It is not by accident that all these technologies appear to have come onto the scene at almost the same time. They are all driven, and or enabled, by the same hardware platforms based upon silicon with chip densities that now rival, or exceed, many biological lifeforms. Their ability to support increasingly complex software has seen AI and robotics become major industrial and medical tools. At the same time, Artificial Life is being applied in a more invisible manner, with Quantum Computing promising to change everything.
So why are these technologies so important? In short; they allow us to tackle and understand the most difficult problems facing our species. And all of these are complex, non-linear, with emergent properties that defy our mathematical and computing frameworks. Problems that are way beyond any biological brain include: protein folding; stem cell behaviours; drug interactions; the understanding of chemistry, biology, seismic activity, and weather systems, pollution and global warming; plus the creation of new materials, device, machine and building design.
Presented @ The University of Essex Innovation Centre for the IoD
It also turns out that they are essential for the creation of sustainable societies…
Summary
There has never been a time in the history of our species that has seen such innovation and rapid progress; and we have never been so confounded by the world we have realized! For sure, we have crossed the Rubicon from a linear past to a non-linear future and find ourselves lacking many of the basic tools we need to fully address the major problems confronting us.
In such an environment we have to prepared to be ‘unreasonable’, to challenge established wisdom, conventions and practices. So in this session, I present three challenging cases that do just that:
1) Wireless Spectrum: It is infinite and there is no bandwidth crisis!
2) Cyber Security: We need auto-immune systems aka biology
3) Information War: The biggest threat to the survival of our species
ICTON 2019 France Keynote Presentation
Only 50 years ago network design was dominated by well defined, characterised, and understood services, but the launch of mobile services in the 1980s brought that era of certainty and stability to a rapid close. Not only where mobile users different in their habits, they discovered TXT! At almost the same time the internet and dial-up modems were introduced, and these compounded the situation further. Since that time network designers have been largely guessing as to what services they should accommodate and when.
The real culprits of chaos here are accelerating technologies and the new services they engender. For example: Facebook did not exist 15 years ago; WhatsApp 10 years ago; Snapchat 8 Years ago; whilst Video/Audio downloading and streaming were not mainstream just 3 years ago. And waiting in the wings we have the IoT and AI services. Needless to say most networks and network designers will continue to be wrong footed by the pace of change!
At some time(s) all of us will lose control; feel anxiety, anger, exposure, vulnerability, threatened, stress, depression, uncertainty, be forgetful, or be of ‘two minds’ and so on. Our behaviors will most likely be modulated, and even strange in some way for some period. But all this is normal and a key component of our physiology of survival, and it is generally transient lasting minutes, hours, or at worst a day or two. When such conditions last for many day or weeks or become episodic, we label them mental illness.
The treatment of mental illness sufferers throughout history has not been a happy story spanning; the possession by spirits and demons, to incarceration, and institutionalization to become objects of fun, entertainment, derision, neglect, and disrespect. In the developed world a deal of progress and enlightenment (in terms of base understanding and treatment) has now been established, but there are still marked differences between the older and younger generations, sub-cultures, religions, and belief systems.
The medical profession has come a long way, and their understanding and science are still advancing, but expertise is in chronically short supply. And so there is a universal plight shared between physical and mental health with a gross shortage of skilled practitioners and physical facilities. In reality, this shortfall cannot be overcome by traditional health models - there are simply insufficient people available to be trained and qualified into all the health professions. Our only hope then; is to turn to new technologies with a progressive migration of patients from a ‘Do It all For Me’ (DIFM) to a ‘Do It For Yourself’ (DIY)_culture and expectation.
This DIFM to DIY transition is getting well established for the physical health sector, but it is still in its infancy for mental patients. Both sectors suffer the irrational/uneducated/unthinking/virulent detractors, but the reality is - we have a very limited number of choices - and we can only move within the framework of the possible. But: it is worth noting that the mental health sector is far more of a ‘minefield’ than the physical precursors. And so we should advance and experiment with great care and be sure to involve patients as a member of the team as opposed to being mere subjects and pseudo ‘lab rats’.
“tread softly, lest you step upon my dreams”
The world of work and employment has never changed so fast or been so complex, and it is showing no sign of slowing down. The raw technologies of communication and IT now see the simultaneous arrival of Mobile Working, BYOD, BMOB, Social Nets; Open Nets, Software, Apps and The Cloud plus Big Data. This is no accident - everything is now connected - and one technology enables/breeds another to satisfy seen and unseen demands!
Not only have we all become typists, computer operators, reprographic specialists, designers, photo takers and movie makers, editors and exceptional producers, our skill sets and abilities are about to be amplified further by artificial intelligence and robotics. Needless to say HR Departments are facing the challenge of existing workforces thinking and operating behind the wave, whilst the new entries are generally ahead of the game and prone to breaking all the rules!
In 2015/16 a number of bodies/nations set about defining societies they would aspire to in the near future. Each vision document similarly described some idealistic, egalitarian, super-smart, human centred, state providing a near uniformity of living conditions, and opportunity. At the same time, each society would be free of adversity, with economic development guided by ecological and human need. Of course, economic growth was defined to continue in line with the past. Very nice, but a product of old linear thinking and modelling!
It is now approaching 2022 and in the past 5/7 years our base silicon technology has advanced to enjoy a >30 fold increase in computing power. Our top end mobile devices would now challenge a super computer of 1996/7 era, whist AI systems now pervade our homes, offices, vehicles, professions and all our on-line services. At the same time, information overload has started to rival some medical conditions!
All of this has also been compounded by two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions that have seen the normalisation of social isolation, limited travel, working and eduction from home, virtualised medicine and care, support services, shopping and meetings. In turn, this has resulted in empty offices, towns and cities. Concurently, climate change, global warming, pollution, finite resources, a stressed planetary system, and social unrest have suddenly become urgent issues. Against this backdrop it really seems to be time to revisit those Society 5.0 Visions and the limited linear thinking that contrived them!
In this presentation we examine many of the core parameters and assumptions to highlight existing, or soon to be realised, solutions and remedies. In doing so, a different picture of Society 5.0 emerges.
(Beyond simplistic thinking and models)
This lecture is one of a series ‘Grand Challenge Subjects’ designed to make students think beyond, and challenge, the status quo; to question what they have been taught and the established industry wisdoms; to look beyond the tech media and journal papers; to think, be original, and be creative in the widest sense. This all culminates in a design and build/project program spread over several weeks.
The notion that the IoT will see everything connecting via the internet using a wireless domain dominated by 5G is not only simplistic, it is fundamentally impossible. A moments thought and a few simple calculations reveal that there is not enough energy on the planet to power 50 - 250Bn or more IoT devices operating in such a mode. So how are we really going to design and engineer the IoT to become a workable proposition? Here are some clues:
3/4G: Carries <5% of all internet traffic; WiFi ~55%; Wired LANs @ 45%
Mobile Network coverage is sadly lacking @ <90% by geography
Mobile Device batteries and charging are major limitations
The internet consumes ~12% of all our energy
Mobile Devices consume ~ 1% and rising
Mobile Nets consume ~ 10%
None of the above takes into account the cost of raw materials, production, distribution, delivery, support, disposal and the ecological impact of civil engineering, equipments, and people.
During this lecture the following surprising conclusions quickly emerge:
Most IoT devices will talk to each other and never connect to the internet
IoT devices will require a range of bandwidths and not just low bit rates
The majority of IoT devices will communicate over very short distance
Our current wireless architectures are outmoded by the IoT
We will most likely need something beyond UWB
The power per IoT device has to be <<1mW
Security will demand auto-immunity
This then is the starting point; from here we can design and engineer solutions for an, as yet, unspecified and dimensioned IoT fit for this century.
In a rapidly changing world of growing demand and diminishing resources merely polishing our old technologies and making industrial processes ever more efficient only delays the onset of crisis and collapse - it does not solve the fundamental problem. Sustainable futures are inextricably linked to radical change and the creation of new technologies based on new materials, processing, shaping, use, reuse, repurposing and recycling at minimal loss.
So we look to the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Nano and Bio-Technology to demonstrate advances are being made, and where the biggest societal changes will originate. We take a deep dive into the realm of human replacement and augmentation by machine, and the likely implications for individuals, groups, society, companies, institutions and governments.
Pundits and experts alike are predicting the demise of Call and Contact Centres at the hand of rapidly advancing AI systems, and it is easy to see why. Google have recently demonstrated remarkable gains in conversational AI used as a booking engine. At the same time, IBM Watson has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge and a reasonably sophisticated ability to debate. But could they all be wrong? For sure, Call/Contact Centres are far from ideal, but they replace other (older) modes that were even worse and we should take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Summary
There has never been a time in the history of our species that has seen such innovation and rapid progress; and we have never been so confounded by the world we have realized! For sure, we have crossed the Rubicon from a linear past to a non-linear future and find ourselves lacking many of the basic tools we need to fully address the major problems confronting us.
In such an environment we have to prepared to be ‘unreasonable’, to challenge established wisdom, conventions and practices. So in this session, I present three challenging cases that do just that:
1) Wireless Spectrum: It is infinite and there is no bandwidth crisis!
2) Cyber Security: We need auto-immune systems aka biology
3) Information War: The biggest threat to the survival of our species
ICTON 2019 France Keynote Presentation
Only 50 years ago network design was dominated by well defined, characterised, and understood services, but the launch of mobile services in the 1980s brought that era of certainty and stability to a rapid close. Not only where mobile users different in their habits, they discovered TXT! At almost the same time the internet and dial-up modems were introduced, and these compounded the situation further. Since that time network designers have been largely guessing as to what services they should accommodate and when.
The real culprits of chaos here are accelerating technologies and the new services they engender. For example: Facebook did not exist 15 years ago; WhatsApp 10 years ago; Snapchat 8 Years ago; whilst Video/Audio downloading and streaming were not mainstream just 3 years ago. And waiting in the wings we have the IoT and AI services. Needless to say most networks and network designers will continue to be wrong footed by the pace of change!
At some time(s) all of us will lose control; feel anxiety, anger, exposure, vulnerability, threatened, stress, depression, uncertainty, be forgetful, or be of ‘two minds’ and so on. Our behaviors will most likely be modulated, and even strange in some way for some period. But all this is normal and a key component of our physiology of survival, and it is generally transient lasting minutes, hours, or at worst a day or two. When such conditions last for many day or weeks or become episodic, we label them mental illness.
The treatment of mental illness sufferers throughout history has not been a happy story spanning; the possession by spirits and demons, to incarceration, and institutionalization to become objects of fun, entertainment, derision, neglect, and disrespect. In the developed world a deal of progress and enlightenment (in terms of base understanding and treatment) has now been established, but there are still marked differences between the older and younger generations, sub-cultures, religions, and belief systems.
The medical profession has come a long way, and their understanding and science are still advancing, but expertise is in chronically short supply. And so there is a universal plight shared between physical and mental health with a gross shortage of skilled practitioners and physical facilities. In reality, this shortfall cannot be overcome by traditional health models - there are simply insufficient people available to be trained and qualified into all the health professions. Our only hope then; is to turn to new technologies with a progressive migration of patients from a ‘Do It all For Me’ (DIFM) to a ‘Do It For Yourself’ (DIY)_culture and expectation.
This DIFM to DIY transition is getting well established for the physical health sector, but it is still in its infancy for mental patients. Both sectors suffer the irrational/uneducated/unthinking/virulent detractors, but the reality is - we have a very limited number of choices - and we can only move within the framework of the possible. But: it is worth noting that the mental health sector is far more of a ‘minefield’ than the physical precursors. And so we should advance and experiment with great care and be sure to involve patients as a member of the team as opposed to being mere subjects and pseudo ‘lab rats’.
“tread softly, lest you step upon my dreams”
The world of work and employment has never changed so fast or been so complex, and it is showing no sign of slowing down. The raw technologies of communication and IT now see the simultaneous arrival of Mobile Working, BYOD, BMOB, Social Nets; Open Nets, Software, Apps and The Cloud plus Big Data. This is no accident - everything is now connected - and one technology enables/breeds another to satisfy seen and unseen demands!
Not only have we all become typists, computer operators, reprographic specialists, designers, photo takers and movie makers, editors and exceptional producers, our skill sets and abilities are about to be amplified further by artificial intelligence and robotics. Needless to say HR Departments are facing the challenge of existing workforces thinking and operating behind the wave, whilst the new entries are generally ahead of the game and prone to breaking all the rules!
In 2015/16 a number of bodies/nations set about defining societies they would aspire to in the near future. Each vision document similarly described some idealistic, egalitarian, super-smart, human centred, state providing a near uniformity of living conditions, and opportunity. At the same time, each society would be free of adversity, with economic development guided by ecological and human need. Of course, economic growth was defined to continue in line with the past. Very nice, but a product of old linear thinking and modelling!
It is now approaching 2022 and in the past 5/7 years our base silicon technology has advanced to enjoy a >30 fold increase in computing power. Our top end mobile devices would now challenge a super computer of 1996/7 era, whist AI systems now pervade our homes, offices, vehicles, professions and all our on-line services. At the same time, information overload has started to rival some medical conditions!
All of this has also been compounded by two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions that have seen the normalisation of social isolation, limited travel, working and eduction from home, virtualised medicine and care, support services, shopping and meetings. In turn, this has resulted in empty offices, towns and cities. Concurently, climate change, global warming, pollution, finite resources, a stressed planetary system, and social unrest have suddenly become urgent issues. Against this backdrop it really seems to be time to revisit those Society 5.0 Visions and the limited linear thinking that contrived them!
In this presentation we examine many of the core parameters and assumptions to highlight existing, or soon to be realised, solutions and remedies. In doing so, a different picture of Society 5.0 emerges.
(Beyond simplistic thinking and models)
This lecture is one of a series ‘Grand Challenge Subjects’ designed to make students think beyond, and challenge, the status quo; to question what they have been taught and the established industry wisdoms; to look beyond the tech media and journal papers; to think, be original, and be creative in the widest sense. This all culminates in a design and build/project program spread over several weeks.
