Until now, my description of secure natural communications has been conceptual, with a few examples. Before we go further it is useful to tease out more of what the words mean in the original statement describing secure natural communications:
Any player (person or device) can have a rich communications experience at will with any target without encumbrances of distance or additional devices.
Here are some elaborations of the above goal.
A rich communications experience. Included in this would be:
• Finding someone I’ve never communicated with
• Having a record of the relevant threads of information that I previously have with this group.
• Having the universe of social networking capabilities at my fingertips.
• In particular, sharing all types of data, using all types of media
• Being able to tie in the history of communications that are relevant.
• A range: from purely communicating to requesting a complex computing task with sophisticated semantics
• Security and privacy
…at will. Included in this would be:
• I don’t need to plan to find addressing conventions to locate the other player.
• I can use my natural means of communicating and a sensory rich world will understand my physical gestures and understand the semantics
• Speech recognition, gestures, natural language, are supported
• All media types are supported
• There are means (such as pervasive video screens or wearables) for me to get responses
…with any target. Included in this are groups, so it would include:
• Being able to create new groups with security and privacy
• Being able to create ad hoc groups to achieve some new task without a great deal of overhead – and still have the rich communications experience.
• Being able to join groups and get access to their shared history
…without encumbrances of distance. Included in this is:
• Assuming the very high bandwidth backbone in which bandwidth is not a constraint.
• Assuming the very high bandwidth local wireless network that gives adequate untethered bandwidth to get to the high bandwidth fiber backbone
• Developing protocols that work well with this unlimited bandwidth
• Recognizing that for certain purposes there are still constraints of propagation delay
…or additional devices• Implies that there are natural user interfaces (speech, gesture) that can be relied on; i.e. the technology is good enough
• Implies that when using such natural interfaces in a noisy area that my specific sentences and commands will be heard
• Understands that this might require nano-scale wearable microphones
• Any language
• Recognizes that many people will want to continue to use keyboard for input
• Recognizes that a variety of display and storage devices will continue to be needed
This provides a more complete description by example of the type of capability that is desired. Next posting I’ll provide a little more general background, before moving to a more detailed discussion of the constructs that can deliver this and the technologies that are needed.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Secure natural communications - how to proceed
After my initial posting last week, the most frequent question that I received was: how do I plan to proceed with this project? Is this something that we will build tomorrow? Is there some spec? Are these some wandering ideas?
Most of these questions came through email from my colleagues. This blog should be an active discussion community so please post your questions and comments to the blog – as several people have already done.
Reprise – and what is possible today
To reprise, the world should provide an infrastructure where: people can have a rich communications experience at will.
From a core technology perspective, almost all technologies required exist today in elemental form. There are numerous sensors that exist: often called by names such as microphones, cameras, displays, etc. These sensors can detect speech, movement, typing or provide images and videos. Properly configured, they provide the elements of natural human communications overcoming individual device conventions. With ample communications bandwidth we also overcome distance constraints. An infrastructure could both sense bits and interpret them – although not with perfection.
From this - in principle – one can take people’s utterances and build a management system that acts upon them. These can be primitive utterances that request basic communications. Or coded machine commands that request the performance of sophisticated compute function, rich applications, moving function to the cloud, etc.
What is not possible today
There is no infrastructure that provides secure natural communications. Not across the globe; not in a country; not in a city – not even on a campus. It would be considerably expensive to build and there is no known economic model to pay for this new infrastructure.
Goal and method
Here is my pitch. If it is possible to create such an infrastructure – and it would mimic how people naturally communicate – isn’t that compelling enough?
Hence my quest. I want to use a series of postings to express my views about the components of such an infrastructure. I need experts to add precision to this with their knowledge and views. After a while, we will develop enough clarity of viewpoint that we can prototype it on a small campus. If people like it – we will grow it from there.
Next several postings
So my first few postings will continue to discuss the high level concept of secure natural communications. I want to engage in discussion on the general idea. After that, I will elaborate in detail on the five constructs that I outlined last week. Provide a more complete description. What technologies exist? What more do we need to develop over time? And in discussion I will continue to need experts who have the domain knowledge to add precision.
