Innovation: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom – and then Wither…?

Roger Needham, who was a major figure in computer science, said that one should not judge the quality of the flowers in the garden from the quantity of manure used to cultivate them. He was referring to research output and the funding that is used to drive research. It’s clear that the benefits of research are their own reward for society and for the individual. From another vantage point, those who allocate funding, maybe ultimately the taxpayer, have every right to know what is derived from the nitrous deposits.

Let’s look at the flowers. It is not a bad thing to countenance a thousand flowers blooming. It is super important too to cultivate the rare and ever so valuable specimens. This is what the French call the orchidean scholarly disciplines, the orchids among the flowers, which in the long run make us proud to be earthlings.

With these floral thoughts in my mind you can imagine how dismayed I was to see an enormously crass view expressed recently by Chris Horn, whom I generally admire.

“If Ireland is to become a world centre for innovation and one of the best smart economies, then it is important to understand why Irish innovators and entrepreneurs would want to stay here in Ireland, and why overseas innovators and entrepreneurs would want to start their companies here in Ireland: the basic reason is to get rich, by building a company to sell it.”

Ouff, is that all?

“Failure is expected. It is critical to fail early … Failure is common, but so are retries: investors and management learn from mistakes and anxious to use this wisdom to become rich by trying again.”

Let a thousand flowers bloom, let them wither and decay and out of the nitrous substances more flowers will spring up. Maybe, but I am thoroughly dismayed by the short-termism of it all, by the personal and unsociable (maybe even unsocial) aggrandizement, by the crudeness of using whomever is at hand to make a quick buck, – in a word by the striking amorality of all of this.

I have noted before (see next post on “Intellectual Property, Innovation and Globalization”) how we in Europe have a real problem with consolidating and growing companies of scale and stature. It is clear that if not consolidated and growing, if companies have no future, well, yes, they should become manure. But there must be a belief in what we are doing, in our engineering of systems, and in our provision of products and services.

Content and substance must be what counts in the end. Building in order to exit is a bad way to pursue any initiative. We may be – all of us – nitrous stuff in the end, but being spectacular in between times is what makes it all worthwhile.

My hope is that our Irish and our European ambition, in engineering, science and technology, are as high as they can be, and stay that way.

Intellectual Property, Innovation and Globalization

In the Sept. 2009 study for the Swedish Presidency, Green Knowledge Society – An ICT policy agenda to 2015 for Europe’s future knowledge society, it is written:

“Some interviewees pointed to the need for Europe to move away from a ‘permission to innovate’ culture. For instance, one of the few examples of European innovation is the file sharing service Pirate Bay, which challenges current intellectual property rules. Rather than attempt to stymie this innovation, we need a more thoughtful response and to rethink rules around protection of intellectual property rights so that they are fit for a digital economy.”

As one might say for a class test, – discuss!

From the French Digital Society Plan to 2012, France Numérique 2012, Plan de développement de l’économie numérique, October 2008, some further issues are addressed: How does one hang onto intellectual property and not lose it? And what are the major stages of innovation following the early start-up and early consolidation stages?

“France and Europe are clearly wrong-footed in terms of the software industry, essentially due to the absence of actors of significant scale. Beyond a few companies like SAP (Germany) or Dassault Systèmes (France), most software giants originate in the US. … Company creation abounds today in the software sector as in many other sectors. However, the young shoots struggle to reach the stature of a world scale actor. The presence of actors of substantial scale (turnover over 500 million euro, international presence) is essential for the software ecosystem in France so as to focus activity of the sector around convergent themes. Much evidence has confirmed that the future of the young shoots is uncertain. They struggle to get the financial resources needed to get on to the global scene; and the most dynamic of them are bought out by foreign-based actors of world scale, separating the technology and the associated jobs from their territorial anchoring.”

Firstly, the critical need to attain scale is emphasized here. Sufficient scale is as much needed in business and commerce as is sufficient scaling up of speed by an aircraft.

