at our command to where they work on our behalf," said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft.

"As powerful as computers are... they're still a tool. If you haven't done an apprenticeship and you don't know how to master the tool, you don't get as much out of it as you might," Mundie said.

This subtle shift at Microsoft comes after 10 or 15 years of work on trying to enhance the user interface for computers. That work has included handwriting, gesture, voice, and touch interaction, but largely used in the context of the existing graphical user interface.

About a year ago that work shifted a bit, in anticipation of technology improvements that would allow researchers to begin to apply these different ways of interacting with computers in a new way, beyond simply replacing the keyboard and the mouse.

Managing the Data Deluge

TACC (n.d.). Texas Advanced Computing Center). Retrieved 7/4/09: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/research/users/features/dynamic.php?m_b_c=corral.

Quoting from the article:

In the 2007 article, “The End of Theory," Wired editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, predicted that in the near future, computers would cull immense databases of observational measurements to produce new insights about the natural world. This data deluge, he argued, would make the scientific method obsolete.

“Instead of coming up with theorems and running the simulations to see if they actually fit the observations, you take very large amounts of data collected from the real world and perform analyses on that data to derive the mathematics behind it, or apply statistical methods to attempt to understand various phenomenon,” explained Chris Jordan, senior operating systems specialist, responsible for data infrastructure at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

This kind of discovery requires a central repository for massive data collections — satellite scans of Earth, digital negatives of plants — that can be accessed and manipulated, compared and reviewed, easily, and from any location.

TACC’s newest resource, Corral, which debuted on March 31, 2009, is just that.

With 16 Dell server nodes and 1.2 petabytes [A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity and is 2 to the 50th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand terabytes.] of DataDirect Networks storage — twice the space required to hold the entire Netflix DVD catalogue, and four times larger than any current data-collection resource on the TeraGrid — Corral will effortlessly handle the challenges and opportunities of data-driven science.

Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Master Inventor, Predicts the Future

Shilingford, Joia (6/17/09). Futurephile: A world with less waiting. Retrieved 6/19/09: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b51e9b62-5a0d-11de-b687-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1.

The short article contains some questions and answers. Here are two examples:

How will IT change?

Everyone will wear glasses that give you a computer overlay. The computer will process faces of passers-by and flash if you have met them before. Their name and where you met them could appear, saving many embarrassing moments.

How will IT be used by individuals in 2020?

We’ll be living with more intelligent systems. We may have to wait 30 seconds more at the traffic lights but we’ll get a completely clear run, with green lights all the way.

3-D Without the Glasses

CORDIS (June 2009). No more geeky glasses to watch 3D. Retrieved 6/13/09: http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90639. Quoting from the Website:

Most people’s experience with 3D involves wearing tinted glasses in a cinema. But a new technology, which does not require glasses and may enable 3DTV, is being developed by European researchers.

While the first applications of the new technology are likely to be the fields of industry and science, there are also very major implications for the future of entertainment, both at the cinema and on television, as well as in video gaming.

The most important aspect of the new system from the user perspective is that nothing is required of the viewer – no need for the special glasses in cinemas or having to adjust your head into specific positions to get the 3D effect, as with a holographic image. It provides the closest video 3D viewing experience compared to the well-known static holography, where the user can freely move to change viewing angle

Very very long term storage

ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years. Retrieved 7/11/09: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090525105418.htm. Quoting from the article:

When it comes to data storage, density and durability have always moved in opposite directions -- the greater the density the shorter the durability. For example, information carved in stone is not dense but can last thousands of years, whereas today’s silicon memory chips can hold their information for only a few decades.

Packing more digital images, music, and other data onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more strawberries into the same size supermarket carton. The denser you pack, the quicker it spoils. The 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today’s memory cards has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. And the electronics industry needs much greater data densities for tomorrow’s iPods, smart phones, and other devices.

Scientists are reporting an advance toward remedying this situation with a new computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years. Their discovery is scheduled for publication in the June 10, 2009 issue of ACS’ Nano Letters, a monthly journal.

Virtual Schools Can Cut Costs

Devaney, Laura (5/27/09). Study: Virtual schools can help cut costs Rapidly-increasing online education eliminates need for transportation and facilities costs, researchers note. eSchool News. Retrieved 5/27/09: Study: Virtual schools can help cut costs Rapidly-increasing online education eliminates need for transportation and facilities costs, researchers note .