The notion that the IoT will see everything connecting via the internet using a wireless domain dominated by 5G is not only simplistic, it is fundamentally impossible. A moments thought and a few simple calculations reveal that there is not enough energy on the planet to power 50 - 250Bn or more IoT devices operating in such a mode. So how are we really going to design and engineer the IoT to become a workable proposition? Here are some clues:
3/4G: Carries <5% of all internet traffic; WiFi ~55%; Wired LANs @ 45%
Mobile Network coverage is sadly lacking @ <90% by geography
Mobile Device batteries and charging are major limitations
The internet consumes ~12% of all our energy
Mobile Devices consume ~ 1% and rising
Mobile Nets consume ~ 10%
None of the above takes into account the cost of raw materials, production, distribution, delivery, support, disposal and the ecological impact of civil engineering, equipments, and people.
During this lecture the following surprising conclusions quickly emerge:
Most IoT devices will talk to each other and never connect to the internet
IoT devices will require a range of bandwidths and not just low bit rates
The majority of IoT devices will communicate over very short distance
Our current wireless architectures are outmoded by the IoT
We will most likely need something beyond UWB
The power per IoT device has to be <<1mW
Security will demand auto-immunity
This then is the starting point; from here we can design and engineer solutions for an, as yet, unspecified and dimensioned IoT fit for this century.
In a rapidly changing world of growing demand and diminishing resources merely polishing our old technologies and making industrial processes ever more efficient only delays the onset of crisis and collapse - it does not solve the fundamental problem. Sustainable futures are inextricably linked to radical change and the creation of new technologies based on new materials, processing, shaping, use, reuse, repurposing and recycling at minimal loss.
So we look to the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Nano and Bio-Technology to demonstrate advances are being made, and where the biggest societal changes will originate. We take a deep dive into the realm of human replacement and augmentation by machine, and the likely implications for individuals, groups, society, companies, institutions and governments.
Pundits and experts alike are predicting the demise of Call and Contact Centres at the hand of rapidly advancing AI systems, and it is easy to see why. Google have recently demonstrated remarkable gains in conversational AI used as a booking engine. At the same time, IBM Watson has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge and a reasonably sophisticated ability to debate. But could they all be wrong? For sure, Call/Contact Centres are far from ideal, but they replace other (older) modes that were even worse and we should take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater!
For millennia people have been travelling to stadia to watch and participate in spectacles of pure brutality and sport sponsored by kings, emperors, states, individuals. Today sport and other entertainment events have become a major global business sector with executive facilities, commercial sponsorship, broadcast and full media coverage. But, in many respects, the crowds and their experience has changed little. However, technology is impacting this situation and looks set to accelerate the rate of change.
In a similar manner to the airline business; the few pay around 80% of the costs, whilst the many fulfil the 20% or so. All the attention is lavished on the few and the many are neglected and remain a latent opportunity. The technologies of communication, networking, apps, Big and Meta Data can change all this by creating a ‘market of one’. Satisfying the needs of every individual and every group should be pursued as it leads to a world of new services and ‘pre-selling’.
The technological opportunities are endless with augmented reality able to furnish a view from every angle to mobile devices and wearables supported by real time details, data and statistics. Clouds and ‘networks without infrastructure’ can overcome the limitations of 3, 4, 5G and wifi systems that will never satisfy the need for growing customer connectivity and bandwidth. They can also help solve entry congestion and simultaneously support security and vending operations. Branded mobile devices with pre-loaded apps are also an obvious step towards the creation of ‘The Club’ identity and ‘belonging’ that goes way beyond the latest strip, scarves and hats etc with far more kudos than a gold card!
“On a grand scale this all involves Big Data, but for a ‘market of one’ it is the Meta Data that counts - that is where the opportunity and the $$$ reside”
All of this comes at a price of management and operational change! Embracing the new takes a positive mind and considerable energy in the face of day to day operations, but the workforce and the customer base is also changing fast with the old and old of mind being replaced by the young and young of mind. The tech savvy are on the move and making up an increasing proportion of society - and the trick is to leverage their knowledge and abilities at every level possible.
“Change is inevitable and accelerating - and you have to decide to be a driver or a victim”
There was a time when Bell Boys would bring you a printed message from the electric telegraph; when a telephone operator would ask you for the number; when a typist would type your letter; when the Xerox operator would create your copies; when the computer operator would load and run your program; and when a secretary would organise your mail. Those days and those jobs are long gone, but at the time the concern was; what would these people do when they came redundant ? In reality all these people found employment as new jobs were created at the behest of new technologies. Web designers, CAD experts, IT specialists, data analysts, spread sheet drivers and many more replaced the old to the point of staffing shortages. Perhaps more poignantly; we are all now the bell boys, telephone operators, typists, printers, copiers, computer operators and secretaries - empowered by the self same technologies!
Today we see a global shortfall of some 200,000 Big data analysts complemented by similar needs for specialists and experts in Artificial Intelligence, Business Modelling, Decision Support Systems, 3D Printing, Genomics; Nano Tech and more. And there is a huge demand for people with the ‘hands on’ skills to design, build, repair and fix just about everything. The reality is that many of the people in these spheres derived their base skills through play. Wasting their young lives on a screen playing computer games, searching the web, hacking code, ‘building stuff’ and more turned out to be their springboard to employment and personal prosperity. But this presents companies and managers with many new challenges as they find it difficult to let go of the old and embrace the new.
Hierarchies and old management methods might just work for industries that are static and churning out the same product day after day, but for those facing rapid change and unpredictable demands, then agility and flexibility are ket, and that demands low flat structures with new and autonomous ways of working…
The biggest force for social change since the first industrial revolution has been adjusting to, and taking advantage of, the new and accelerating capabilities of our advancing technologies. And in our entire history, the dominant technology driver has been silicon-based electronics. It has prompted revolutions in Computing, Telecoms, Automation, AI, and Robotics that radically changed the human condition. Today, that same exponential revolution is accelerating us into Industry 4.0 and onto Industry 5.0.
The consequential transformation of medicine, industrial design and production, farming, food, processing, supply and demand has seen living standards improve and life expectancy widen. Many of our institutions have also seen tech-driven transformations in line with industry. If there has been a down-side to this progression, it has been our inability to transform the workforce ahead of new demands. Unemployment has persisted whilst reeducation and retraining have been on the back foot, whilst, the net creation of new jobs has always exceeded the demise of the old. As a result, leading countries in the first world now have labour shortages at all levels right across the spectrum.
Recently, COVID-19 has demonstrated that we have the technology and we can rapidly reorganise and change society if we have to. So in this presentation, we examine ‘the force functions’ and changes engineered to date, and then peer over the horizon to sample what is to come in terms of technologies and working practices…
The internet will not scale to support >7Bn people and >50Bn things on line, but Clouds and Networks Without Infrastructure will, and they are neither singular nor static. Clouds are entirely dynamic and multi-modal with; public, private, personal, open, closed, government and commercial clouds that are fixed, mobile, long and short lived, permanent and transitory. In addition the new degrees of freedom that Clouds afford makes them inherently more secure and resilient than any network medium we have created before. But, not all clouds are equal, and neither is all data!
The era of IT Departments providing centralised networking and security is drawing to a rapid close in the same way that sitting in front of a PC in an office all day is becoming unworkable. So, it is time to rethink what has to change in order to adapt to rapidly growing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and BMOB (Be My Own Boss) cultures. At the same time, ecological, social, commercial and technology demands are pushing toward more and smaller devices, the tagging and tracking of everything, whilst using less material and energy. This all demands more wireless and new modes of networking demanding more optical fibre especially in the last mile where Point to Point systems will replace the outmoded BPON and GPON technologies of the past. In this symmetric wide bandwidth future there is no place or part to plat by the old copper local loop technologies, and the mobile operators @ 3,4,5G will be further relegated to transporting < 1% of the total traffic of the future connected world. New species of WiFi and BlueTooth will emerge to dominate mobile connectivity and transport with the short range hops to a vastly increased number of fibre fed hot spots in room, on floor, in building, and on campus.
Man’s dreams of ‘intelligences and robots’ go back thousands of years to the worship of gods and statues; mythologies: talisman and puppets; people, places and objects with supposed magical and (often) judgemental/punitive abilities. But it wasn’t until the electronic revolution in 1915, accelerated by WWII that we saw the realisation of two game changing-machines: Colossus (Decoding Machine of Bletchley Park) 1943 and ENIAC (Artillery Computation Engine and Nuclear Bomb Design @ The University of Pennsylvania) 1946.
And so in 1950 the modern AI movement was optimistically projecting what machines would be capable of ‘almost anything’ by 1960/70. Unfortunately, there was no understanding of the complexity to be addressed, and all the projections were wildly wrong; leading to a deep trough of disparagement and disillusionment of some 30 years. However, 70 years on and the original AI optimism and projections of what might be had at least been largely achieved with AI outgunning humans at every board and card game including Poker and GO, and of course; general knowledge, medical diagnosis, image and information pattern recognition…
Telecom customer services appear to be stuck in the early 20th Century with the telephone call the primary channel for service provision that can take days to affect. Compare that to Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple and other modern companies where customers control service provision by the minute or second.
Modem business is driven by the accumulation of customer data, but the Telecom Industry sees vast amounts of customer-related data dormant and untapped. As a result, many new opportunities are lost. For example, the behavior of people, devices, systems, and networks give the earliest indicators of potential security problems.
OTT operators exploit networks and make far greater profits than any other sector and this might be further amplified by the roll-out of 5G. But without a fundamental rethink of FTTP, 5G will fail to deliver sufficient coverage and the advertised data rates. This pending failure is already seeing alternative solutions from outside the industry along with the realization that most ‘things’ on the IoT will never connect to the internet!
Since 1986 a global debate has raged on copper or fibre in the local loop, and despite all the evidence the copper heads have pursued a path of survival at any cost with outrageous claims of what they can deliver. With claims of ‘up-to’ download speeds and homes passed (not connected), and crosstalk induced asymmetry they have never delivered what was said on the tin. And worst, with great temerity they insist on dictating to customers as to the bandwidth they really need.
We have now (probably) reached a peak of the lunacy with FTTCabinet/Kerb and pole top G.Fast developers claiming speeds of 1,000Mbit/s delivered. They can no more deliver such speeds than 10Mbit/s unless it is over impractically short spans. You can deliver 10Gbit/s over 5m of twisted pair or 100Gbit/s over 1m, but it aint of much practical use. In contrast optical fibre can deliver 1, 10, 100 Gbit/s over 100km using <10% of the energy demanded by copper.
So in November 2015 I attended my 100th conference/seminar/meeting on the topic to explain that the world is now bifurcating into those with Gbit/s fibre in the local loop and those who are sticking with copper. City and community wide FTTH is rolling out in a frenzy of frustration with the incumbent telco copperheads who continue their futile quest to squeeze the last micro-gram out of their 150 year old technologies. Only fibre is green, only fibre is future proof, only fibre is economic, and only fibre can support future business, Cloud Computing, The IoT, Smart Cities, and the 3,4,5G infill needed into the future.
It is all obvious, but here we go again! Will the UK be a world leader or laggard, in the first division, or at the back of the pack? There is a lot at stake. The first to roll out FTTH was BY in 1990, but government ignorance saw the program closed down and since then the GDP has suffered with lost business and the emigration of young start ups. But all that is insignificant compared with what is to come!
The easiest and most sensible route out of the ‘gotcha’ is to let the companies do as they wish, but empower towns and cities to install dark fibre nets, and to provide assistive funding to villages and communities to DIY Fibre. This is happening by default, but it needs to be accelerated by a modest capital investment.
In most developed nations the proportion of old people is increasing along with their demands on healthcare services as they transit toward their eventual exit from this life. People no longer, live, work, retire and die in short order! Far more likely, they experience a series of complex, and often protracted, episodes an a concatenation of individual organ failure.
We therefore see a growing healthcare crisis across the First World with politicians resorting to very simple/similar ‘spend more, train more, and support more’ solutions. But this lacks any deep analysis. Reality is that no amount of money or people will cure this - it is a self sustaining loop of medical advance, improving survival rates, longer life spans, falling birth rates, fewer young people of sufficient talents, and reducing tax returns!
“This is an complex (non-linear) problem & there are no simple solutions”
Doing more with less, but far better, at a lower cost, by continually exploiting the latest technology is something already been pioneered/experienced by industry. It is the basic mechanism that now powers our progress - including many supporting healthcare technologies. This general principle is now a long overdue essential for healthcare professionals and patients; and absolutely necessary, if are to see any significant improvement in services.
Here we present examples of technologies that are available toady and most likely to be available in the next decade along with some necessary and key behavioural and responsibility changes.
Despite a security landscape now embracing: People; Companies; Governments; Devices; Networks; Services; Vehicles; Properties; LAND; SEA; AIR; SPACE; CYBER and INFORMATION, people and organisations still tend to see all this as someone else problem. In reality, it concerns all of us. Governments can no longer protect their citizens and nor can any company IT/Security Dept!
“In an ideal world: responses to Cyber and Terror would be automated and immediate”
The Dark Side has grown rich and powerful by investing in R&D and the latest technology; adopting distributed team working and a global market for talent and resources; and they are winning this war with an estimated $1.5Tn income in 2019. We have to adopt the same strategies to survive let alone win. Global sharing and cooperation are key along with people, staff, management, board, NED and Chairman education/training/involvement. At this time it is rare to find a ‘Cyber Seat’ on the main board of any organization, but it is a new and critical essential!