Secondly, without sufficient and critical scale, local anchoring in the given cultural terrain will not be enough in its own right. Both critical scale and local culture are needed to build and consolidate an economy in the global context.

Third Age – Age of Unbridled Opportunity

A few points here in regard to the elderly, – the Third Age.

• The Third Age is one of great potential for Technological Innovation.

  Older people are ideally positioned, not to adapt to new technologies (why on earth should they!) but rather to develop new technologies. After all, older means wiser and more experienced. Look at the facts. “… though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. … The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth. … Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.”

  So the New York Times, “Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens”, 25 August 2009.

• Space is more imporant than time for the elderly – and in fact for all of us.

  This is intended in a practical sense. In retirement (in the US), 60% of people will move home. No wonder therefore that “University-linked retirement communities offer revenue for universities with space on campus, and involve small developments as well as larger. For the retirees there is stimulus, sports (golf) facilities, safe surroundings, perhaps access to Medical School and care.” (See Back on campus – Baby Boomers are flocking to campus retirement communities and, in turn, pumping money back into the school, by T. Halligan in University Business, 1 December 2004.)

  In some regions there is huge opportunity to link up with retirees, a whole industrial sector in fact. I am thinking of Ticino in Switzerland and Donegal in Ireland. Telemedicine might come into its own, at last, in a context of retirees living where they have vacationed throughout their lives – in the beautiful regions that are quite likely to be outside and away from major conurbations.

• Ambient assisted living is a hot topic. What is the most crucial testbed of all, the most crucial infrastructure for the elderly? In my opinion, very high speed broadband. High speed broadband is likely to help too with e-inclusion. Let me look (metaphorically speaking!) for a moment at digital television. The switch-off of analog is proceeding well across the globe. With the digital dividend comes, too, a great chance to bundle data and voice, as well as digital television.

  We should really go a lot further: data and voice networks, energy networks, waste networks – infrastructure for all can and should be provided at one and the same time. If there is digging up of trenches then this should surely be done once and once only. If there is broadband via overhead cabling, far less expensive than underground, then this lends itself to being jointly developed as power grids are extended to take ocean or isolated windfarm sources of energy. Mutual roll-out and maintenance of these differing networks is called for.

• Third Age Entrepreneurs.

  “… one in six of those aged 46-65 hope to embark on a new business venture rather than retire. This is seven times the number of possible start-ups from their parents’ generation – and could amount to one million new businesses” – yes indeed, as pointed out by L. Johnson, Tomorrow’s entrepreneurs – old is the new young, RSA Journal, Summer 2009, pp. 39-40.

  He continues: “Their experience and wisdom will be their secret weapon. Ageing baby boomers … realise that, thanks to collapsing pension provision and rising longevity, many of us will have to work until we’re well past 60. Not every venture started by a silver entrepreneur need be a new for-profit undertaking. It might be a charity, a social enterprise, a civic endeavour, a new neighbourhood organisation or a recreational club. We do not, after all, face a shortage of challenges or opportunities – across industry, politics or in communities.”

Final word: it is clear that enormous opportunity is there for the taking with older populations. I have just touched here on how the destiny of the aged is inextricably bound up with energy and environment; health and medicine; information and communications; finance; and entrepreneurship and innovation.

And reciprocally: our society needs the elderly to dig us out of the economic mess that we are currently in.

Why Not Zero Tolerance of Road Fatalities and Injuries?

An anniversary passed recently, the 140th, of a portentous event. According to [1], the first ever automobile fatality was in Ireland when Mary Ward, a respected microscopist, artist, astronomer and naturalist fell from a steam carriage and went under its heavy iron wheels in Birr, Co. Offaly, on 31 August 1869. In the past year, some 39,000 people have died on Europe’s streets, roads and highways as a result of traffic accidents [2]. While this figure is down on the previous year, nonetheless the downward trend is not pointing to the European target of 27,000 by 2010 (that is, 50% of the number of deaths in 2001). This target will not be realized. Globally, about 1.2 million people die each year from traffic crashes and 25 million suffer permanent disability. The current trajectory of road traffic fatalities is such that by 2020 this is expected to be the third most common cause of death. The tragedy of Mary Ward back in August 1869 goes on and on.

