The impact of computing

on the future of the human society

Dr. Fabrizio GagliardiEMEA Director

External Research

Microsoft Research

ESPOL Ciencia

Ecuador, November 13-15th

Outline• The question: “A more developed and intelligent humanity?”

• Milestones in computing history:

The first computer, the invention of the transistor, high programming languages, ARPAnet, the IBM PC, MS-DOS, the Apple Mac and the Mouse…Internet and the web..

• Current and future trends in computing:

• e-Infrastructures, the Grid, Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, Multi-core architectures, Green IT

• The impact on the future of the human society?

• Socio-economic, health and well-being

• Conclusions

The ITC timeline

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Altavista 1995

Yahoo 1995

Google 1998

The Internet and the World Wide Web

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The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system

of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a

Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text,

images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them

using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by

English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European

Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland,

and released in 1992.Source: Wikipedia

The Internet is a global

system of interconnected

computer networks that

interchange data by packet

switching using the

standardized Internet

Protocol Suite (TCP/IP).

• Internet and the WEB where designed for the scientists but came out from the labs and changed for ever everybody’s life

• Search engines such as ALTAVISTA (1995), Yahoo (1995) and Google (1998) made the web a natural extension of our brains…

• A web based economy was born (but soon exploded in the e-bubble burst)

• Amazon, eBay are some tangible realities

Computing for everybody

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Outline• History of computing:

The invention of the transistor, the first computer, high programming languages, ARPAnet, the IBM PC, MS-DOS, the Apple Mac and the Mouse…Internet and the web…

• Current and future trends in computing:

• e-Infrastructures, the Grid, Cloud Computing, Virtualisation, Data Centers, Software as a Service, Multi-core architectures, Green IT

• The impact on the future of the human society?

• Socio-economic, health and well-being

• Conclusions

Research Networks and Global Collaboration

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High Performance Computing for Research in Europe

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Achieving global e-Science

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Courtesy EGEE Project Office

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Cloud and storage on demand supported by Web2.0 and SoA

•Cloud Computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

•Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo, major ‘Cloud Platform’

potential providers

•Operating compute and storage facilities around the world

•Have developed middleware technologies for resource sharing and

software services

•First services already operational - Examples:

•Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) -Simple Storage Service (S3)

•Google Apps www.google.com/a

•Sun Network.com www.network.com (1$/CPU hour, no contract cost)

•IBM Grid solutions (www.ibm.com/grid)

•GoGrid – a division of ServePath company (www.gogrid.com) Beta

released (pay-as-you-go and pre-paid plans, server manageability)

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The Microsoft Cloud: http://www.microsoft.com/azure

Digital Reality: The Data Exponentials

MegabyteA small novel

GigabyteA pickup truck filled with paper or a DVD

Terabyte: one thousand gigabytes – ~$200 todayThe text in one million books

Entire U.S. Library of Congress is ~ten terabytes of text

Petabyte: one thousand terabytes1-2 petabytes equals all academic research library holdings

Coming soon to a pocket near you!

Routinely generated annually by many scientific instruments

Exabyte: one thousand petabytes5 exabytes of words spoken in the history of humanity

See www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

Courtesy of Dan Reed13-15 November2008 21ESPOL2008, Ecuador

Social networking websites: Facebook et al

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110 million active users!

Broadcast yourself

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Hosts user-generated videos. Includes network and professional content

Combined with e-mail can be used as major promotion tool!

23andMe – See your genes…

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23andMe is a privately held

personal genomics and

biotechnology company based

in California[1] that is

developing new methods and

technologies which can

enable consumers to

understand their own genetic

information. In December

2007, three companies,

23andMe, Navigenics and

deCODE, announced the

availability of $999 to $2500

tests for genome-wide, select

single nucleotide

polymorphisms. 23andme

dropped their price to $399 in

Sep 2008[2]. Google has

invested $3.9M in 23andMe,

whose co-founder Anne

Wojcicki is married to Google

co-founder Sergey Brin.[3]

Sources: 23andMe and Wikipedia

https://www.23andme.com/

Social networking: Some issues…

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Privacy concerns:• A means of surveillance and data mining[1] Facebook policy: "We may use

information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not

limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging

services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."

• Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the

clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done

"for the CIA or any other group."[2] However, the possibility of data mining by

private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the

fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over

70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of

Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy

published on December 14, 2005.[3]

• Third party applications have access to almost all user information and

"Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control

how such Platform Developers use any personal information." [1]

• It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria[6] and

Iran.[7]

• It has also been banned at many places of work to increase productivity.[8]

Source: Wikipedia

Outline• History of computing:

The invention of the transistor, the first computer, high programming languages, ARPAnet, the IBM PC, MS-DOS, the Apple Mac and the Mouse…Internet and the web..

• Current and future trends in computing:

• e-Infrastructures, the Grid, Cloud Computing, Virtualisation, Data Centers, Software as a Service, Multi-core architectures, Green IT

• The impact on the future of the human society?

• Socio-economic, health and well-being

• Conclusions

Science 2020

“In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the Internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work.

From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?”

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020scienceCourtesy of Dan Reed

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Climate Change

Sensors and measurementModels and analysisPolicies and processes

Courtesy of Dan Reed

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Biochemical Physical Questions

Genomics

Proteomics

Cell biochemistryand structure

Cilia

Mucus

Airway/flow

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Personalized, Genetic Medicine

• Minimally, several data elements

– family histories, genetic profile

– lifestyle characterization

– environmental factors

– outcome-driven biomarkers• genetic, proteins, metabolites, labs

• Technologies

– inexpensive medical testing

– integrated, portable EMR

– mobile, wireless sensors

– data mining and analysis

– composable computational models Courtesy of Dan Reed

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• Internet world and Globalisation…– A society where robots, sensors, intelligent environments are going to

interact requesting very high bandwidth end-2-end connections to our houses, cars, and our bodies

• Data, data, data… spread around the internet world– Search engines are able to cope with the increased data volumes

• Social networking is the new way of living – However it creates serious privacy concerns and also addiction syndromes

• Computing brings new opportunities on health care and well being– New discoveries, new drugs, longer life

• A dream society for an ageing population where more and more assistance would be needed but it could also lead to a sad lonely world where in the last days for our life we will be surrounded by machines rather than humans

• When cheap labour ends, computers and robots could take over but hopefully as part of the solution not as the only one

Conclusions 1

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• Answering the original question:– A more developed and comfortable world for the rich,

but the digital divide might still be there for the poor– Better and cheaper health care for sure– More intelligent society but too much information and

too fast processing can produce economic disaster as the present world-wide recession

– As often in the human history technology is essentially neutral and is left up to the governments, the scientists and the people to decide on the use

– We should ALL feel responsible and take the appropriate decisions

– We are building our future now, let’s try to build a good one for everybody and not only for the rich!

Conclusions 2

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Thanks to the organizers for the kind invitation and to all of you

for your attentionContact me at:

Fabrig @ microsoft.com

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Thanks

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