Predicting digital futures a sector at a time is relatively easy, but in a networked world driven by accelerating technologies this is insufficient. Sectors do not operate in isolation, they are connected, and as technology advances the boundaries morph, with whole industries overtaken and pushed aside. At the same time old jobs lose relevance and new skills are required, but in aggregate ever more people are employed. Today there is no country, no matter how big or rich, that has all the raw materials and people required to power its industries, healthcare systems, farming and food production, or indeed educational institutions. Insourcing, outsourcing, and globalisation are the result, and they are about to be augmented by global networking of facilities, skills and abilities
We have never known or understood so much about our world, and nor have we enjoyed the capabilities bestowed by modern technology. But keeping up to date, acquiring the right knowledge and skills is a growing challenge as ‘the world of the simple’ evaporates and complexity takes over.
“There are plenty of simple solutions to complex problems, but they are all wrong”
Preparing for change whilst coping with the status quo now presents many new challenges way beyond human ability and we have to partner with machines to aid our decisions. For organisations it is essential to find and employ the right people, and for people it is necessary to become ever more flexible and adaptable whilst continually acquiring pertinent capabilities.
“AI and robots are not going to push us aside, but they will change everything”
No man is an island, and neither is any country, company or institution. A digital and connected global interdependency now governs the fortunes of our species as technology empowers us at every level. In this presentation we highlight a small sample of the technologies on the horizon, the jobs they will destroy, enhance and create.
As a general rule engineers and scientists do not harbour any ambition to disadvantage their fellow man, quite the reverse! They get up every day with an ambition to improve the situation and do so against a backdrop of hard-earned truths, practices and physical laws. In effect; they come to the party with an ethical framework of investigation, experimentation, innovation, design, build, deploy and support! It is in their DNA; forged (tried and tested) over hundreds of years and one of the founding components of our technological advance and success. Without such discipline; such a framework; such experience and knowledge we would still be in the realms of Alchemy and Witchcraft!
Outside this sector, we see a far fuzzier, uncertain and ill-defined world of management that spans every human activity from companies to institutions, governments and the military. Here the rules of the game are far more uncertain and dynamic, and the ethical framework far less developed and clear.
In every domain we remain governed by human behaviours and fallibilities. And to err is human - that is; mistakes happen no matter what laws and frameworks are in place. Even if we are open, honest and ethical stuff still goes wrong! But overall our intent is to minimise the occurrence of damage, hurt, injury and death!
In this lecture and the associated series on management we lay out the essentials of professional ethics and give examples of classic fails. We also include exercises in ethics for students to engage and think through.
In the same way laws do not eradicate crime; ethics cannot stop all errors!
For millennia people worked in relative stability with industries sustained by very little change for hundreds of years. Even the industrial revolution saw a high degree of stability after the initial disruption. Mining, foundries, railways, shipping, mills etc employed thousands for a lifetime. This saw the creation of new towns and cities dedicated to major industries and gave rise to the illusion of job security - a notion that persists in many political minds today.
In <50 years that heritage has been swept away by technology and globalisation. The future now belongs to the mobile, the connected, the networkers and the most adaptable. A lifetimes employment in one job in one sector living in one place is rare. Even mining and agriculture are increasingly automated to require fewer people with less muscle and more tech skills. And while the media feature the destruction of jobs and a total takeover by the machines, the empirical evidence shows a growing number of vacancies for the skilled and those educated to adapt to the new needs of an age of robotics and artificial intelligence.
Everybody, every society and country, now face significant challenges in the need to change and adapt to technological advance….
“ Exactly like Mother Nature and biological evolution, technological evolution shows no compassion and no care - it really is about the survival of the most adaptable”
No company, institution, government or agency can afford to contain and maintain all the resources they need in house. In a connected and fast changing world those needs are not static, they are dynamic and fast changing. So, outsourcing and insourcing, flexible working, BYOD, Social Networking, Open Access and Apps have become essential to flexibility and adaptability. But, perhaps more importantly ‘collaboration’ provides a prime element to success, that spans most sectors across the planet.
The various modes and tools of eCollaboration between people are well documented including: audio and video conferencing, connected white boards and meeting spaces are perhaps the most common. But there is far more when we include machines. People use and collaborate with machines at all levels, but increasingly the machines are autonomously collaborating.
“When things think, they want to link”
The inclusion of intelligence and smarts sees everything from our mobile devices to laptops, PCs, MainFrames and Super Computers starting to engage in cooperation and invisible conversations. The Cloud is amplifying this to our advantage with a growing range of apps backed up with distributed data, resources, networking, computing power and intelligences. Truth Engines and Intelligent Search and Find are also being developed to make available a range of new (easy to use) group and profession specific apps.
Most of us seem to spend more time locating information and the right people, than we devote to being creative and finding solutions. Our biggest challenge is to understand (in a shorter and shorter time frame), find the appropriate skill cells and get them all to come together as an effective team.
“The power to convene is both rare and coveted”
The old ways of working are falling by the wayside in the leading companies operating in the fastest moving sectors, whilst nothing much is happening (yet) at the other end of the market spectrum. But in this 21C the winners will be the global teams that connect, network and collaborate to maximise there creativity, and become the primary creators and solution finders.
With more and more competition across the sector and a widening range of media sources the ‘Visits Industry’ has to be continually innovative in developing and using technology to entertain, raise expectation and excitement whilst satisfying enquiry, giving relevant experience, education and enjoyment. The range of advancements and opportunities possible is widening with the availability of networks, mobile technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, new materials and processes, plus modelling, meta and big data analysis.
Improving the experience, delighting the visitors, and getting them to be the evangelists of the industry is the next step along with follow on visits with friends, family, school and college.
It was scientifically established in the 1970s that we are stressing the planet beyond the point where it can naturally recover. Today we are using about 50% more natural resources than can be extracted sustainably. The long history of industrialisation and population growth is now seeing climate change, extreme weather, and perhaps it is human overpopulation and terraforming that is now giving way to pandemics as we increasingly challenge and stress ecosystems.
Stressed systems react and fail in a variety of ways, and there is increasing evidence that CV-19 might just be the surprising product of human abuse of nature. What we can be certain of is that without action we will see more unpleasant and unwelcome surprises.
The Green Agenda is our biggest hope, but much of it is driven by emotion rather than deep thought, evidence, and scientific analysis. For example; recycling is mostly a fallacy and we need to think again! In reality Industry 4.0 is the first major program vested in the basics of long term sustainability.
In this presentation we give a brief overview of what I4.0 brings to the party by a focus on one major sector that is ripe for transformation. A much broader and wider treatment has been presented at previous events and numerous additional, associative, and supportive slide sets in this series are available on the web site.
Looking at a problem or data in isolation might have worked in a slow and disconnected past, but it is now a dangerous practice. The world is networked and Six Degrees of Separation have shrunk to 2 or 3 courtesy of the connectivity and networking of people, machines and things. Nothing is singular and isolated anymore, and establishing causality, future implications and likely outcomes is no longer simple or certain. Few systems can be treated as a Black Box with an input and an output related by some stable and linear function. Multiple inputs and outputs and stochastic transfer functions rule, and the resulting combinatorics confound us to the point where uncertainty is now the ‘uncomfortable’ norm!
Data mining is about drilling down to the fine detail in relatively small and contained data sets. A PC, spread sheets, structured data and simple analysis tools are the hallmarks of this domain. But Big Data is about the Big Picture, relationships, paths, and links which are way beyond the PC and simple tools. We are talking huge, sophisticated, fast evolving, and very specialised. It is already challenging many long held truths, discovering new ones, whilst revealing previously unknown relationships. The biggest problem is that we lack ‘Big Understanding’ or even the capacity to analyse and model situations to the point where clarity emerges. Our most powerful tools turn out to be computer modelling, simulation, Artificial Intelligence, and Visualisation.
Day on day our machine dependency grows as we tackle the vital Green, Social, Health, Science and Industry issues. We need the necessary wisdoms, we need the truths in order to make wise decisions that will impact future generations. So it is no accident that our Symbiosis with machines grows in hand with our abilities, but Big Data is no panacea, it is one of a raft of powerful new tools and should be seen so in our mission to gain better understanding and greater wisdom.
Presented @ The AI Summit, Olympia, London, 29 Nov 2017
In a world that is getting more connected and complex by the day, where we need to produce and distribute more at a lower and lower cost to the planet to achieve sustainability, we see the Japanese embracing robotics and AI with great confidence. They see both as part of the solution to many of their societal, care and industrial problems and limitations, and they assign some level of life quality to both.
Meanwhile, throughout the West a debate rages on the dangers, real and imaginary. These are mainly based on fear created by ignorance, the Hollywood Effect (eg Terminator and AI) bolstered by celebrities issuing warnings whilst that never having designed or operated an AI system!
So, what is the reality? Are there any real dangers? Of course, there always are with all new technologies, but as ever, engineers and scientists are continually reviewing what can and should be done. The reality is; the AI cat is well and truly out of the bag! It has already seen widespread deployments across manufacturing industry, transport, logistics, and of course the medical and care sectors. There is no going back, we are now totally dependant!
To date all of our AI has been ‘Narrow’ and simple; very limited and generally addressing a singular or single class of problem. We have IBM Watson in the lead with its breadth of analysis and diagnostic abilities, whilst Google AlphaGO is in the lead in the way it is able to learn games and processes sans human help. But in the next two phases leading to General (or Wide) AI we are heading toward true sentience, self awareness, and full autonomy of access and action.
This general trajectory is of some concern and the focus of this presentation. So, we examine the characteristics of each phase and the techniques that could be and are being developed and deployed to avert the much heralded ‘Destruction of the Human Race’ to come. In reality, military hunter killer robots are already being developed with some trials and deployments underway. As ever, AI and Robotic technologies have a huge upside, but potentially with a bigger that usual downside!
In reality, the real problem, threat and risks have little to do with the technologies, they are almost entirely in the hands of their human masters!
Education systems across the West have degenerated into a series of memory tests and the quest to hit abstract performance targets and measures. So students that appear well qualified are often unable to apply the most basic of mathematical, scientific, engineering or logical principles, and nor do they have a good appreciation of history or design. This does not bode well for a future of faster change and greater complexity.
“At the most basic level our society it is about the survival of the most adaptable”
For sure; today’s education and learning methodologies have to move toward more experimental and experiential working in order to reinforce the basics whilst engendering far greater understanding. Early specialism has also to be reversed with all students studying a broader range of topics through school and on into college and/or university.
“Education isn’t something you have to get done and dusted - it is a lifelong pursuit”
There is a further need to recognize that the (so-called) academic and practical streams are afforded equal importance! To get the best out of teams/groups all members have to share a common base of understanding and appreciation. In turn, this can be enabled and supported by Just-in-Time education and training-on-line. But there is much more….
Throughout the developed world healthcare systems are creaking and failing to deliver what is expected by ageing and ailing populations. From the richest to the poorest of nations in this group, spend is going up, but failure is not being arrested. Three key mechanisms are the cause: First technology and the resulting advances in medicine are keeping us alive longer; Second the number of people needing care is rising rapidly and so is their individual expectation; Thirdly the dominant mode of death has migrated from a ‘simple, sudden, and unexpected event’ in the 1940/50s to a ‘protracted and complex series of physical and mental failure mechanisms’ in the 2000s.
“Death’s harbinger now moves slowly and very visibly amongst us”
Spending ever more money and employing ever more people is not the answer! A new model is required where we as individuals leverage all the available resources to take charge of our own health. We have to minimise the risks and be prepared to manage our minds and bodies should a failure mechanism strike. In the same way technology empowered us by affording new skills, facilities and capabilities, it can now lend support to our lives at every stage. But our actions have to be part of a three pronged approach: healthier lifestyles; day-to-day monitoring of vital body functions and regular medical checks; rapid diagnostics and remedial action. The necessary technology enablers are now within the grasp of everyone should they so choose.
The migration of medical facilities, skills, and equipment has always been: Hospital to Health Centre to Doctors Office to Our Bathroom Cabinet. But it was extremely slow! It is now accelerating with some aspects appearing to be in reverse gear! Mobiles, wearables, apps, testers, and on-line facilities often outgun Doctors and Hospitals in their ability to measure and monitor us 24x7 whilst we continue our daily lives. But, the revolution in sensors, genomics, robotics, and more, is about to amplify this trend…
Everything you should have known about Systems before you started the course!
The universe, planet earth, life forms, us, and everything we create and use constitute systems that are capable of transforming energy, matter and information at some micro and/or macro level. As such they span the basic, simple, linear and well behaved, through to the complicated, complex, non-linear and unpredictable. Moreover, they encompass the cosmological, geological, biological, mechanical, electrical, electronic, atomic and life systems + the more abstract economics, networking and sociology et al.
“All known and studied systems obey the basic laws of physics and to one degree or another enjoy an underlying number of principles that lend them to a reasonably common set of analytic, modelling and mathematical techniques”
Sadly, it appears to be badly taught and understood at an early stage in the education process and students often arrive at college and university with a partial or confused picture of the basic principles. This ‘Systems’ tutorial is therefore designed to correct any earlier failings and misconceptions, and to furnish students with the basic thinking and tools necessary for the wider lecture and research programs at The University of Suffolk.
Man’s dreams of ‘intelligences and robots’ goes back thousands of years to the worship of gods and statues; mythologies: talisman and puppets; people, places and objects with supposed magical and (often) judgemental/punitive abilities. But it wasn’t until the electronic revolution in 1915, accelerated by WWII that we saw the realisation of two game changing-machines: Colossus (Decoding Machine of Bletchley Park) 1943 and ENIAC (Artillery Computation Engine and Nuclear Bomb Design @ The University of Pennsylvania) 1946.
And so in 1950 the modern AI movement was optimistically projecting what machines would be capable of ‘almost anything’ by 1960/70. Unfortunately, there was no understanding of the complexity to be addressed, and all the projections were wildly wrong; leading to a deep trough of disparagement and disillusionment of some 30 years. However, 70 years on and the original AI optimism and projections of what might be have at least been largely achieved with AI outgunning humans at every board and card game including Poker and GO, and of course; general knowledge, medical diagnosis, image and information pattern recognition…
It should be no surprise that AI is treading a similar path to computing which began with single-purpose machines tasked for payroll calculations, banking transactions, or weapons targeting et al, but nothing more! It took decades for General Purpose Computing to emerge in the form of the now ubiquitous PC. Today, AI is still in a single-purpose/task-specific phase, and we have no general-purpose platforms, but their emergence is only a matter of time!