It is interesting to speculate on what modern technologies can offer to end the deaths and injuries in this most man-made of problems. Let me offer just a few such thoughts. Mobile phones are super abundant and location-based services are on the increase, rapidly in fact. It doesn’t have to be a matter of such mobile comms – fixed context-aware comms would be fine too.

Data transfers would lead to the potential of very powerful peer-to-peer mechanisms for the exchange of data, and ambient machine and environment data uploads. Traffic ahead, whether oncoming or receding, could provide valuable information, all the more valuable as data transfers approach real-time transfer rates. Such mechanisms could help not only with safety but with re-routing around bottlenecks and jams. On isolated country highways and byways, fixed beacons by or near the roadside could be pinged for information on ambient conditions.

The ambient machine and environment data uploads – a sort of black box recorder – would have the aim both of allowing everything to be known about an accident if such were to happen, with comprehensive learning from that; or the onboard – or in the driver’s pocket – data recorder could be linked to an insurance company such that (let us say) cultured driving earns an insurance premium rebate.

I have only begun here to envision a world where telecoms, sensors, and interaction algorithms, would meet up with road and highway engineering, transport system planning and design, and human-machine interfaces, to start with (and later financial engineering and regulatory frameworks, among other domains), in order to address this problem that just won’t go away.

This is a Grand Challenge of our time, that is addressable with modern technologies.

[1] I. Fallon and D. O’Neill, “The world’s first automobile fatality”, Accident Analysis and Prevention, 37, 601-603, 2005.

Responding to the Crisis – How Computing is Changing Everything

Updating my article discussed below under “Student recruitment as an excellent indicator of the information economy” here are some udates from the CRA, Computing Research Association.

Given the sufficient data on which these trends are based, and also given how the North American trends often lead others, these trends are worthy of consideration.

• Cumulative increase over last three years in new Bachelor students per department is 15.8%$ if only majors are considered.
• Continuing upward trend in Computer Science PhD production. Up 5.7% from mid 2007 to mid 2008.
• Unemployment rate for new PhDs less than 1%.
• Continuing increasing trend for PhDs to go directly into industry. Now at 56.6%.
• Academic employment by fresh PhDs continuing to decline. Now at 30%.
• Proportion of women among CS PhDs now up to 20.5% in 2008.

From the National Science Foundation:

• 2007 was fifth consecutive year of annual increases in PhDs produced.
• Electrical engineering – fastest growing engineering field during the decade 1998-2007, with number of PhDs awarded increasing by 51.0%.

The Quiet Revolution in Research and Its Profound Impact on Society

It has been predicted that the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA, the Obama stimulus package) will create about 402,000 jobs for one year, through an additional investment of $20 billion in research. Accountability though it critical: “Within 2 years, the public will want to be informed about the impact of the stimulus on the economic recovery. Were the estimates accurate? How can they be validated? And, in the longer term, what were the impacts of the reinvestment strategy on scientific knowledge, economic growth, and job creation?” (See J. Lane, “Assessing the impact of science funding”, Science, 324, 1273-1275, 5 June 2009.) Research nowadays is no longer blue-skies, if it ever was.

Accountability of research and measurement of impact is high on the agenda everywhere now. Is this the end of altruistic, socially-beneficially research as it once was – or as it was once perceived? No, – research has become very different in the way it is structured and organized but, as I will show, hugely more relevant and more beneficial.

A first important point to make is that appearances are not always what they are held up to be. For example the 1968 social upheaval is often viewed in terms of youth versus authority. But as I exemplified in a recent article, in fact the May events served – at least in my example – to bring the academy closer to industry. Internships became popular as a result of 1968, with university students seeing internships now as an important indication of practical relevance of their work.

Research was once seen as a source of collective knowledge. Here the early Royal Society in 17th century London comes to mind, with so much care and attention given to collecting and describing practical life- and work-based experience of varied occupations. Or look at how the modern scientific period was begun in the century before then, on the back of voyaging and trading.