Distance learning in K-12 education is steadily growing. Quoting from the article:

New research suggests that more K-12 public school students will take classes online and will have longer school days in the next decade--and academic improvement and cost savings are two big benefits.

…

Cavanaugh's report found that the average yearly cost of online learning for a full-time student was about $4,300 in 2008, based on a survey of 20 virtual schools in 14 states. The national average cost per student in a traditional public school in 2006, the most recent year in which data were available, was more than $9,100. Cost estimates included course development, teaching, and administrative and technical expenses.

More Success in Digitizing the Past

Alter, Alexandra (5/8/09). The Next Age of Discovery. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 5/11/09: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124173896716198603.html.

The article discusses the steadily improving tools that allow the digitization of old, crumbling literary treasures. For example:

In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

Social-Computational Systems

The National Science Foundation tends to select important areas of STEM and help foster their development. Here is part of a April 2009 program announcement:

The Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop a practical understanding of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing. By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result. Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems.

The SoCS program will support research in socially intelligent computing arising from human-computer partnerships that range in scale from a single person and computer to an Internet-scale array of machines and people. The program seeks to create new knowledge about the capabilities these partnerships can demonstrate - new affordances and new emergent behaviors, as well as unanticipated consequences and fundamental limits. The program also seeks to foster new ideas that support even greater capabilities for socially intelligent computing, such as the design and development of systems reflecting explicit knowledge about people's cognitive and social abilities, new models of collective, social, and participatory computing, and new algorithms that leverage the specific abilities of massive numbers of human participants.

Simulated brain

Palmer, Jason (4/22/09). Simulated brain closer to thought. BBC News. Retrieved 4/25/09: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8012496.stm.

The Blue Brain project to develop a computer simulation of a human brain began in 2005, and it continues to make progress. Quoting from the report:

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.

The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory.

…

The first phase of the project is now complete; researchers have modeled the neocortical column - a unit of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex which is responsible for higher brain functions and thought.

"The thing about the neocortical column is that you can think of it as an isolated processor. It is very much the same from mouse to man - it gets a bit larger a bit wider in humans, but the circuit diagram is very similar," Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain project and founder of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland, told BBC News.

He added that, when evolution discovered this "mammalian secret", it duplicated it many many times and then "used it as it needed more and more functionality".

Future shock: The PC of 2019

Pratt, Mary K. (3/16/09).Future shock: The PC of 2019. Computerworld. Retrieved 3/19/09: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Hardware&articleId=334799&taxonomyId=12&pageNumber=1. Quoting from the 4-page article:

For those of you who want the world at your fingertips, the wait is almost over.

The future PC promises to put nearly everything you could need or want right in your palm.

Think of a souped-up version of today's smartphone, with a monitor that unrolls into a larger screen and a biometric security system that lets you access everything in your professional and personal life from anywhere, with all the data residing in the cloud. Wave it at your car to unlock the door. Order and pay for your morning coffee with a touch of a button. Plug it into a docking station and project that big presentation to your clients. Book a weekend getaway with just a few clicks.

Toward Universal Access to all Knowledge

Kale, Brewester (4/14/2009). Toward Universal Access to All Knowledge. (Abstract of talk to be presented at a conference.) Accessed 3/11/09: http://net.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=1020348&PRODUCT_CODE=WRC09/GS01&bhcp=1.

Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public web page ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By mostly using existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this collection as well as compensate authors within the current worldwide library budget.

Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.

Thomas Jefferson’s statement that "All that is necessary for a student is access to a library" may be an exaggeration, but access to information is a key ingredient to education and an open society. Will we allow ourselves to reinvent our concept of libraries to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our governments’ spending priorities, and in law.

Of course, not all of this content will be made available free. However, A large amount of the collected knowledge will be available free, and a lot will be available through "for fee" services that are paid for by our educational system, libraries, and so on.

The size of the Library of Alexandria is debated, but may have been the equivalent of 50,000 to 500,000 books. (Remember, the meaning of book" has changed over time. Think of the many books that make up the Old and New Testaments of the one or two books we call the Bible. Current search engines on the Web are probably looking at the equivalent of two-billion books.

U.S. Losing Competitive Edge

Lohr, Steve (2/25/09). In Innovation, U.S. Said to Be Losing Competitive Edge . The New York Times. Retrieved 2/26/09: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/technology/25innovate.html?_r=1. Quoting from the article:

The competitive edge of the United States economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.