Recent AI progress has seen a repeat of the media debate and alarmist warnings for our computing past, compounded by consequential advances in robotics. In turn, this has promoted numerous attempts to draw biological equivalences defining the time when machines will overtake humans. But without any workable definitions or framework that tend to little more than un/educated guesses. Recourse to IQ measures and the Touring test have proved to be irrelevant, and without a reference framework or formal characterisation, continued discussion and debate remain futile
We therefore approach this AI problem from the bottom up by defining the simplest of machines and lifeforms to derive clues, pointers and basic boundary conditions . This sees a fundamental Entropic description emerge that is applicable to both machine and lifeforms.
This presentation is suitable for professionals and the public alike, and is fully illustrated by high-quality graphics, animations and, movies. Inevitably, it contains some mathematics that non-practitioners will have to take on trust, but the focus is on defining the key characteristics, parameters, and important features of AI, our total dependence, and the future!
Note: A 40 min session for a predominantly ley audience and not all the slides presented here were used on the day. Their inclusion here is in response to those audience members requesting more detail at the end of/during the event.
For millennia people have been travelling to stadia to watch and participate in spectacles of pure brutality and sport sponsored by kings, emperors, states, individuals. Today sport and other entertainment events have become a major global business sector with executive facilities, commercial sponsorship, broadcast and full media coverage. But, in many respects, the crowds and their experience has changed little. However, technology is impacting this situation and looks set to accelerate the rate of change.
In a similar manner to the airline business; the few pay around 80% of the costs, whilst the many fulfil the 20% or so. All the attention is lavished on the few and the many are neglected and remain a latent opportunity. The technologies of communication, networking, apps, Big and Meta Data can change all this by creating a ‘market of one’. Satisfying the needs of every individual and every group should be pursued as it leads to a world of new services and ‘pre-selling’.
The technological opportunities are endless with augmented reality able to furnish a view from every angle to mobile devices and wearables supported by real time details, data and statistics. Clouds and ‘networks without infrastructure’ can overcome the limitations of 3, 4, 5G and wifi systems that will never satisfy the need for growing customer connectivity and bandwidth. They can also help solve entry congestion and simultaneously support security and vending operations. Branded mobile devices with pre-loaded apps are also an obvious step towards the creation of ‘The Club’ identity and ‘belonging’ that goes way beyond the latest strip, scarves and hats etc with far more kudos than a gold card!
“On a grand scale this all involves Big Data, but for a ‘market of one’ it is the Meta Data that counts - that is where the opportunity and the $$$ reside”
All of this comes at a price of management and operational change! Embracing the new takes a positive mind and considerable energy in the face of day to day operations, but the workforce and the customer base is also changing fast with the old and old of mind being replaced by the young and young of mind. The tech savvy are on the move and making up an increasing proportion of society - and the trick is to leverage their knowledge and abilities at every level possible.
“Change is inevitable and accelerating - and you have to decide to be a driver or a victim”
There was a time when Bell Boys would bring you a printed message from the electric telegraph; when a telephone operator would ask you for the number; when a typist would type your letter; when the Xerox operator would create your copies; when the computer operator would load and run your program; and when a secretary would organise your mail. Those days and those jobs are long gone, but at the time the concern was; what would these people do when they came redundant ? In reality all these people found employment as new jobs were created at the behest of new technologies. Web designers, CAD experts, IT specialists, data analysts, spread sheet drivers and many more replaced the old to the point of staffing shortages. Perhaps more poignantly; we are all now the bell boys, telephone operators, typists, printers, copiers, computer operators and secretaries - empowered by the self same technologies!
Today we see a global shortfall of some 200,000 Big data analysts complemented by similar needs for specialists and experts in Artificial Intelligence, Business Modelling, Decision Support Systems, 3D Printing, Genomics; Nano Tech and more. And there is a huge demand for people with the ‘hands on’ skills to design, build, repair and fix just about everything. The reality is that many of the people in these spheres derived their base skills through play. Wasting their young lives on a screen playing computer games, searching the web, hacking code, ‘building stuff’ and more turned out to be their springboard to employment and personal prosperity. But this presents companies and managers with many new challenges as they find it difficult to let go of the old and embrace the new.
Hierarchies and old management methods might just work for industries that are static and churning out the same product day after day, but for those facing rapid change and unpredictable demands, then agility and flexibility are ket, and that demands low flat structures with new and autonomous ways of working…
The biggest force for social change since the first industrial revolution has been adjusting to, and taking advantage of, the new and accelerating capabilities of our advancing technologies. And in our entire history, the dominant technology driver has been silicon-based electronics. It has prompted revolutions in Computing, Telecoms, Automation, AI, and Robotics that radically changed the human condition. Today, that same exponential revolution is accelerating us into Industry 4.0 and onto Industry 5.0.
The consequential transformation of medicine, industrial design and production, farming, food, processing, supply and demand has seen living standards improve and life expectancy widen. Many of our institutions have also seen tech-driven transformations in line with industry. If there has been a down-side to this progression, it has been our inability to transform the workforce ahead of new demands. Unemployment has persisted whilst reeducation and retraining have been on the back foot, whilst, the net creation of new jobs has always exceeded the demise of the old. As a result, leading countries in the first world now have labour shortages at all levels right across the spectrum.
Recently, COVID-19 has demonstrated that we have the technology and we can rapidly reorganise and change society if we have to. So in this presentation, we examine ‘the force functions’ and changes engineered to date, and then peer over the horizon to sample what is to come in terms of technologies and working practices…
The internet will not scale to support >7Bn people and >50Bn things on line, but Clouds and Networks Without Infrastructure will, and they are neither singular nor static. Clouds are entirely dynamic and multi-modal with; public, private, personal, open, closed, government and commercial clouds that are fixed, mobile, long and short lived, permanent and transitory. In addition the new degrees of freedom that Clouds afford makes them inherently more secure and resilient than any network medium we have created before. But, not all clouds are equal, and neither is all data!
The era of IT Departments providing centralised networking and security is drawing to a rapid close in the same way that sitting in front of a PC in an office all day is becoming unworkable. So, it is time to rethink what has to change in order to adapt to rapidly growing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and BMOB (Be My Own Boss) cultures. At the same time, ecological, social, commercial and technology demands are pushing toward more and smaller devices, the tagging and tracking of everything, whilst using less material and energy. This all demands more wireless and new modes of networking demanding more optical fibre especially in the last mile where Point to Point systems will replace the outmoded BPON and GPON technologies of the past. In this symmetric wide bandwidth future there is no place or part to plat by the old copper local loop technologies, and the mobile operators @ 3,4,5G will be further relegated to transporting < 1% of the total traffic of the future connected world. New species of WiFi and BlueTooth will emerge to dominate mobile connectivity and transport with the short range hops to a vastly increased number of fibre fed hot spots in room, on floor, in building, and on campus.
Man’s dreams of ‘intelligences and robots’ go back thousands of years to the worship of gods and statues; mythologies: talisman and puppets; people, places and objects with supposed magical and (often) judgemental/punitive abilities. But it wasn’t until the electronic revolution in 1915, accelerated by WWII that we saw the realisation of two game changing-machines: Colossus (Decoding Machine of Bletchley Park) 1943 and ENIAC (Artillery Computation Engine and Nuclear Bomb Design @ The University of Pennsylvania) 1946.
And so in 1950 the modern AI movement was optimistically projecting what machines would be capable of ‘almost anything’ by 1960/70. Unfortunately, there was no understanding of the complexity to be addressed, and all the projections were wildly wrong; leading to a deep trough of disparagement and disillusionment of some 30 years. However, 70 years on and the original AI optimism and projections of what might be had at least been largely achieved with AI outgunning humans at every board and card game including Poker and GO, and of course; general knowledge, medical diagnosis, image and information pattern recognition…
Telecom customer services appear to be stuck in the early 20th Century with the telephone call the primary channel for service provision that can take days to affect. Compare that to Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple and other modern companies where customers control service provision by the minute or second.
Modem business is driven by the accumulation of customer data, but the Telecom Industry sees vast amounts of customer-related data dormant and untapped. As a result, many new opportunities are lost. For example, the behavior of people, devices, systems, and networks give the earliest indicators of potential security problems.
OTT operators exploit networks and make far greater profits than any other sector and this might be further amplified by the roll-out of 5G. But without a fundamental rethink of FTTP, 5G will fail to deliver sufficient coverage and the advertised data rates. This pending failure is already seeing alternative solutions from outside the industry along with the realization that most ‘things’ on the IoT will never connect to the internet!
Since 1986 a global debate has raged on copper or fibre in the local loop, and despite all the evidence the copper heads have pursued a path of survival at any cost with outrageous claims of what they can deliver. With claims of ‘up-to’ download speeds and homes passed (not connected), and crosstalk induced asymmetry they have never delivered what was said on the tin. And worst, with great temerity they insist on dictating to customers as to the bandwidth they really need.
We have now (probably) reached a peak of the lunacy with FTTCabinet/Kerb and pole top G.Fast developers claiming speeds of 1,000Mbit/s delivered. They can no more deliver such speeds than 10Mbit/s unless it is over impractically short spans. You can deliver 10Gbit/s over 5m of twisted pair or 100Gbit/s over 1m, but it aint of much practical use. In contrast optical fibre can deliver 1, 10, 100 Gbit/s over 100km using <10% of the energy demanded by copper.
So in November 2015 I attended my 100th conference/seminar/meeting on the topic to explain that the world is now bifurcating into those with Gbit/s fibre in the local loop and those who are sticking with copper. City and community wide FTTH is rolling out in a frenzy of frustration with the incumbent telco copperheads who continue their futile quest to squeeze the last micro-gram out of their 150 year old technologies. Only fibre is green, only fibre is future proof, only fibre is economic, and only fibre can support future business, Cloud Computing, The IoT, Smart Cities, and the 3,4,5G infill needed into the future.
It is all obvious, but here we go again! Will the UK be a world leader or laggard, in the first division, or at the back of the pack? There is a lot at stake. The first to roll out FTTH was BY in 1990, but government ignorance saw the program closed down and since then the GDP has suffered with lost business and the emigration of young start ups. But all that is insignificant compared with what is to come!
The easiest and most sensible route out of the ‘gotcha’ is to let the companies do as they wish, but empower towns and cities to install dark fibre nets, and to provide assistive funding to villages and communities to DIY Fibre. This is happening by default, but it needs to be accelerated by a modest capital investment.
In most developed nations the proportion of old people is increasing along with their demands on healthcare services as they transit toward their eventual exit from this life. People no longer, live, work, retire and die in short order! Far more likely, they experience a series of complex, and often protracted, episodes an a concatenation of individual organ failure.
We therefore see a growing healthcare crisis across the First World with politicians resorting to very simple/similar ‘spend more, train more, and support more’ solutions. But this lacks any deep analysis. Reality is that no amount of money or people will cure this - it is a self sustaining loop of medical advance, improving survival rates, longer life spans, falling birth rates, fewer young people of sufficient talents, and reducing tax returns!
“This is an complex (non-linear) problem & there are no simple solutions”
Doing more with less, but far better, at a lower cost, by continually exploiting the latest technology is something already been pioneered/experienced by industry. It is the basic mechanism that now powers our progress - including many supporting healthcare technologies. This general principle is now a long overdue essential for healthcare professionals and patients; and absolutely necessary, if are to see any significant improvement in services.
Here we present examples of technologies that are available toady and most likely to be available in the next decade along with some necessary and key behavioural and responsibility changes.
Despite a security landscape now embracing: People; Companies; Governments; Devices; Networks; Services; Vehicles; Properties; LAND; SEA; AIR; SPACE; CYBER and INFORMATION, people and organisations still tend to see all this as someone else problem. In reality, it concerns all of us. Governments can no longer protect their citizens and nor can any company IT/Security Dept!
“In an ideal world: responses to Cyber and Terror would be automated and immediate”
The Dark Side has grown rich and powerful by investing in R&D and the latest technology; adopting distributed team working and a global market for talent and resources; and they are winning this war with an estimated $1.5Tn income in 2019. We have to adopt the same strategies to survive let alone win. Global sharing and cooperation are key along with people, staff, management, board, NED and Chairman education/training/involvement. At this time it is rare to find a ‘Cyber Seat’ on the main board of any organization, but it is a new and critical essential!
Predicting digital futures a sector at a time is relatively easy, but in a networked world driven by accelerating technologies this is insufficient. Sectors do not operate in isolation, they are connected, and as technology advances the boundaries morph, with whole industries overtaken and pushed aside. At the same time old jobs lose relevance and new skills are required, but in aggregate ever more people are employed. Today there is no country, no matter how big or rich, that has all the raw materials and people required to power its industries, healthcare systems, farming and food production, or indeed educational institutions. Insourcing, outsourcing, and globalisation are the result, and they are about to be augmented by global networking of facilities, skills and abilities
We have never known or understood so much about our world, and nor have we enjoyed the capabilities bestowed by modern technology. But keeping up to date, acquiring the right knowledge and skills is a growing challenge as ‘the world of the simple’ evaporates and complexity takes over.
“There are plenty of simple solutions to complex problems, but they are all wrong”
Preparing for change whilst coping with the status quo now presents many new challenges way beyond human ability and we have to partner with machines to aid our decisions. For organisations it is essential to find and employ the right people, and for people it is necessary to become ever more flexible and adaptable whilst continually acquiring pertinent capabilities.
“AI and robots are not going to push us aside, but they will change everything”
No man is an island, and neither is any country, company or institution. A digital and connected global interdependency now governs the fortunes of our species as technology empowers us at every level. In this presentation we highlight a small sample of the technologies on the horizon, the jobs they will destroy, enhance and create.