Research now has moved beyond these goals. Research has become the production of intellectual goods. Based on intellectual goods, research has become the production of intellectual properties.

We should understand intellectual property (IP) quite generally because there are areas where there is considerable evolution right now relative to traditional contexts. Consider e.g. research publishing itself. The research journal is usually traced to the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavants, both started in 1665. Nowadays research journals dominate the scene for research and scholarly output. There are other outlets, including conference proceedings, books (monographs are at issue here), and in our more enlightened and also evolving times, data sets, software, and various forms of multimedia object. The trend towards reproducible research is only starting and has implications for data and software. We have therefore a changing landscape of research product and process, with attendant rights and responsibilities.

It would be nice to think that intellectual goods and IP in the research arena are showing the way forward for digital rights management. Maybe in the future the general roll-out to society at large of rights management in research will appear to us as reminiscent of how the web all started because physicists wanted to exchange documents.

So research has become the production of intellectual goods, some of which result in intellectual properties.

We have yet to arrive at a way to measure in the absolute what these intellectual goods bring to society. But it is clear that research has become the mainstay of any modern economy.

It is interesting to note though that powerful ways of measuring relative impact are now core to the way that research is carried out. Moreover the model of how research is comparatively assessed has become a mirror for many other areas of social activity. Examples: government processes; and business practice. Let me draw out just how the impact of research is assessed in a relative way.

Benchmarking has come to the fore, as a new managerial approach. This not a command and control, centralized, hierarchical way of organizing research or other social activities. Instead we have league tables, rankings, scorecards – a way to organize activities that is distributed and autonomous. This is not so much government any more as governance.

Universities everywhere look towards the Shanghai rankings; student satisfaction surveys in universities and institutes of learning are reported on in the newspapers; countries have their scorecards for telecoms infrastructure, for Business Expenditure on Research and Development, and so on; the UK had the Research Assessment Exercise and will have the Research Evaluation Framework, Australia will have its Excellence in Research for Australia; and so on and on. Within companies there are examples, and within governments lots of examples too. The rise of governance fits well with competitiveness through benchmarking. It fits really well with modern development models of the knowledge economy and of the nurturing of human capital.

There is a useful article by Isabelle Bruno in Lille on this, that links the new benchmarking-based, and competitiveness-oriented governance to the Lisbon strategy in Europe, – growing the European knowledge economy and associated human capital through research. Furthermore governance has a clear managerial principle underpinning it, where government could be said to have had an underpinning legal principle.

Since the 1990s, there have been enormous changes – behind the scenes – in research and the way it is structured on the global level. The mix of competition and cooperation is now at the core of research. Already significant aspects of government and of business are in tow. Government and business have taken on board how research is carried out and copied the benchmarking models established in research.

It is true that there is still evolution in how impact of research is measured in absolute terms. But in relative terms, what we see is that the impact of research is captured through competitiveness and innovation. These in turn have been taken on board as essential organizational drivers by governement and business.

Just like the web’s take-off through Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic browser in early 1993, once again research innovation – this time through organisation and a new dynamic – is changing society completely.

Going on from this, it will be very interesting to see how rights management and the myriad IP processes that have evolved and developed in research are generalized to all of society in the coming years. I have no doubt they will be, if only because research has established itself as the major source of innovation, change and renewal in our time.

ICT, Energy and Environment – Inextricably Intertwined

Processing of Information, Processing of Energy: A Short Review of (1) Querying, and (2) Email

I will look at just one aspect of this ICT/energy/climate picture. This is related to the fundamental Internet activities of data searching and email.

All our business, social, and indeed personal, activities and processes are built on information and they are built on energy. Some recent reports are interesting in regard to this close relationship.

Data Querying – Energy Needs and Impact on Environment

How much energy is expended with each and every search query? Following some discussion in the press in January 2009, it is clear that the carbon emissions and the energy use that accompany computing tasks are complicated.