Most of these questions came through email from my colleagues. This blog should be an active discussion community so please post your questions and comments to the blog – as several people have already done.
Reprise – and what is possible today
To reprise, the world should provide an infrastructure where: people can have a rich communications experience at will.
From a core technology perspective, almost all technologies required exist today in elemental form. There are numerous sensors that exist: often called by names such as microphones, cameras, displays, etc. These sensors can detect speech, movement, typing or provide images and videos. Properly configured, they provide the elements of natural human communications overcoming individual device conventions. With ample communications bandwidth we also overcome distance constraints. An infrastructure could both sense bits and interpret them – although not with perfection.
From this - in principle – one can take people’s utterances and build a management system that acts upon them. These can be primitive utterances that request basic communications. Or coded machine commands that request the performance of sophisticated compute function, rich applications, moving function to the cloud, etc.
What is not possible today
There is no infrastructure that provides secure natural communications. Not across the globe; not in a country; not in a city – not even on a campus. It would be considerably expensive to build and there is no known economic model to pay for this new infrastructure.
Goal and method
Here is my pitch. If it is possible to create such an infrastructure – and it would mimic how people naturally communicate – isn’t that compelling enough?
Hence my quest. I want to use a series of postings to express my views about the components of such an infrastructure. I need experts to add precision to this with their knowledge and views. After a while, we will develop enough clarity of viewpoint that we can prototype it on a small campus. If people like it – we will grow it from there.
Next several postings
So my first few postings will continue to discuss the high level concept of secure natural communications. I want to engage in discussion on the general idea. After that, I will elaborate in detail on the five constructs that I outlined last week. Provide a more complete description. What technologies exist? What more do we need to develop over time? And in discussion I will continue to need experts who have the domain knowledge to add precision.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Secure Natural Communications – Initial posting
Sitting in a lecture about global warming you have a new insight about the climate model you have been quietly building in your office, twelve time zones away. You mutter under your breath; let me change these variables, re-run my model, and see if my new results change how we deal with this pressing issue. As soon as the words come out of your mouth, the three dimensional plot of the new result appears on the personal display in the conference center. One example of secure natural communications.
You run into a college roommate on line. You are reminiscing about a third roommate. You say: I would like to talk to him. Although you don’t know where they are, your mere request to speak to this person causes him to be found and for the conversation to start.
Secure natural communications
Over the past twenty years, society has benefited from and been transformed by new infrastructures. Wireless infrastructure and cell phones have made us instantly accessible. The Internet and the World-Wide Web have changed the way we obtain information, interact with others, and shop. The next transformation will come from a far more intelligent infrastructure. Individuals will have a rich communications experience at will. People will be liberated from managing devices, constraints of distance and location, and knowledge of arcane commands. With foresight, we will build security into this infrastructure so privacy is restored.
We call this future vision “Secure natural communications”. It begins with a simple premise which provides a powerful result. The simple expression is:
Any player (person or device) can have a rich communications experience at will with any target without encumbrances of distance or additional devices.
We use the word player to refer to any person or device that needs to communicate with any other set of players.
People have many input / output capabilities – including speech, gesture, feel, vision, keyboard, etc. Devices also have their built-in input / output capabilities. Whenever a player wants to accomplish something which involves another set of players which has an information component, they can do so. An information component could be any communications or computing task imaginable.
Five key constructs: First, the player’s semantic experience is natural. That means, that they communicate – or request that a task be performed in their most intuitive fashion. They use exactly the same words, sentences, and nuances they would use if they were analogously trying to accomplish something in the physical world. The meaning of their action in the digital world matches what it would mean in the physical world.
The physical world is fully enabled and prepared to do what it must at the physical level to provide this semantic experience. Thus the player has a natural physical experience as well. Not only do they express the task with the words and sentences that are natural, but they use their preferred personal input / output modality: whether speech, keyboard, handwriting, gesture, video screen, etc. Sensors are ubiquitous to detect and display what is going on so that the expressive piece of the requester is natural and receptor piece of the player(s) being communicated with are equally natural.
