THE FUTURE OF ICT

Time moves so fast that the future is almost here. I have seen changes in information and communication technologies that were simply unimaginable when I was in engineering school in the 1950’s. So perhaps I have been thinking too much about ICTs as they are now, and not enough about how they will be in the foreseeable future. Things that are on the design tables and the university labs will be here very, very soon. Here are some links to online resources that help in thinking about ICT in the future.

Some Thoughts on How ICTs Could Really Change the World
John Gage, at the World Economic Forum, 2002.

One interesting new direction is the Grid, as described by Ian Forster.

What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist
Ian Foster, July 20, 2002. (PDF, 4 pages.)

and for those interested in more detail.

The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration
Abstract: “In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging because of the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. Our presentation complements an earlier foundational article, “The Anatomy of the Grid,” by describing how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explaining how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrating how our architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration—within and across organizational domains.” By Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Jeffrey M. Nick and Steven Tuecke, June, 2002. (PDF, 31 pages.)

How about intelligent rooms?

The Intelligent Room Project at MIT

Rather than thinking about the technology per se, these deal with using technology to change the way people learn.

Using Information Technology to Transform the Way We Learn

This is an innovative way to present the results of a meeting online:

Symposium on Improving Learning with Information Technology
Charts from David Sibbet's Facilitation of Sessions at the ILIT Symposium

A more general overview, albeit one that is several years old, is:

Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future
The report encourages more support for IT research by government, and defines priorities in several areas: Software, Scalable Information Infrastructure, High-End Computing, and Socioeconomic Impacts. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee Report to the President, February 24, 1999.

This is one of a number of interesting reports online at:

The U.S. National Coordinating Office for Information Technology Research and Development

including:

Workshop on New Visions for Software Design and Productivity: Research and Applications
U.S. Government Interagency Working Group on Information Technology Research and Development, Released February 2002.

New Visions for Large Scale Networks: Research and Applications

Transforming Health Care Through Information Technology

Developing Open Source Software for High End Computing

Resolving the Digital Divide: Information, Access, and Opportunity

High Confidence Software and Systems Research Needs

Digital Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge

Transforming Access to Government

And ICT publications from the National Academy of Science:

Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University
Panel on the Impact of Information Technology on the Future of the Research University, National Research Council. 97 pages, 2002.

Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government
Committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in Government, National Research Council. 168 pages, 2002.

Global Networks and Local Values: A Comparative Look at Germany and the United States
Committee to Study Global Netoworks and Local Values, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Reseach Council. 260 pages, 2001.

Embedded, Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers
Committee on Networked Systems of Embedded Computers, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board , National Research Council. 236 pages, 2001.