It has been estimated that, globally, the ICT sector is directly responsible for 2% of CO2 emissions. That is the same as the totality of the aviation sector. Included in ICT are computer displays, servers, routers, printers, fixed and mobile telecoms, and so on. (Gartner Group, 26 April 2007.)

Let’s look at emissions. According to Google, a one hit search taking less than a second produces about 0.2g of CO2. When a search is a multiple one, then the estimated CO2 byproduct varies from 1g to 10g. By way of comparison, boiling a kettlefull of water entails about 15g of CO2 emission. There are about 200 million Internet searches per day, the lions’s share of them through Google.

Viewing a web page generates an estimated 0.02g of CO2 per second. If there are complex images or video on what is being viewed, then the estimate rises tenfold to 0.2g of CO2 per second. Running a PC generates an estimated 40g to 80g of CO2 emissions per hour. And maintaining an avatar on Second Life requires an estimated 1752 kilowatt hours of electric power per year, which is almost as much as the average personal use in Brazil. (The Sunday Times, 11 and updated 16 January 2009.)

Google’s response to the Sunday Times article traced out the energy as well as greenhouse gas consequences of searching. A typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. “Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.  In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2.”  (Reference, 12 January 2009.)

PCs and monitors account for 40% of the CO2 emissions figures of the ICT sector. Data centres account for 23% of global ICT CO2 emissions. (Reference.) The New York Times of 14 June 2007 described how data centres are increasingly located near where energy is readily available. The price of power in Washington state is about one fifth that of California. So data centres are being established on the Columbia river, by Google, by Microsoft at Wenatchee, and by Yahoo at Quincy. In an article in Le Monde of 23 June 2007 there was a sketch of a future world where nuclear plants in less developed countries would be surrounded by data centres. (Reference.)

The Formidable Amount of Energy Wasted with Spam

It is common currency that spam accounts for about 97% of all email (Microsoft view, 8 April 2009) although by other accounts spam can be as low as 80% of all traffic. Whatever… it accounts for the greatest proportion of traffic, – 62 trillion (10^12) spam emails in 2008 according to the McAfee ICF report, “The carbon footprint of email spam report”. Richi Jennings contributed in a major way to this report.

The McAfee ICF report looks at legitimate email comprising the following phases and percentages of energy and associated CO2-equivalent emissions:

• drafting – 25%
• outgoing mail server – 12.5%
• internet – 2%
• incoming mail server – 12.5%
• storage – 11%
• viewing – 37%

The total energy expended in legitimate email, per year, is given as 120,115 million kWh, or 120 TWh. I will now look at the energy that goes hand in hand with spam, working out at 33,733 million kWh per year, or 33 TWh.

The pipeline for analysis of carbon footprint of spam is as follows.

• embodied energy of servers, storage, network equipment; user machines
• harvesting/scraping addresses
• disseminating directly from servers or commandeering zombie (botnet) machines
• transmission circuits
• server-based filtering – 16%
• receipt and storage by user machines
• user appraising and then deleting of spam; searching for false positives – 52%, 27%

The dominant energy expenditure is 16% for server-based filtering, 52% for user viewing and deleting of email – about 3 seconds on average for this; and searching for false positives, 27%. False positives are the genuine emails that have been wrongly labeled as spam.

The lion’s share of energy expended here is a user viewing and deleting spam. Overall, approximately 104 billion user hours per year go into such viewing and deleting of spam.

Per spam message, the CO2-equivalent emissions are 0.3 g. For a legitimate email, the CO2-equivalent emissions are 4 g.

Two Conclusions

This is an inspirational analysis. Let me make two comments about what arises out of it.

Firstly, optimizing a system of the sort described – e.g. to minimize overall email handling energy efficiency – is unlikely to be feasible. The reason is that many aspects of what is dealt with here – the size of an email and its significance for the user; the odd spam that will take more than usual consideration; a new form of spam that will take time for the filters to understand and lop off; and so on – are subject to extreme or out of the ordinary events of various sorts. The distributions involved (of data, time, energy, equivalent emissions, etc.) are long tailed. Although unusual but nonetheless realistic, with such distributions it may not be possible to define its variability and it may not even be possible to define its average! In practice therefore we can come up with figures, but each and every context will give rise to different figures.