The more natural the player’s experience at the semantic and physical level, the more intelligence required by the infrastructure to figure out what the player wants to accomplish. That is what we call the decode engine.
Aside from a decode engine that translates intent into action, there must be sufficient capacity to achieve everyone’s wishes. Core infrastructure is the design and specification of the aggregate capacity needed.
With this adequate capacity there needs to be a management operations system that allocates capacity to the requested tasks in an efficient manner. This is what we call information intelligence.
Purpose of this blog
I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a long time and part of my time will be to explore them further. Others have similar ideas and we need a place to come together to develop them. So this blogspot becomes a place where a community of people across different organizations come together to share ideas about future infrastructure.
I have ideas to get us started. The roughest outline is posted above. In my next several postings I will develop them further. But at each step I invite people to comment so we can make this everyone’s idea of the future.
To get from where we are today to a vision of the future requires a great deal. First it requires a well socialized vision that we can all agree upon. But that vision will rely on technology that does not yet exist. So part of the objective is to create a research agenda spanning several industries: IT, telecommunications, and nanotechnology with a very focused end goal.
At some point, the blog format will become unwieldy. At that point we’ll move to a wiki or some other sharing mechanism.
As we solve technical problems to create
this exciting future we will need to build prototypes and ultimately build out the infrastructure. That will be another topic we work our way through.
Where did this come from?
A bit about my background. I’ve been fortunate in my career to get the broadest exposure possible to a palate of technologies. At IBM Research for over 16 years, we explored the limits of the IT industry, and as VP of Systems and Software I learned, participated in, and explored the entire range of computer system and software technology. Later, as IBM Corporate VP of Technology, I assessed IBM’s entire technology base – including semiconductors, storage, systems, software, and services.
Later, as President of Research at Bell Laboratories, I had a similar experience and exposure – here with a stronger emphasis on telecommunications, nanotechnology, and physical sciences. Towards the end of my tenure at Bell, I gave a few papers on secure natural communications. It was the coming together of all the advances in two industries – projected a few years in the future – and bolstered by technology making new things possible.
I didn’t pursue it further. Many of the technologies were too early. The vision was too broad. How could one construct an effort to bring all of these technologies together.
I took a position as Executive Vice President and CTO of Novell. Novell, a leading Linux distributor participates heavily in the open source community. I saw the power. I saw how communities of like minded people can build operating systems, database systems, app servers, virtualization solutions, etc.
Here I am today, armed with this vision that unifies IT, telco, and core technology by creating a new infrastructure for our future. I see how this can be accomplished with the power of communities. I resigned my position at Novell. One of several objectives I now have is to now to create a community to drive secure natural communications. We start today.
Call for action
What am I requesting from you? First, participate. Give your viewpoints on the vision. Add your own vision. My starting blogs necessarily will evolve as great minds add their ideas
Second, invite your colleagues to participate. We want as many viewpoints as possible.
Third, have some respect for different viewpoints. The blogosphere can be unvarnished. I think we are all better off when we listen to others. There is a reason that we all have two ears and only one mouth.
You run into a college roommate on line. You are reminiscing about a third roommate. You say: I would like to talk to him. Although you don’t know where they are, your mere request to speak to this person causes him to be found and for the conversation to start.
Secure natural communications
Over the past twenty years, society has benefited from and been transformed by new infrastructures. Wireless infrastructure and cell phones have made us instantly accessible. The Internet and the World-Wide Web have changed the way we obtain information, interact with others, and shop. The next transformation will come from a far more intelligent infrastructure. Individuals will have a rich communications experience at will. People will be liberated from managing devices, constraints of distance and location, and knowledge of arcane commands. With foresight, we will build security into this infrastructure so privacy is restored.
We call this future vision “Secure natural communications”. It begins with a simple premise which provides a powerful result. The simple expression is:
Any player (person or device) can have a rich communications experience at will with any target without encumbrances of distance or additional devices.
We use the word player to refer to any person or device that needs to communicate with any other set of players.