As a general rule engineers and scientists do not harbour any ambition to disadvantage their fellow man, quite the reverse! They get up every day with an ambition to improve the situation and do so against a backdrop of hard-earned truths, practices and physical laws. In effect; they come to the party with an ethical framework of investigation, experimentation, innovation, design, build, deploy and support! It is in their DNA; forged (tried and tested) over hundreds of years and one of the founding components of our technological advance and success. Without such discipline; such a framework; such experience and knowledge we would still be in the realms of Alchemy and Witchcraft!
Outside this sector, we see a far fuzzier, uncertain and ill-defined world of management that spans every human activity from companies to institutions, governments and the military. Here the rules of the game are far more uncertain and dynamic, and the ethical framework far less developed and clear.
In every domain we remain governed by human behaviours and fallibilities. And to err is human - that is; mistakes happen no matter what laws and frameworks are in place. Even if we are open, honest and ethical stuff still goes wrong! But overall our intent is to minimise the occurrence of damage, hurt, injury and death!
In this lecture and the associated series on management we lay out the essentials of professional ethics and give examples of classic fails. We also include exercises in ethics for students to engage and think through.
In the same way laws do not eradicate crime; ethics cannot stop all errors!
For millennia people worked in relative stability with industries sustained by very little change for hundreds of years. Even the industrial revolution saw a high degree of stability after the initial disruption. Mining, foundries, railways, shipping, mills etc employed thousands for a lifetime. This saw the creation of new towns and cities dedicated to major industries and gave rise to the illusion of job security - a notion that persists in many political minds today.
In <50 years that heritage has been swept away by technology and globalisation. The future now belongs to the mobile, the connected, the networkers and the most adaptable. A lifetimes employment in one job in one sector living in one place is rare. Even mining and agriculture are increasingly automated to require fewer people with less muscle and more tech skills. And while the media feature the destruction of jobs and a total takeover by the machines, the empirical evidence shows a growing number of vacancies for the skilled and those educated to adapt to the new needs of an age of robotics and artificial intelligence.
Everybody, every society and country, now face significant challenges in the need to change and adapt to technological advance….
“ Exactly like Mother Nature and biological evolution, technological evolution shows no compassion and no care - it really is about the survival of the most adaptable”
No company, institution, government or agency can afford to contain and maintain all the resources they need in house. In a connected and fast changing world those needs are not static, they are dynamic and fast changing. So, outsourcing and insourcing, flexible working, BYOD, Social Networking, Open Access and Apps have become essential to flexibility and adaptability. But, perhaps more importantly ‘collaboration’ provides a prime element to success, that spans most sectors across the planet.
The various modes and tools of eCollaboration between people are well documented including: audio and video conferencing, connected white boards and meeting spaces are perhaps the most common. But there is far more when we include machines. People use and collaborate with machines at all levels, but increasingly the machines are autonomously collaborating.
“When things think, they want to link”
The inclusion of intelligence and smarts sees everything from our mobile devices to laptops, PCs, MainFrames and Super Computers starting to engage in cooperation and invisible conversations. The Cloud is amplifying this to our advantage with a growing range of apps backed up with distributed data, resources, networking, computing power and intelligences. Truth Engines and Intelligent Search and Find are also being developed to make available a range of new (easy to use) group and profession specific apps.
Most of us seem to spend more time locating information and the right people, than we devote to being creative and finding solutions. Our biggest challenge is to understand (in a shorter and shorter time frame), find the appropriate skill cells and get them all to come together as an effective team.
“The power to convene is both rare and coveted”
The old ways of working are falling by the wayside in the leading companies operating in the fastest moving sectors, whilst nothing much is happening (yet) at the other end of the market spectrum. But in this 21C the winners will be the global teams that connect, network and collaborate to maximise there creativity, and become the primary creators and solution finders.
With more and more competition across the sector and a widening range of media sources the ‘Visits Industry’ has to be continually innovative in developing and using technology to entertain, raise expectation and excitement whilst satisfying enquiry, giving relevant experience, education and enjoyment. The range of advancements and opportunities possible is widening with the availability of networks, mobile technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, new materials and processes, plus modelling, meta and big data analysis.
Improving the experience, delighting the visitors, and getting them to be the evangelists of the industry is the next step along with follow on visits with friends, family, school and college.
It was scientifically established in the 1970s that we are stressing the planet beyond the point where it can naturally recover. Today we are using about 50% more natural resources than can be extracted sustainably. The long history of industrialisation and population growth is now seeing climate change, extreme weather, and perhaps it is human overpopulation and terraforming that is now giving way to pandemics as we increasingly challenge and stress ecosystems.
Stressed systems react and fail in a variety of ways, and there is increasing evidence that CV-19 might just be the surprising product of human abuse of nature. What we can be certain of is that without action we will see more unpleasant and unwelcome surprises.
The Green Agenda is our biggest hope, but much of it is driven by emotion rather than deep thought, evidence, and scientific analysis. For example; recycling is mostly a fallacy and we need to think again! In reality Industry 4.0 is the first major program vested in the basics of long term sustainability.
In this presentation we give a brief overview of what I4.0 brings to the party by a focus on one major sector that is ripe for transformation. A much broader and wider treatment has been presented at previous events and numerous additional, associative, and supportive slide sets in this series are available on the web site.
Looking at a problem or data in isolation might have worked in a slow and disconnected past, but it is now a dangerous practice. The world is networked and Six Degrees of Separation have shrunk to 2 or 3 courtesy of the connectivity and networking of people, machines and things. Nothing is singular and isolated anymore, and establishing causality, future implications and likely outcomes is no longer simple or certain. Few systems can be treated as a Black Box with an input and an output related by some stable and linear function. Multiple inputs and outputs and stochastic transfer functions rule, and the resulting combinatorics confound us to the point where uncertainty is now the ‘uncomfortable’ norm!
Data mining is about drilling down to the fine detail in relatively small and contained data sets. A PC, spread sheets, structured data and simple analysis tools are the hallmarks of this domain. But Big Data is about the Big Picture, relationships, paths, and links which are way beyond the PC and simple tools. We are talking huge, sophisticated, fast evolving, and very specialised. It is already challenging many long held truths, discovering new ones, whilst revealing previously unknown relationships. The biggest problem is that we lack ‘Big Understanding’ or even the capacity to analyse and model situations to the point where clarity emerges. Our most powerful tools turn out to be computer modelling, simulation, Artificial Intelligence, and Visualisation.
Day on day our machine dependency grows as we tackle the vital Green, Social, Health, Science and Industry issues. We need the necessary wisdoms, we need the truths in order to make wise decisions that will impact future generations. So it is no accident that our Symbiosis with machines grows in hand with our abilities, but Big Data is no panacea, it is one of a raft of powerful new tools and should be seen so in our mission to gain better understanding and greater wisdom.
Presented @ The AI Summit, Olympia, London, 29 Nov 2017
In a world that is getting more connected and complex by the day, where we need to produce and distribute more at a lower and lower cost to the planet to achieve sustainability, we see the Japanese embracing robotics and AI with great confidence. They see both as part of the solution to many of their societal, care and industrial problems and limitations, and they assign some level of life quality to both.
Meanwhile, throughout the West a debate rages on the dangers, real and imaginary. These are mainly based on fear created by ignorance, the Hollywood Effect (eg Terminator and AI) bolstered by celebrities issuing warnings whilst that never having designed or operated an AI system!
So, what is the reality? Are there any real dangers? Of course, there always are with all new technologies, but as ever, engineers and scientists are continually reviewing what can and should be done. The reality is; the AI cat is well and truly out of the bag! It has already seen widespread deployments across manufacturing industry, transport, logistics, and of course the medical and care sectors. There is no going back, we are now totally dependant!
To date all of our AI has been ‘Narrow’ and simple; very limited and generally addressing a singular or single class of problem. We have IBM Watson in the lead with its breadth of analysis and diagnostic abilities, whilst Google AlphaGO is in the lead in the way it is able to learn games and processes sans human help. But in the next two phases leading to General (or Wide) AI we are heading toward true sentience, self awareness, and full autonomy of access and action.
This general trajectory is of some concern and the focus of this presentation. So, we examine the characteristics of each phase and the techniques that could be and are being developed and deployed to avert the much heralded ‘Destruction of the Human Race’ to come. In reality, military hunter killer robots are already being developed with some trials and deployments underway. As ever, AI and Robotic technologies have a huge upside, but potentially with a bigger that usual downside!
In reality, the real problem, threat and risks have little to do with the technologies, they are almost entirely in the hands of their human masters!
Education systems across the West have degenerated into a series of memory tests and the quest to hit abstract performance targets and measures. So students that appear well qualified are often unable to apply the most basic of mathematical, scientific, engineering or logical principles, and nor do they have a good appreciation of history or design. This does not bode well for a future of faster change and greater complexity.
“At the most basic level our society it is about the survival of the most adaptable”
For sure; today’s education and learning methodologies have to move toward more experimental and experiential working in order to reinforce the basics whilst engendering far greater understanding. Early specialism has also to be reversed with all students studying a broader range of topics through school and on into college and/or university.
“Education isn’t something you have to get done and dusted - it is a lifelong pursuit”
There is a further need to recognize that the (so-called) academic and practical streams are afforded equal importance! To get the best out of teams/groups all members have to share a common base of understanding and appreciation. In turn, this can be enabled and supported by Just-in-Time education and training-on-line. But there is much more….
Throughout the developed world healthcare systems are creaking and failing to deliver what is expected by ageing and ailing populations. From the richest to the poorest of nations in this group, spend is going up, but failure is not being arrested. Three key mechanisms are the cause: First technology and the resulting advances in medicine are keeping us alive longer; Second the number of people needing care is rising rapidly and so is their individual expectation; Thirdly the dominant mode of death has migrated from a ‘simple, sudden, and unexpected event’ in the 1940/50s to a ‘protracted and complex series of physical and mental failure mechanisms’ in the 2000s.
“Death’s harbinger now moves slowly and very visibly amongst us”
Spending ever more money and employing ever more people is not the answer! A new model is required where we as individuals leverage all the available resources to take charge of our own health. We have to minimise the risks and be prepared to manage our minds and bodies should a failure mechanism strike. In the same way technology empowered us by affording new skills, facilities and capabilities, it can now lend support to our lives at every stage. But our actions have to be part of a three pronged approach: healthier lifestyles; day-to-day monitoring of vital body functions and regular medical checks; rapid diagnostics and remedial action. The necessary technology enablers are now within the grasp of everyone should they so choose.
The migration of medical facilities, skills, and equipment has always been: Hospital to Health Centre to Doctors Office to Our Bathroom Cabinet. But it was extremely slow! It is now accelerating with some aspects appearing to be in reverse gear! Mobiles, wearables, apps, testers, and on-line facilities often outgun Doctors and Hospitals in their ability to measure and monitor us 24x7 whilst we continue our daily lives. But, the revolution in sensors, genomics, robotics, and more, is about to amplify this trend…
Everything you should have known about Systems before you started the course!
The universe, planet earth, life forms, us, and everything we create and use constitute systems that are capable of transforming energy, matter and information at some micro and/or macro level. As such they span the basic, simple, linear and well behaved, through to the complicated, complex, non-linear and unpredictable. Moreover, they encompass the cosmological, geological, biological, mechanical, electrical, electronic, atomic and life systems + the more abstract economics, networking and sociology et al.
“All known and studied systems obey the basic laws of physics and to one degree or another enjoy an underlying number of principles that lend them to a reasonably common set of analytic, modelling and mathematical techniques”
Sadly, it appears to be badly taught and understood at an early stage in the education process and students often arrive at college and university with a partial or confused picture of the basic principles. This ‘Systems’ tutorial is therefore designed to correct any earlier failings and misconceptions, and to furnish students with the basic thinking and tools necessary for the wider lecture and research programs at The University of Suffolk.
Man’s dreams of ‘intelligences and robots’ goes back thousands of years to the worship of gods and statues; mythologies: talisman and puppets; people, places and objects with supposed magical and (often) judgemental/punitive abilities. But it wasn’t until the electronic revolution in 1915, accelerated by WWII that we saw the realisation of two game changing-machines: Colossus (Decoding Machine of Bletchley Park) 1943 and ENIAC (Artillery Computation Engine and Nuclear Bomb Design @ The University of Pennsylvania) 1946.
And so in 1950 the modern AI movement was optimistically projecting what machines would be capable of ‘almost anything’ by 1960/70. Unfortunately, there was no understanding of the complexity to be addressed, and all the projections were wildly wrong; leading to a deep trough of disparagement and disillusionment of some 30 years. However, 70 years on and the original AI optimism and projections of what might be have at least been largely achieved with AI outgunning humans at every board and card game including Poker and GO, and of course; general knowledge, medical diagnosis, image and information pattern recognition…
It should be no surprise that AI is treading a similar path to computing which began with single-purpose machines tasked for payroll calculations, banking transactions, or weapons targeting et al, but nothing more! It took decades for General Purpose Computing to emerge in the form of the now ubiquitous PC. Today, AI is still in a single-purpose/task-specific phase, and we have no general-purpose platforms, but their emergence is only a matter of time!
Recent AI progress has seen a repeat of the media debate and alarmist warnings for our computing past, compounded by consequential advances in robotics. In turn, this has promoted numerous attempts to draw biological equivalences defining the time when machines will overtake humans. But without any workable definitions or framework that tend to little more than un/educated guesses. Recourse to IQ measures and the Touring test have proved to be irrelevant, and without a reference framework or formal characterisation, continued discussion and debate remain futile
We therefore approach this AI problem from the bottom up by defining the simplest of machines and lifeforms to derive clues, pointers and basic boundary conditions . This sees a fundamental Entropic description emerge that is applicable to both machine and lifeforms.
This presentation is suitable for professionals and the public alike, and is fully illustrated by high-quality graphics, animations and, movies. Inevitably, it contains some mathematics that non-practitioners will have to take on trust, but the focus is on defining the key characteristics, parameters, and important features of AI, our total dependence, and the future!