What I have just sketched out is quite a general analysis. There is a mathematical argument behind it which means that we cannot view this as a closed, fully specified, system, which would offer an optimized solution.

What this points to instead is that the policy-oriented issues come to the fore. How do we handle worst case scenarios? Will we support redundancy in order to establish guaranteed levels of fault tolerance? Or to cater for extreme events?

As we have seen here however, part and parcel of spam are the energy and environment implications. There are energy and environment implications to querying and searching, to handling email, and to catering for common-place and for out of the ordinary activities.

Underlying all such activities, ordinary or exceptional, power and emissions auditing are becoming every bit as important as data and information auditing.

The Increasingly Critical Need for More Computing Graduates

I have written in other posts here that there is a very great mismatch between the needs for clever and capable computing people versus the dearth of people available. This is really quite shocking in view of the current economic melt-down.

The Third Level Computing Forum, which is a grouping of all third level institutes – universities and Institutes of Technology – as well as companies and businesses in the sector, and government agencies, in Ireland, published a report some weeks ago: “There is a demand for Irish ICT graduates” – Third Level Computing Forum press release, 17 February 2009. It is well worth a look.

The RTE 1 television channel did a look at this mismatch between need for graduates in the sector and availability of people. This was on 23 April 2009. This can be seen now on Youtube. Again it is very well worth a look.

Pre-Commercial Public Procurement

An ICT response to the current economic crisis is discussed in the following recent document:

“A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game”, 13 March 2009.

A joint focus is needed by researchers and those who deploy the results of research, not least – and this is something new in Europe – by the public sector.

A synopsis of what this relates to is as follows:

“By acting as technologically demanding first buyers, public procurers can drive innovation from the demand side. In addition to improving the quality and effectiveness of public services this can help creating opportunities for companies to take international leadership in new markets.”

Pre-commercial procurement of ICT to modernize public services is greatly underutilized in Europe compared to the US. This effects not only the quality and efficiency of public services but also it entails missed opportunities for opening up new markets and creating “first mover” advantage for the innovators.

There is insufficient coordination between public authorities and those carrying out R&D and innovation in ICT-based solutions. Examples are such areas as health, transport, energy. (Page 10 of the report gives further examples.)

Education policies have a special relationship with what is at issue here. In practice, across Europe, the educational arena is fragmented leading to lack of ability to focus all efforts on the big challenges that our society faces. Some sectors like nano-electronics and web-based services urgently require a shared European vision.

The report makes this observation: “… barriers to growth pose a bigger problem than barriers to starting a business in the EU. The reasons why European SMEs are not growing are multiple, e.g. sub-optimal conditions for their access to markets, innovation and finance; excessive regulatory burdens.”

Further information is available on the Commission web site at
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/pcp/home_en.html.

Computing Undergraduate Recruitment Up – Sometimes Massively

The news from the US (ACM TechNews, March 18, 2009) is good –

Computer Science Majors Increase at Most Significant Rate Since Dot Com Boom

The number of computer science majors enrolled in U.S. universities rose 8.1 percent in 2008, the first increase in six years, reports the Computing Research Association (CRA) in its 2007-2008 annual CRA Taulbee Survey. Total enrollment in computer science classes, including majors and pre-majors, rose 6.2 percent. “The upward surge of student interest is real and bigger than anyone expected,” says Peter Lee, CRA’s incoming chair. “The fact that computer science graduates usually find themselves in high-paying jobs accounts for part of the reversal. Increasingly students also are attracted to the intellectual depth and societal benefits of computing technology.

The Irish situation has seen increases in recruitment of up to 100% and more.

What is quite exciting is how this presages an economic upturn, as I have described in my blog entry below entitled “Student recruitment as an excellent indicator of the information economy”.