The player's semantic experience

In my first posting I outlined what it means for a player to communicate at will without distance or devices. Just as we have conversations with people in the room we are in and our friends hear our talking and respond, that in the future we can have the same natural interaction when we want to accomplish anything digital. The excitement of this statement is when we interpret “anything” as a “rich communications experience”. We are no longer restricted to verbal communications between two people. Secure natural communications includes all communications and computing interactions that exist for people and devices - for human communications as well as device communications.

I also introduced the five key constructs required to achieve this new capability and infrastructure. We require support for the player’s semantic experience, the player’s physical experience, the decode engine, core infrastructure, and information intelligence. If you have been following some of the dialog on this blog you know that Chiku has proposed that we should also focus on new enabled applications as a sixth construct.

In the next set of postings I will elaborate on each of these constructs and also discuss some of the research problems that can be addressed to further improve capabilities

The player’s semantic experience

To better characterize how the player will intellectually interact with other players, we characterize the following components of the player’s semantic experience. In the infrastructure we build for secure natural communications we will require support for each of these components.

• The players. The players in secure natural communications are the potential parties to communications. In today’s terms it would be anything with an IP address. This includes people, computers, devices, sensors, microphones, cameras, items with RFID tags, MP3 players, anything with a GPS system attached, scanners, medical imaging devices, etc. So the notion of “natural” communications means that each of these devices is able to send and receive communications in a way that is natural for them. And any user is able to naturally refer to these items and find them.

• The groups. Group communication has become a fundamental paradigm through the advent of social networking. The infrastructure must make it natural for users to participate in arbitrary ad hoc groups.

• Media. Secure natural communications must support unstructured data as well as voice, video, high quality music, fax, etc.

• Semantics. We have developed increasingly sophisticated means for people, computer systems, and applications to communicate with each other in a highly coded fashion. To the extent that the current protocols and interfaces are adequate, they would be used as they are defined today; but many need to be made more natural.

With these four components, we can give the next level of description of secure natural communications.

Since we include all players imaginable this clarifies the form of communications that is supported. Any player can communicate with any other player. Each has a set of requests supported and each has a different sense of what is “natural”. The infrastructure supports both their physical requests and semantic meeting thereof.

“Groups” recognizes that much communication wants to be multi-party. Increasingly, large projects cross organizational boundaries and collaborate on some set of tasks. Hence all types of group requests must be intelligently anticipated by the infrastructure. When a person or device is participating in multiple group interactions, they must be able to handle the challenge to participate in multiple groups. To achieve this, the infrastructure must present all of the information from multiple interactions in the most intuitive possible fashion. They must handle multiple group interactions digitally as well as any human can handle multiple physical interactions. The infrastructure needs to support an exponential number of potential groups that want to form.

“Media” requires that we digitize everything, so we are encompassing all of human experience in this infrastructure.

The Semantic layer implies that compute tasks that happen with a regular pattern each develop their own means of semantic expression which is also supported.

Of course, in describing each of these components of the player’s semantic experience, I am only scratching the surface. As we develop this, each of these will get more detail. The readers of the blog are invited to provide their viewpoints by commenting on what they think some of these details should be.

In the next posting, I will describe efforts that should take place to more fully develop a player’s semantic experience.

Secure natural communications - achievability and relationship with computing

Today I’ll address two questions that continue to come up.

First: with secure natural communications people can walk around the streets not holding any computing device and look up some piece of data or request a computation from the computing cloud, and it gets performed by an intelligent infrastructure. I’m asked - how realistic is this? People struggle to understand the vastness of the infrastructure needs to achieve this lofty goal. Are parts of this “vision” beyond our grasp?

Here is how I think about it. There are more and less demanding variations on secure natural communications. Enough technology exists that a proof-of-concept could be built, today. Over a long period of time technology and infrastructure advances will make more of this possible. Key to making this happen, however, is to set a stretch goal so we can plan the required physical infrastructure and motivate the necessary innovation.

Second question: Information infrastructure, as in today’s wireless infrastructure, Internet or World Wide Web provides more than communications. Most of the value is in the applications - e-commerce, auctions, advertising, document interchange, compute intensive applications, storage. How does our focus on communications relate to the larger computing applications.

Here is how I think about this issue. At the moment, this blog is focusing on the core infrastructure rather than the compute tasks because for each of these tasks, there is a dominant common communications infrastructure need. To be sure, communications takes place at every level: from physical transmission of bits at the lowest level to the interpretation thereof by applications that have application level protocols.

In particular, when we discuss “the player’s semantic experience”, we will ultimately support the semantics for every type of computing task. However, with the existence of millions of applications this blog will not address application specific protocols herein – although some require substantial infrastructure of their own. That work must proceed in parallel with the core communications infrastructure.

Next blog posting I will next move to a detailed description of the five constructs mentioned in the introductory posting.

Secure natural commmunications - elaboration

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.

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.

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.