Note: A 40 min session for a predominantly ley audience and not all the slides presented here were used on the day. Their inclusion here is in response to those audience members requesting more detail at the end of/during the event.
An introduction to the challenges of our digital society. An update on the most disruptive advances in the field of digital technologies. Nanorobots, drones, quantum computers, artificial intelligence, human-machine interfaces, deep fake, etc.
Seventy years on from AI appearing on the public scene and all the optimistic projections have been largely overtaken with systems outgunning humans at all board, card and computer games including Chess, Poker and GO. Of course; general knowledge, medical diagnosis, genetics and proteomics, image and pattern recognition are now all firmly in the grasp of AI.
Interestingly, AI is treading a similar path to computing in that it began with single purpose/task machines that could only deal with a company payroll calculations or banking transactions and nothing more! General purpose computing emerged over further decades to give us the PCs and devices we now enjoy. So, AI currently runs as task specific applications on these general purpose platforms, and no doubt, general purpose AI will also become tractable in a few decades too!
Recent progress has promoted a deal of debate and discussion along with hundreds of published papers and definitions that attempt to characterise biological and artificial intelligence. But they all suffer the same futility and fail! Without reference to any formal characterisation, all discussion and debate remains relatively meaningless.
Somewhat ironically, it was the defence industry that triggered the analysis work here. Two of key steps to success were: the abandonment of all performance comparisons between biological and machine entities; and the avoidance of using the human brain as some ‘golden’ intelligence reference.
This presentation is suitable for professionals and public alike, and comes fully illustrated by high quality graphics, animations and movies. Inevitably, it contains (engineering) mathematics that non-practitioners will have to take on trust, whilst professionals may wish challenge on the basis that the focus on getting a solution rather than the purity of the process!
IoT growth forecasts currently tend to span 30 – 60 Bn ‘Things’ by 2030. However, this ignores the central IoT role in realising sustainable societies where raw materials and component use have to see very high levels of reuse, repurposing, and recycling. In such a world almost everything we possess and use will have to be tagged and be electronically addressable as a part of the IoT. Such a need immediately sees growth estimates of 2Tn or more over the span of Industry 4 and 5. On the basis of energy demands alone, it is inconceivable that the technologies of BlueTooth, WiFi, 4, 5, and 6G could support such demand, and nor are the signaling and security protocols viable on such a scale.
The evolution of the IoT will therefore most likely see a new form of dynamic network requiring new lightweight protocols employing very little signal processing, together with very low energy wireless technologies (in the micro-Watt range) operating over extremely short distances (~10m). This need might be best satisfied by a new form of ‘Zero Infrastructure Mesh Networks’ that engage in active resource sharing, lossy probabilistic routing, and cyber security realised through an integrated ‘auto-immunity’ system. Ultimately, we might also envisage data amalgamation at key nodes that have a direct connection into the internet along with an additional layer of cyber checks and protection.
We justify the above assertions by illustrating the energy and network limitations of today’s 5G networks and those already obvious in current 6G proposals. We then go on to detail how a suitable IoT MeshNet might be configured and realised, along with a few solutions and emergent outcomes on the way.
When people are exposed to the new for the first time their reaction, quite rightly, is generally one of caution and perhaps a degree of suspicion. And, when that ‘new born’ is a novel technology, reactions can quickly become amplified and biased toward the dystopian by the sensationalism of media and mis-information of social networks. In this modern era I think we can also safely assume that Hollywood has more than a ‘bit part’ in nurturing extreme reactions with movies such as Terminator, AI and Ex-Machina.
Our purpose here is to dispel the modern myth that technology is, or can be, inherently evil and a direct threat to humanity. We do so by positing three basic axioms:
“Without technology we would know and understand
almost nothing”
“The greatest threat to humanity is humanity”
“If technology progress and societal advance stall, then civilisations collapse”
Having briefly establishing these in the context of our wider history, we focus on the Industrial Revolutions and their beneficial upside and consequential negatives. We then move on to examine Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Quantum Computing in the context of our current needs and realising sustainable futures, and the survival of our civilisation.
Introduction to Artificial intelligence and MLbansalpra7
**Title: Understanding the Landscape of Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Exploration**
**I. Introduction**
In recent decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping industries, influencing daily life, and pushing the boundaries of human capabilities. This comprehensive exploration delves into the multifaceted landscape of AI, encompassing its origins, key concepts, applications, ethical considerations, and future prospects.
**II. Historical Perspective**
AI's roots can be traced back to ancient history, where philosophers contemplated the nature of intelligence. However, it wasn't until the mid-20th century that AI as a field of study gained momentum. The influential Dartmouth Conference in 1956 marked the official birth of AI, with early pioneers like Alan Turing laying the theoretical groundwork.
**III. Foundations of AI**
Understanding AI requires grasping its foundational principles. Machine Learning (ML), a subset of AI, empowers machines to learn patterns and make decisions without explicit programming. Within ML, various approaches, such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning, play crucial roles in shaping AI applications.
**IV. Types of Artificial Intelligence**
AI is not a monolithic entity; it spans a spectrum of capabilities. Narrow AI, also known as Weak AI, excels in specific tasks, like image recognition or language translation. In contrast, General AI, or Strong AI, would possess human-like intelligence across a wide range of tasks, a goal that remains a long-term aspiration.
**V. Applications of AI**
AI's impact is felt across diverse sectors. In healthcare, AI aids in diagnostics and personalized treatment plans. In finance, it enhances fraud detection and risk assessment. Self-driving cars exemplify AI in transportation, while virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa showcase its role in daily life. The convergence of AI with other technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics, amplifies its transformative potential.
**VI. Machine Learning Algorithms**
The backbone of AI lies in its algorithms. Linear regression, decision trees, neural networks, and deep learning models are among the many tools in the ML toolkit. Exploring the mechanics of these algorithms reveals the intricacies of how AI processes information, learns from data, and makes predictions.
Past civilisations have nurtured small populations of those trying to understand and manipulate nature to some advantage in materials, tools, weapons, food, and wealth. However, they never formed communities and lacked the means of recording, communicating, and sharing successes and failures. They also lacked a common framework/philosophy to qualify them as scientists, but that all began to change in the 16th Century. In this lecture we consider the progression to a philosophy of science, and the underlying principles and assumptions that now guide scientific inquiry.We also examines the nature of scientific knowledge, the methods of acquisition, evolution, and significance over past centuries, and reflect on the value to society.
In the struggle to solve problems, deliver understanding, and reveal the truth about our universe, science had to suffer and survive: ignorance, bigotry, established superstitions, and the ‘diktats’ of religions and politics, and latterly, falling education standards mired by social media. We chart that ‘scientific’ journey emphasising the importance of observation, experimentation, and the search for universal laws. Ultimately, this essentially Aristotelian perspective was challenged and overtaken by the rise of empiricism, which emphasised the importance of sensory experience and the limitations of human knowledge.
Science continues to evolve and provide us with the best truths attainable with our leading edge technologies of observation and experimentation. Today, it stands as the greatest and richest contributor to human knowledge, understanding, progress, and wellbeing. In turn, debates and controversies are ongoing, shaping the field and philosophy which remains essential for understanding the nature of scientific knowledge and the models it creates. But unlike any belief system, the answers and models furnishers by science are not certain and invariant, they tend to be stochastic and incomplete - ‘the best we can do’ at a given time.
In this workshop session we identify aging technology design concepts, old business and operating models, plus energy supply limits as the prime constraints of 6G and beyond. We also identify the notion of an erroneous spectrum shortage born of the bands and channel mode of operation which is fundamentally unsuited to 6G and IoT demands in the near and far future.
We strongly link optical fibre in the local loop with future wireless systems and the need for very low-energy ‘tower-less’ systems. We also postulate a future demanding UWB and HWB (Hyper) with transmission energies ~𝛍W and signals below the ambient noise level. This will be necessary to power an IoT of >2.4Tn Things which we estimate to be necessary for Industry 4/5 and sustainable societies.
It is hard to understate the importance of ‘Thermodynamics’ in providing an almost complete (Grand Unified Theory) picture of the inner physics of energy transfer spanning machines and chemistry thro information.
Apparently, Einstein had two favourite theories: General Relativity and Thermodynamics! He championed both because of their ‘beauty’, completeness, and emergent properties purely derived from the fundamental consideration of how the universe works.
The origins of this topic mainly reside in the Industrial revolution and the realisation that the early machinery was grossly inefficient. E.G. Engines were only converting the energy consumed to ~2% of useful work output. This drew the attention of Savery (1698), Newcomen (1712), Carnot (1769), and for the next 200 years the conundrum of lost energy occupied many of the greatest scientific minds. This culminated in Rudolf Clausius (~1850)publishing his theory of Thermodynamics with further refinement by Boltzmann (1872).
Why was all this so important? In the 1700s a ‘beam engine’ weighing in at >20 tons consumed vast amounts of coal, to deliver an output ~10hp. Today a Turbofan jet Engine can deliver >30k hp at a weight of ~6 tons. This is the difference between working with little understanding, and today where our knowledge is far more complete. Our latest challenges tend around non-linear loss mechanisms associated with turbulent air and fuel flow.. And like many other fields we have to step beyond our generalise mathematical models and turn to the power of our computers for deeper insights.
Ultimately all machines, mechanisms, computing processes and information itself, involve the transformation of matter and/or bits, and thus they are Entropic and subject to the theory of Thermodynamics. This lecture therefore presents a foundation spanning the history and progress to date in preparation for the embracing other science and engineering disciplines.
Engineering might be defined as the judicial application of science and scientific knowledge, but with the rider that unlike science and scientific studies, engineering always has to deliver a solution and a result. There are therefore aspects of engineering that stretch and challenge, the accepted, wisdom and knowledge of science. To purists, this might appear outrageous, but it is no more so than the works of Erwin Schrödinger or Leonhard Euler et al
In this lecture we examine many of the established engineering basics whilst being mindful that most of our education, techniques, and working solutions are founded on the assumption of well behave linear environments. As our entire universe, and everything in it, is inherently complex and non-linear, we have to salute the powers of approximation and iteration for our many engineering success to date. However, we are increasingly being challenged by complexities of the fundamental non-linear nature of the problems confronting us. ( E.G. Politics, Conflict, Global Warming, Sustainability, Medicine, Fusion Power, Logistics, Networks, Depletion of Resources, Accelerating Tech Driven Change +++)
We start by tracing history from the foundations up to the present day, including modern analytical nomenclature and techniques, system reliability, resilience and costs, we highlight the the basic human limitations that necessitate multi-disciplinary teams that include AI and vast computing power.
The overall treatment includes our analogue past, digital today, and analogue/digital hybrid future of computing, robots, networks and systems of all kinds. It also includes animations, movies and sound files to demonstrate the realities of modern system design including the inherent complexities. To further highlight, and exemplify this projected future, we examine a real engineering project concerned with acoustic sniper spotting under battlefield conditions and extreme noise. Here a combination of digital modelling sees the use of analogue acoustic filter arrays, analogue signal amplification, and digital signal processing doubling the range of sniper detection and location.
Recently, it has become increasingly evident that we have engineers and scientists reaching a professional level of practice without a clear understanding of the scientific method, its origins, and its fundamental workings. There also appears to be a lack of appreciation of our total dependence on the truths that science continually reveals. How this situation ensued appears to vary from country to country, and the flavour of education system encountered by students. But a common complaint is the progressive dumbing down of the science curriculum along with a dire shortage of qualified teachers. This also seems to be compounded with the increasing speciation of science and engineering into narrower and narrower disciplines. So this situation (crisis?) prompted a request for a corrective series of foundation lectures focussed on healing these educational flaws across relevant disciplines, graduating and practicing levels. This then is the first in this foundation series.
Uncanny Valley addresses our reactions to humanoid objects, such as robots, a video game characters, or dolls, and how they look and act ‘almost’ like a real human. Feeling of uneasiness or disgust in the observer are addressed directly, rather than familiarity or attraction. The theory was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 and has been explored by many researchers and artists since. It has application in AI, robotics, MMI, and human-computer interaction, and helps designers to create more appealing devices that can interact with people in various domains, such as industry, education, entertainment, defence, health care, et al.
In this lecture we explain and demonstrate the fundamentals before extending the principle to sound, motion, actions, and eyes as an output mechanism. We also note that all this poses some challenges and risks in the potential for reduced the emotional connections, empathy, acceptance, and trust between humans and machines. On a further dimension the potential to create threat and terror can be useful opportunity in the military domain. It is thus important to understand the causes and effects of the uncanny valley in the wider sense in order to meet the needs of each application space
Only 40 years ago, the rate of technologically driven change was such that companies could re-organize efficiently and economically over considerable periods of time, but about 30 years ago this changed as the arrival of new technologies accelerated. We effectively moved from a world of slow periodic changes to one where change became a continuum. The leading-edge sectors were fast to recognize and adopt this new mode of continual adaptation driven by new technologies. This saw these ever more efficient and expansive companies dominating some sectors. For the majority, however, it seems that this transition was not recognized until relatively recently, and a so new movement was born under the banner of digitalization. This not only impacts the way people work, it affects company operations and changes markets, and it does so suddenly!.
Perhaps the most impactive and recent driver of change in this regard has been COVID which saw the adoption of video conferencing and working as a survival imperative in much less than a month. This now stands as a beacon of proof that companies, organizations, and society, can indeed change and adapt to the new at a rate previously considered impossible. The big danger for digitalization programmes now is the simple-minded view that there are singular (magic) solutions that fit every company and organization, but this is not the case. The reality is that the needs and culture of an organization are not the same and may not be uniform from top to bottom.
Manufacturing necessitates very steep hierarchical management structures and tight control to ensure the consistency of the quality of products. On the other hand, a research laboratory or design company requires a low flat management hierarchy and an apparently relaxed level of control. This is absolutely necessary to foster creativity, innovation, and invention. This presentation gives practical examples of management and organizational, extremes. We then go on to highlight the need to embrace AI and Quantum Computing over the coming decade to deal with future technologies, operating
and market complexity.