People have many input / output capabilities – including speech, gesture, feel, vision, keyboard, etc. Devices also have their built-in input / output capabilities. Whenever a player wants to accomplish something which involves another set of players which has an information component, they can do so. An information component could be any communications or computing task imaginable.
Five key constructs: First, the player’s semantic experience is natural. That means, that they communicate – or request that a task be performed in their most intuitive fashion. They use exactly the same words, sentences, and nuances they would use if they were analogously trying to accomplish something in the physical world. The meaning of their action in the digital world matches what it would mean in the physical world.
The physical world is fully enabled and prepared to do what it must at the physical level to provide this semantic experience. Thus the player has a natural physical experience as well. Not only do they express the task with the words and sentences that are natural, but they use their preferred personal input / output modality: whether speech, keyboard, handwriting, gesture, video screen, etc. Sensors are ubiquitous to detect and display what is going on so that the expressive piece of the requester is natural and receptor piece of the player(s) being communicated with are equally natural.
The more natural the player’s experience at the semantic and physical level, the more intelligence required by the infrastructure to figure out what the player wants to accomplish. That is what we call the decode engine.
Aside from a decode engine that translates intent into action, there must be sufficient capacity to achieve everyone’s wishes. Core infrastructure is the design and specification of the aggregate capacity needed.
With this adequate capacity there needs to be a management operations system that allocates capacity to the requested tasks in an efficient manner. This is what we call information intelligence.
Purpose of this blog
I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a long time and part of my time will be to explore them further. Others have similar ideas and we need a place to come together to develop them. So this blogspot becomes a place where a community of people across different organizations come together to share ideas about future infrastructure.
I have ideas to get us started. The roughest outline is posted above. In my next several postings I will develop them further. But at each step I invite people to comment so we can make this everyone’s idea of the future.
To get from where we are today to a vision of the future requires a great deal. First it requires a well socialized vision that we can all agree upon. But that vision will rely on technology that does not yet exist. So part of the objective is to create a research agenda spanning several industries: IT, telecommunications, and nanotechnology with a very focused end goal.
At some point, the blog format will become unwieldy. At that point we’ll move to a wiki or some other sharing mechanism.
As we solve technical problems to create
this exciting future we will need to build prototypes and ultimately build out the infrastructure. That will be another topic we work our way through.
Where did this come from?
A bit about my background. I’ve been fortunate in my career to get the broadest exposure possible to a palate of technologies. At IBM Research for over 16 years, we explored the limits of the IT industry, and as VP of Systems and Software I learned, participated in, and explored the entire range of computer system and software technology. Later, as IBM Corporate VP of Technology, I assessed IBM’s entire technology base – including semiconductors, storage, systems, software, and services.
Later, as President of Research at Bell Laboratories, I had a similar experience and exposure – here with a stronger emphasis on telecommunications, nanotechnology, and physical sciences. Towards the end of my tenure at Bell, I gave a few papers on secure natural communications. It was the coming together of all the advances in two industries – projected a few years in the future – and bolstered by technology making new things possible.
I didn’t pursue it further. Many of the technologies were too early. The vision was too broad. How could one construct an effort to bring all of these technologies together.
I took a position as Executive Vice President and CTO of Novell. Novell, a leading Linux distributor participates heavily in the open source community. I saw the power. I saw how communities of like minded people can build operating systems, database systems, app servers, virtualization solutions, etc.
Here I am today, armed with this vision that unifies IT, telco, and core technology by creating a new infrastructure for our future. I see how this can be accomplished with the power of communities. I resigned my position at Novell. One of several objectives I now have is to now to create a community to drive secure natural communications. We start today.
Call for action
What am I requesting from you? First, participate. Give your viewpoints on the vision. Add your own vision. My starting blogs necessarily will evolve as great minds add their ideas
Second, invite your colleagues to participate. We want as many viewpoints as possible.
Third, have some respect for different viewpoints. The blogosphere can be unvarnished. I think we are all better off when we listen to others. There is a reason that we all have two ears and only one mouth.
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