The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness. They included venture capital investment, scientific researchers, spending on research and educational achievement.

But the American economy placed last in terms of progress made over the last decade. “The trend is very troubling,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the foundation.

The "Deep Web"

Wright, Alex (2/22/09). Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp. The New York Times. Retrieved 2/24/09: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/internet/23search.html?_r=2. Quoting from the article:

One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available—if only the search engines knew how to find them.

I (David Moursund) was intrigued by the trillion pages figure that was mentioned. My mind formed the following way of looking at this big number. Suppose that 500 Web pages is in some sense equivalent in length or content to a typical hard copy book. Then a trillion Web pages is roughly equivalent to two billion hard copy books. Hmm.

New Supercomputer to be World's Fasted

Bonasia, J. (2/2/09). IBM's Power Play: New Supercomputer Called Fastest Ever. Investors.com. Retrieved 2/5/09: http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&issue=20090202. Quoting from the article:

Businesses could soon tap into vast troves of computing power at a fraction of the cost of today's fastest systems, according to officials working on Sequoia, IBM's (IBM) next-generation BlueGene supercomputer.

IBM has won a much-coveted contract to design and build the machine for the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to better manage the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, according to NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino.

Sequoia, set to go online in 2011, will run at 20 petaflops, or a quadrillion floating operations per second. That's 15 times faster than today's fastest computers — more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined.

Twenty petaflops equals 20,000 trillion calculations per second; one petaflop equals 150,000 calculations per second for every person on earth.

Declining Critical Thinking

Wolpert, Stuart (1/27/09). Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? UCLA Newsroom. Retrieved 1/29/2009: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/is-technology-producing-a-decline-79127.aspx. Quoting from the report:

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

…

Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.

"In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.

A.I. Comes of Age

Anthes, Gary (1/26/09). Future Watch: A.I. comes of age.. Retrieved 1/28/09: Computerworld.http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=332273.

Quoting from the article about robotic and AI work at Stanford:

Today, AI systems can perform useful work in "a very large and complex world," Horvitz says. "Because these small [software] agents don't have a complete representation of the world, they are uncertain about their actions. So they learn to understand the probabilities of various things happening, they learn the preferences [of users] and costs of outcomes and, perhaps most important, they are becoming self-aware."

These abilities derive from something called machine learning, which is at the heart of many modern AI applications. In essence, a programmer starts with a crude model of the problem he's trying to solve but builds in the ability for the software to adapt and improve with experience. Speech recognition software gets better as it learns the nuances of your voice, for example, and over time Amazon.com more accurately predicts your preferences as you shop online.

Economic Stimulus

Lohr, Steve (1/25/09). Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus. The New York Times. Retrieved 1/26/09: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/technology/26techjobs.html?_r=1. Quoting from the article:

The $825 billion stimulus plan presented this month by House Democrats called for $37 billion in spending in three high-tech areas: $20 billion to computerize medical records, $11 billion to create smarter electrical grids and $6 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in rural and underserved communities.

A study published this month, which was prepared for the Obama transition team, concluded that putting $30 billion into those three fields could produce more than 900,000 jobs in the first year. The mix of proposed spending is different in the House plan, but the results would be similar, said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which did the study.

Children and ICT in the UK

University of Hertfordshire (1/20/09). New report reveals that children have the edge in new technologies. Retrieved 1/23/2009: http://www.herts.ac.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/Children-have-the-edge-in-new-technologies.cfm.

Quoting from the report:

They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families. The aim was to assess how parents engage with children learning new technology and how parents could better support their children’s learning. The survey found that 94 per cent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

“What is clear from these results is that mothers are taking the lead,” said Professor Pine. “Overall, mothers are more likely to engage with their children using new technologies especially when it comes to formal learning or research. The mothers were also the most experienced and capable computer and Internet users.”

The high percentages of both girls and boys who are using ICT is an indication that ICT in homes in the UK is now commonplace. The involvement of parents—and especially, the high percentage of mothers—is encouraging from an overall education point of view.

Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World

Quoting from the http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html Website:

From the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World" is the fourth unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view of the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events. Our report is not meant to be an exercise in prediction or crystal ball-gazing. Mindful that there are many possible "futures," we offer a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.

Some of our preliminary assessments are highlighted below:

The whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China— have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.

The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.

Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.

The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

The full 100 page report is available free as a PDF download.