The aspirational visions of Society 5.0 coined by many nations around 2015/16 have now been eclipsed by technological progress and world events including another European war, global warming, climate change and resource shortages. In this new context, the published 5.0 documents now seem naive and simplistic, high on aspiration, and very short on ‘the how’. The stark reality is that the present situation has been induced by our species and our inability to understand and cope with complexity.
“There are no simple solutions to complex problems”
What is now clear is that our route to survival and Society 5.0 will be born of Industry 4.0/5.0 and a symbiosis between Mother Nature, Machines, and Mankind. Today we consume and destroy near 50% more resources than the planet might reasonably support, and merely improving the efficiency of all our processes and what we do will only delay the end point. And so I4.0 is founded on new materials and new processes that are far less damaging, inherently sustainable, and most importantly, readily dispensable across the planet.
“Reversing global warming will not see a climatic reversal to some previously stable state”
In this presentation, we start with the nature of climate change, move on to the technology changes that might save the day, the impact of Industry 4.0/5.0, and then postulate what Society 5.0 might actually look like.
In a world of accelerating innovation and increasingly complex digital services, applications, appliances, and devices, it seems unreasonable to expect customers to understand and maintain their own cyber security. We are way past the point where even the well educated can cope with the compounded complexity of an ‘on-line-life’. The reality is, today's products and services are incomplete and sport wholly inadequate cyber defence applications.
Perhaps the single biggest problem is that defenders have never been professional attackers - and they don’t share the same level of thinking and deviousness, or indeed, the inventiveness of their enemies. Apart from an education embracing the attack techniques, and in some cases, engaging in war games, the defenders remain on the back foot However, there a number of new, an potentially significant, approaches yet to be addressed, and we care to look at the problem from a new direction.
In the maintenance of high-tech equipment and systems across many industries, identifiable precursors are employed to flag impending outages and failures. This realisation prompted a series of experiments to see if it was possible to presage pending cyber attacks. And indeed it was found to be the case!
In this presentation we give an overview of our early experimental and observational results, long with our current thinking spanning networks through to individual hackers, and inside actors.
Connecting Everything Vital to Sustainability
Mobile network evolution has followed a reasonably predictable path almost entirely focused on the needs of human communication. The transition from 1 to 2G was dictated by the economics of reliability, performance, and scale, whilst 3, 4, and 5G saw the transition to mobile computing with full internet access, AI and an ever-expanding plethora of applications. But 5G could be the end of the line as cell-site energy demands have become excessive at ~10kW.
Midway between the migration from 4G to 5G, M2M and the IoT machines overtook the human population of 8Bn people with near (estimated) 20Bn devices. Current IoT growth rates suggest a 40 - 60Bn population by 2030 to 2050. However, we present evidence that it could be far more ~ 1,000Bn ‘Things’. This is based on the observation of the number of IoT components populating modern vehicles, homes, offices, factories and plants, along with smart ‘human implants’ and ‘smart bolts’ plus the instrumentation of civil; structures.
The bold assumption that 5G would be a dominant player in the IoT is now patently one of naivety and the world has become far more complex with over 10 wireless standards currently in use. So, this poses the question; will 6G rise to the challenge? We see this as highly unlikely as the diversity of need is extremely broad, and we propose that it could be the end of tower based networks for a lot of applications. A migration to mesh-nets, UWB and (Hyper Wide Band) for the IoT at frequencies above 100GHz seems the most obvious engineering choice as it allows for far simpler designs with extremely low power at sub $0.01/device cost. 5G is already on the margins of being sustainable, and a ‘more-of-the-same’ thinking 6G can lonely be far worse!
For millennia we have crafted artifacts from bulk materials that we have progressively refined to produce ever more precision tools and products. Latterly, we have crossed a critical threshold where our abilities now eclipse Mother Nature. For example; the smallest transistors in production today have feature sizes down to 2nm which is smaller than a biological virus ~20 - 200nm. The implications for ITC, AI, Robotics, and Production are ever more profound as we approach, and most likely undercut, the scale of the atom ~ 0.1-0.4nm. Not only does this open the door to new technologies, it sees new and remarkable capabilities. So, in this presentation we look at this new Tech Horizon spanning robotics to quantum computing and sensory technologies, and how they will help us realise sustainable futures germane to Industry 4.0, 5.0, and beyond.
We are engaged in a war the like of which we have never seen or experienced before. Our enemies are invisible and relentless; with globally dispersed forces working at all levels and in all sectors of our societies. They are better organised, resourced, motivated, and adaptive than any of our organisations or institutions, and they are winning. This war is also one of paradox!
“The cost to many nations is now on a par with their GDP”
“No previous war has seen so many suffer so much to (almost) never retaliate”
“We are up against attackers who operate as a virtual (ghost-like) guerrilla army”
“No state can defend its population and organisations, and they stand alone - isolated and exposed”
“A real army/defence force would rehearse and play all day and very occasionally engage in warfare. We, on the other hand, are at war every day but never play, war-game, or anticipate new forms of attack”
To turn this situation around we need to understand our enemies and adopt their tactics and tools as a part of our defence strategy. We also have to be united, and organised so the no one, and no organisation, stands alone. We also have to engage in sharing attack data, experiences and solutions.
All this has to be supported by wargaming, and anticipatory solutions creation.
The good news is; we have better, and more, people, machines, networks, facilities, and expertise than our enemies. All it requires is the embracing of advanced R&D, leadership, sharing, and orchestration on a global scale.
Throughout my career in science, engineering and management I attended numerous meeting where many misconceptions and misinterpretations were evident. Perhaps the most expansive and expensive were the probabilities assumed and calculated for system reliability and/or product manufacturing quality. Eventually, I began to refer to this as ‘five nines’ problem!
Not fully understanding the origins of the reliability measures, it is so easy to demand a 99.999% instead of 99.99% up time for an electronic system. What could be easier? At face value it appears to be trivial and straightforward! Likewise, taking a 5s manufacturing plant up to a 6s defect level turns out to be a monumental engineering challenge! And at the time of writing 6s has never been achieved!
It appears that to few engineering and management courses address this topic, and if they do, it is as a scant reference of insufficient depth. So, we see far too many students understand in any depth, if at all! And when they become managers they just ‘don’t get it’!
This presentation and the associated lecture have been specifically created to address this problem with relevance to BSc, BA, MSc and MBA students along with anyone needing a refresher or explicit introduction to the topic. In addition to the graphics, animations and movies, the lecture is also littered with practical examples and the outcomes of case studies.
Industries 1.0, 2.0 (and most of) 3.0, saw manufacturing and construction using natural materials readily extracted, refined, amalgamated, machined, and molded. In general, these exhibited fixed mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. However, the latter stages of Industry 3.0 embraced synthetics exhibiting superior properties to afford new degrees of freedom in the design of structures and products.
Today Industry 4.0 sees further advances with metamaterials, dynamic coatings, controllable properties, and additive manufacturing. Embedded smarts have also made communication between components, products and structures possible under the guise of the IoT. Adaptable materials with a degree of self-repair are also opening the door to further freedoms and less material use. In combination, these represent a big step toward sustainable societies with highly efficient ReUse, RePurposing, and Recycling (3R).
At the leading edge, we are now realising active surfaces that can reflect, absorb, or amplify wireless signals, offer programmable colour, and integral energy storage. But amongst a growing list of possibilities, it is integral sensing & communication that may define this new era. In this presentation, we look at these advances in the context of smart design, cities & societies.
We are engaged in an exponentially growing cyber war that we are visibly losing. Within the next 3 years it has been estimated that the global cost will equal, or overtake, the UK GDP, and it is clear that our defences are inadequate and often ineffective. Malware and ransomer-ware continue to extort more money, and cause damage and inconvenience to individuals, organisations and society, whilst hacker groups, criminals and rogue states continue to innovate and maintain their advantage. At the same time, our defences are subverted and rendered ineffective as we operate in a reactive and prescriptive, after the fact, mode with no foresight or anticipation.
In any war it is essential to know and understand as much about the enemy as possible, it is also necessary to establish the truth and validity of any situation or development. Doing this in the cyber domain is orders of magnitude more difficult than the real world, but some of the relevant tools are now available or at an advanced stage of development. For example; fully automated fact checkers and truth engines have been demonstrated, whilst situational awareness technologies are commercially available. However, what is missing is some level of context assessment on a continual basis. Without this we will continue to be ‘blind-sided’ by the actions and developments of the attackers as they maintain their element of surprise along every line of innovation.
What do we need? In short ; a Context Engine that continually monitors networks, servers, routers, machines, devices and people for anomalous behaviours that flag pending attacks as behavioural deviations that are generally easy to detect. In the case of attacker groups we have observed precursor events and trends in network activity days ahead of some big offensive. However, this requires a shift in the defenders thinking and operations away for the reactive and short term, to the long term continual monitoring, data collection and analysis in order to establish threat assessments on a real time.
The behavioural analysis of people, networks and ITC, is at the core of our ‘Context Engine’ solution which completes the triangle of: Truth; Situation; Context Awareness to provide defenders with a fuller and transformative picture. Most of the known precursor elements of this undertaken have been studied in some depth, with some behavioural elements identified on real networks and some physical situations. The unknown can only add more accuracy!
In a world that appears riven by social media, ill-informed opinion, rumour, and conspiracy theories in preference to facts and established truths, it can be alarming to see scientists, doctors, and engineers challenged by vacuous statements that often hold sway over the hard-won truths of science. Moreover, large numbers of people do not understand the ‘scientific method’ and what makes it so powerful.
Paradoxically, those challenging science and scientists based on their belief systems do so using technologies that can only be furnished by scientific methodologies. For sure; no religion, belief system, great political mind, anarchist, professional protester, or social commentator will produce a TV set, mobile phone, laptop, tablet, supercomputer, MRI Scanner, AI system, or vaccine! But they will criticise, challenge, and be abusive based on their ignorance and inability.
So, this is the world that now influences the minds of young aspiring students, and this presentation is designed to go beyond the simple exposition and statement of the scientific principles and method, to provide an ancient, modern, and forward-looking perspective. It also includes a complex ‘worked example’ to highlight the rigour that must be applied to establish any truth!
Our communications history is dominated by fixed networks of bounded linear predictability. These were based on precise engineering design giving assured information security, and measured operation. However, mobile devices, internet, social networks, IP, and Apps changed all that! Internets are inherently non-linear, unbounded, and essentially designoid — that is, mostly shaped by evolution, steered by demand/rapid innovation - highly adaptive and ‘learning’ in real time.
So, those who suppose we can control such networks to fully guard and protect the information of institutions and individuals are sadly mistaken. And further confounded by Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT). Here, a mix of the information of individuals and things, is distributed across the planet on a scale far larger than ever conceived in the past, to become essential components in the survival of our species in realising sustainable societies.
Not surprising then, Privacy and Data protection are big issues for regulators, governments and civil liberties organisations. But so far, nothing has worked, and we see the UK Data Protection Act, EU-GDPR, EU-USA Shield, and Copyright Laws often ignored or worked around. These are largely derivatives of a paper based world and a pre-computing world are now largely unfit for purpose.
This presentation was created in support of a short keynote for ICGS3-21 (14-15 Jan21) UK to purposely highlight the reasons why we are losing the cyber war and what we have to do to win. The approach adopted quantifies the key weakness and shortcomings of our current defence strategies to give pointers to a more secure future.
In postulating remedies, we purposely fall back on the wisdoms of Sun Tzu and The Art of War to highlight and explain the meaning and implications of quoted insights (below) and their pertinence to modern cyber wars/security.
“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy”
In this way, we go beyond opinion and suspicion by quantifying the scale of the individual elements of the cyber security equation using a variant of Drake’s Equation. This gives us a good estimate of the scale of the problems we face. Beyond this we highlight some cultural and political issues that need urgent attention.
Finally, we link to comprehensive presentations going back to 2016 that detail specific Red and Blue team exercises thinking and preparation. These themes were invoked to widen the awareness and thinking in the student body @ The UoS.
In this lecture is the final session of an extensive wireless course delivered over several weeks at the University of Suffolk. So, by way of ‘rounding-off’ the series, we chart the progression of wireless/radio communication from the first spark transmitters through Carrier -Wave Morse, AM, FM, DSSC, SSB to digital systems along with the use of LW, MW, SW, VHF, UHF and Microwaves. Whilst we focus on Electro-Magnetic-Waves from 30kHz through 300GHz, we also mention optical, ultrasonic, and chemical communication as additional modes.
Our examinations detail the distinct genetic trails of 1, 2, 3G, and 4, 5G, the approximate development cycles/timeline along with distinctive changes in design thinking. We then postulate that 6 and 7G are likely to form a new line of development with 6G probably realised without any towers or any conventional cellular structure. In this context we also point out that there are no digital radios today, only traditional analogue designs with ‘strap-on-modems’ at the transmitter and receiver. Perhaps more radically, we suggest that it is time to adapt fully digital designs that allow for the eradication of the established bands and channels mode of operation.
We also chart the energy hungry progression of systems from 1 through 5G where tower installations are now consuming in excess of 10kW due to the extensive signal processing employed. This immediately debunks any notion of another step in the direction of more bandwidth, lower latency, greater coverage with >20x more towers (than 4G) and >250Bn power hungry smart devices. In short: we propose that 5G is the last of the line and the realisation of 6G demands new thinking and new modes that lead us away from W and mW to µW and nW wireless designs.
Whilst most of the technology required for 6G is available up to 300GHz, there remains one big channel in respect of the growing number of antennas per device and platform. Even for 3 - 5G + WiFi + BlueTooth space is at a premium in mobile devices and fractal antennas have not lived up to their promise too integrate all of these into one wideband structure. However, at 100GHz and above, antennas/dipoles become less than chip size and can see 10s included as phased arrays. But this all needs further work!
Throughout this lecture, we provide examples, demonstrations, and mind-experiments to support our assertions.
"Demystifying a world of the weird and unexpected"
In just over 100 years our understanding of reality, nature, and the world about us has transited from the simple, linear and causal, to the complex, non-linear, and confounding. As a species, we now understand something of the scale of the problems we face and the limitations of our innate abilities. In addition, our mathematical and digital computing frameworks do not scale to match the challenges of climate change, global warming, or the economics of sustainability.
‘Quantum Computing is analogue/probabilistic and not digital’
The stark reality is; We will never understand the human brain, the true nature of cancer, chemistry, biology, life, and the complexities of the environment using today’s tools. Building bigger and better digital computers does not scale to meet these challenges, and is untenable in the longer term! For sure, AI can help us formulate new enlightenments, but it still isn’t enough. We occupy a quantum universe that cannot be decoded and understood by us or our linear machines, no matter how many or how big! A Quantum universe demands Quantum Computers to realize deep understandings.
‘Quantum Computers will not replace our digital computers
In this multi-media talk we open the ‘quantum kimono of reality’ to explain the what, how, and when, of Quantum Machines and the implications for the future.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
3. REALITY STRIKES
The universe is not simple or linear
The universe is complex, non-linear and chaotic
Workable simplicity is long gone - complexity now rules !
Robert Boyle
PV = MRT
George Ohm
V = IR
Robert Hook
x = Fk
Isaac Newton
F = Mg
4. REALITY STRIKES - Thank You Human Limitations!
Simple thinking has seen us achieve so much!
Further progress however demands better models and deeper understanding
“Just because we don’t understand something does not mean to say we cannot exploit it”
5. IGNORANCE - What we do not understand
Economics - the current model is destroying the planet
Climate Change - if we do nothing it might just destroy us
Biology - we do not understand cells or stem cells sufficiently well
Ecologies - we are relatively clueless and continue to inflict great damage
Chemistry - our models are crude and preclude the synthesis of the new
Physics - quantum mechanics + string theory create more paradoxes than they solve
Networks - we design and build best we can but are unable to predict outcomes
Software - we have no means of thoroughly testing what we build
People - behaviours remain something of a mystery
+++++ - “Our mathematical models/abilities are virtually useless at the leading
edge providing nothing more than crude representations at best ”
6. HOPE - What might just save us ?
260 × 280
Deep analysis
and modelling
Deep cognition
and knowledge
7. OUR CHOICE - Binary!
We can pretend we don’t
need new technologies
and thereby suffer a
slow death at the
hand of fate….
…or we can embrace
and exploit to our advantage
whilst discovering the problems and
dangers - and then resolve, refine and repair as we go…
We actually have no
choice if we wish to
survive!
8. DON’t Panic - Think Instead !
Naysayers
in
General
never
built
an
AI system
or
studied
the
topic
9. Reality CHECK - The Real Upside(s)
More accurate medical diagnostics
Acceleration of genomic medicine
Highly efficient medical imaging
Combinatorial drug analysis
New drug discovery
New materials
Network analysis
Dynamic modelling
Automated security
Solving problems beyond human intellect
Technology is inert and does not build dystopian societies - only people do that!
Robots
and
AI
rapidly
learn
from
humans
11. AWARENESS
Begets sentience
A function of context and cognition
An indirect function of memory & computing power
Predominantly determined by sensors, actuators and data I/O
Suppositions
All living things exhibit intelligence <=> Not all intelligent things exhibit life
Humans do not have the capacity to recognise all intelligences
Not all intelligent/living systems enjoy/exhibit awareness
12. RECAP - Reality Check Reasonable Deterministic
and Well Behaved
16. Robots - Status Quo
Power industry, farming, production and delivery, and subliminally
feature in most of our lives
They do a better job than humans by working to a far greater precision,
not getting bored and not losing concentration
17. Robots - Status Quo
The next phase: buddy-buddy working !
Human - Robot : Robot - Human helpers/teams !
20. DOING WHAT WE Cannot DO - Inside Us !
Productionizing surgery and medical procedures
21. Are you an
artificial
intelligence ?
Does it Matter ?
Future reality
Already here - a widely accepted norm
Talking to your car, TV, computer
mobile - Amazon Alexa et al are
examples of very limited and
weak apps/specific AI
General AI is much
harder to crack -
but is being
realised a
byte at a
time…
22. 7 0 y e a r s o n !
“We can assert with great confidence
that we do not yet fully understand the
human (or any other) brain”
This is not going to get
any bigger, better, or in
anyway more powerful
and it is a fundamental
limiter to our further
progress
23. C RU D e !
Neuron Count
Early machines had ~4k
memory & << 1k nodes
Such comparisons are
engineering estimates
that are virtually useless
and certainly not valid
or accurate….
24. BIO-ENGINEERING
Ratio of neurons + axon + dendrite
network to vascular plumbing to get
energy in and heat out
STILL BEING WORKED ON: Physiology
of men and women drastically different in
respect of nerve endings across the surface
are of the skin - and the eyes - for sure
they are ‘wired’ differently!
For average human adult
"The average number of neocortical
neurons was 19 Bn in female brains
and 23 Bn in male brains."
T
0
b
e
c
o
n
t
in
u
e
d
25. 1949 DONALD HEBB Learning
We remember, forget, learn, make decisions on the basis
of the concatenation of accumulating switching and/or
decaying synapse states as they store ‘charge’ almost
capacitor like and thereby ‘influence’ their neighbours
Forgetting appears
to be essential
for learning
26. Thermodynamics tells
us that one of these
cannot decode or
understand the other
We can only understand
our own brain with the
aid of something more
powerful
AI + Quantum
Computing +
Human ?
Physics gets in on the act
27. ABILITY BENCHMARK
1031 v 959 cells - HUH ?
When AI (/Quantum Computing ?) helps
us crack this problem we will have the
first comparative measure of what it
might take to understand ourselves !
We ~1011 neurons
cannot understand ~102 Worms
Social behaviours with 302 neurons
28. 1957: 13 people deliver a computer
2017: 13 computers in one hand
£29,000 then ~£613,000 today
HD 320k
>3.5kW
Q u a d C o r e
Memory 1.G
12W
£20
S E G u e B A C K
29. i n < 3 0 Y e a r s
~ 1,000,000,000 x chip capacity
Cray 2 1985
$32M and 5kW
iPhone 5 2012
$700 and 5W
3 x more
powerful
30. i n < 3 0 Y e a r s
~ 1,000,000,000 x chip capacity
~Dog Brain
~Mouse Brain
~Human
Brain
There is far more to intelligence
than a very crude analogy to transistor
- neuron equivalence and count, but this serves to
indicate one reason why AI has been along time coming !
Processing
Memory
Sensors
Adaptability
SoftwareComplexity
Autonomy
AI
Processing
Memory
Sensors
Manipulators
Communication
Networking
Intel > 100M transistors/mm2
IBM > 30Bn transistors/chip
Feature size now ~ 10nm
31. G A M E C H A N G E R 2 0 1 4
Considered to be impossible by philosophers
32. G A M E C H A N G E R 2 0 1 8
Considered to be impossible by philosophers
33. Processing
Speed
Data
Storage
Internet
Processing
Indeterminate
I n t e r n e t
Storage
~1022 Bytes
Human
Storage
~1016 Bytes
Processing
~1 TF
Cat
Storage
~1014 Bytes
Processing
~0.1 TF
T E C H V B I O L G Y
A very rough comparison - the
actuality is far more complex
Super Computer
Storage
~1017 Bytes
Processing
~200 PetaFlops
34. Processing
Speed
Data
Storage
Internet
Processing
Indeterminate
I n t e r n e t
Storage
~1022 Bytes
Human
Storage
~1016 Bytes
Processing
~1 TF
Cat
Storage
~1014 Bytes
Processing
~0.1 TF
T E C H V B I O L G Y
A very rough comparison - the
actuality is far more complex
Super Computer
Storage
~1017 Bytes
Processing
~200 PetaFlops
STILL Relatively
D U M B c o m p a r e d
to biology
39. A I
Sense, Garner Data, Analyse, Reason
M A C H I N E
L e a r n i n g
Adaptive Networks & Algorithms
More exposure to data sees continual
improvement in accuracy with time
P E RS P ECT IV E
D e e p
L e a r n i n g
Multilayered Neural
Networks
Vast amounts of data
result in an ever
more accurate
consensus
Can get very complex but I think we can
safely say that we fully understand this
Designed, Built, Optimised by Man
Designed By Man & Self Optimising
Whilst we understand most of this
- there is a growing % of Huh !
Designed By Man & Machine
Emergent behaviours dominate
- we may or may not comprehend
Boundaries not well defined
40. A I
Sense, Garner Data, Analyse, Reason
M A C H I N E
L e a r n i n g
Adaptive Networks & Algorithms
More exposure to data sees continual
improvement in accuracy with time
P E RS P ECT IV E
D e e p
L e a r n i n g
Multilayered Neural
Networks
Vast amounts of data
result in an ever
more accurate
consensus
Can get very complex but I think we can
safely say that we fully understand this
Designed, Built, Optimised by Man
Designed By Man & Self Optimising
Whilst we understand most of this
- there is a growing % of Huh !
Designed By Man & Machine
Emergent behaviours dominate
- we may or may not comprehend
Boundaries not well defined
41. G a m e C h a n g e r 2 o 1 8
Goodbye Touring Test and a lot of nonsense
P re - p ro g ra m m e d c o n t e x t a n d o n l y
limited cogn ition required !
42. G a m e C h a n g e r 2 o 1 8
Goodbye Touring Test and a lot of nonsense
T h e m a c h i n e i s d e f i n i t e l y s m a r t e r
t h a n t h e h u m a n i n t h i s c a s e !
43. A I C O N T E X T
A vital step toward cognition
Feel
Sight
Taste
Smell
Sound
Experiences
Cameras
Mobiles
Sensors
Media
Nets
IoT
“Let us pray”
“Lettuce spray”
“Let us spray”
Are we in church/mosque,
kitchen or garden ?
Ultimately, AI
is defined by
sensory systems
44. AWAREness
More & more clues
Who is it
What are they
Where are they
What is the topic
A priori information
Content & context
Facial expressions
Body language
All combat noise &
other generators of
errors
46. 5
TYPE 1
Reactive
Task Specific
Very Limited
Largely Pattern Matching
Human Programmers: Chess, cards,
dominoes data, speech, pictures,
characters, behaviours, movements+
Narrow Cognition
Largely Programmed by AI alone:
Subsume the networked knowledge
of previous and current generations
TYPE 3
Reasoning
Multi-Task Ability
Broadly Applicable
TYPE 2
Learning
Task Specific
Broadly Applicable
Memory and Analysis
Initial Human AI Program That Then
Adapts: Recognises highly complex/
large scale non-linear relationships
A I L A D D E R
Progress & Categories
Full Awareness
May be categorised as a ‘being’:
With a wide range of sensory units
networked to other machines
TYPE 4
Self-Aware
47. 5
TYPE 1
Reactive
Task Specific
Very Limited
Largely Pattern Matching
Human Programmers: Chess, cards,
dominoes data, speech, pictures,
characters, behaviours, movements+
Narrow Cognition
Largely Programmed by AI alone:
Subsume the networked knowledge
of previous and current generations
TYPE 3
Reasoning
Multi-Task Ability
Broadly Applicable
TYPE 2
Learning
Task Specific
Broadly Applicable
Memory and Analysis
Initial Human AI Program That Then
Adapts: Recognises highly complex/
large scale non-linear relationships
A I L A D D E R
Progress & Categories
Full Awareness
May be categorised as a ‘being’:
With a wide range of sensory units
networked to other machines
TYPE 4
Self-Aware
~ 70yrs to become a solid
& deployable technology
2027 Robotic embodiment,
extensive sensors & actuators
plus entity networking
rapidly raises the game
2017 Google Alpha GO
p r o p e l s A I i n t o a n
autonomous future of
learning & doing
2024 AI-Human cooperation
see exponential innovation &
progress of AI capabilities
48. P R O G ESS
S t i l l a t t h e R & D s t a g e
A I
R o b ots
Q C
D e p l o y m e n t f a r f a s t e r
t h a n R o b o t i c s
A L
49. Ic ~ k log2[1 + K.A.S ( 1 + P.M )]
S = Sensor, A = Actuator, P = Processor, M = Memory
I N T E L L I G E N C E D E F I N I T I O N
50. 1960 70 80 90 2000 10
ComputingPowerMIP/s
Intelligence
Level
PC
Estimates of
Artificial
Intelligence
Internet
R i s e o f I n t e l l i g e n c e
51. Ex e m p l a r
N e w C r e a t i v i t y Criticism
It is just copying and
aping what human
composers have done !
Retort 1
You mean exactly
like human
composers do ?
Retort 2
AI has only just got
into this game that
humans have be at
for well over 3M years
53. Thinking the right way
People fear, & complain, overlook the big gains
V i v e
L a
d i f f e r e n c e
54. WHAT HAVE WE DISCOVERED
Intelligence is an emergent property of complex systems
Not all complex systems exhibit intelligence
Intelligence always involves communication
All intelligences are entropic
AI always seeks the truth
Axioms
An intelligent system must have some form of input and an output
Memory and processing power are not always an essential
Communication and connection are essentials
Things that think want to link
Things that link want to think
55. ONLY ONE
All that is needed
Mobile AI/Robotic weapon platforms
demand far less resources than any
atom bomb and/or missile program
Numerous rogue states will
quickly embrace this new
opportunity!
W
e a p o n s
C o n t r o l
S E E M S
I m p o s s i b l e
56. TOASTER
Deep humour
or nightmare?
Talkie Toaster, in Red Dwarf
novels & TV series.
Manufactured by Crapola Inc.,
an annoying, monomaniacal,
AI toaster purchased by Dave
Lister whilst on leave at a
second-hand junk shop on
Miranda, along with a robot
goldfish and a smuggled pet
cat.
More intelligent than the Red
Dwarf computer Holly