Future Salon

Beyond Mouse and Men: Doug Engelbart at the Future Salon

When Doug Engelbart left last Friday after talking over 2 hours at the Future Salon at SAP and joining us at Pizza my Heart until midnight he said: "This has been the most understanding audience that I had in a very very long time. How can we continue the dialog."

I was thinking about it, should the dialog go on at the Bafuture Yahoo group? Should we start something at the new Accelaware discussion area? As it is often the case if you don't get to it someone else will and that person will do a better job than you would have ever been able to. Davibennett created the Processing Engelbart Yahoo Group stuck full with good posts and links to relevant resources on the net. I didn't have time to really delve into it, yet, but can't wait to do so after I am back from my as I call it Unplugged Thanksgiving Tour to Inverness that starts right after I posted this.

I especially like that Paul King pointed to the where the Doug's demos from 1968 are hosted and working. (Even Wikipedia is still pointing to a page at Stanford's Sloan School which is not working anymore.Go MIT)

As someone said at the Future Salon the 1992 paper: Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware is his most important covering what he talked about last Friday. Doug told me that he got almost no resonance when he first published it, so much that it almost turned him off publishing. Read it, link to it and join the discussion at Processing Engelbart.

Davibennett has laid down the rules in his first post. [Side note, I got asked again how to just get the invitations to the Future Salons and not all messages from bafuture. Change your Yahoo subscription to: "Just special Notices" and you will get only my announcements.]

I saw someone taking pictures at the Future Salon. Please let us know where you post them and if you use Flickr to share please give it the tag futuresalon.

I am off to the Unplugged Tour. Happy Thanksgiving.

Quantum networking, quantum registers, and quantum computing chips

Quantum computing, which will allow Moore's Law to continue beyond the barriers imposed by semiconductor physics, continues to advance in research labs. Major developments include quantum "networking" -- a way to entangle a photon using a laser, quantum registers -- a way of storing qubits for later use, and quantum computing chips -- a technique using "qutons" (quantum photons) on a semiconductor chip. The invention stores qubits in a Cooper box that has more than a billion superconducting aluminum atoms acting together which provides the ability to read a qubit's state without disturbing it.

 

Demo Advances Quantum Networking
Researchers have transferred information stored in the properties of a cloud of rubidium atoms to the properties of a single photon. They fired a laser through a pair of rubidium atom clouds, causing the clouds to emit a photon that was entangled, or linked at the quantum level, with the atom clouds. The next steps are to develop a quantum node that works with the wavelengths of light used in today's telecommunications networks so that photons can travel longer distances over fiber lines.  

A quantum leap forward for computing
Experts presented their latest results at the 5th QIPC workshop. the SQUBIT-2 project is investigating the use of qubits made from special superconducting electric circuits called Josephson Junctions. "Reaching 1000 state cycles within the superconducting qubits lifetime, or decoherence time, was a challenging goal but we have achieved it now," said SQUBIT-2 Coordinator Dude.  

Professor Puts New Spin on Quantum Computer Technology
A team of researchers has created a device that can effectively split a stream of quantum objects such as electrons into two streams according to the spin of each. The tiny device could become a key component in quantum computers.  

Germans demo working quantum register
Physicists at the University of Bonn have successfully demonstrated a five-qubit quantum register, using neutral atoms.  

A neutral atom quantum register [pdf]
4-page description of the details of the system  

Design Rules Build on Self-Assembly
Quantum dots patterned with sticky molecular patches could be made to self-assemble into the wires and three-dimensional structures needed for quantum computer circuits.  

Teleportation breaks new ground
Physicists in Austria and the US have independently demonstrated quantum teleportation with atoms for the first time. Until now, teleportation had only ever been observed with photons. The results could represent a major step towards building a large-scale quantum computer.  

Yale team builds chips for quantum computing
While quantum computing has been verified in a physics lab, building real circuitry on silicon chips has had only sporadic success, until now. Yale University researchers have built what they call QED integrated circuits to manipulate quantum bits.  

Researcher makes quantum leap into new technology
Dr Andrew White of UQ’s School of Physical Sciences said quantum cryptography was of great interest to financial institutions because it could provide a commercial advantage.  

Scientists teleport atomic particles and push quantum computing closer to reality.
 

Success in controlling multi-photon transitions of a superconducting flux qubit
One step closer to realizing a quantum computer  

Calculating the Quantum Nightmare
We must awaken to the threat of a quantum computer getting into malicious hands  

Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics [pdf]
Coherent Coupling of a Single Photon to a Cooper Pair Box  

Speck Trios Make Secret Codes
Researchers from the Canadian National Research Council have devised a way to use quantum dots -- tiny bits of semiconductor -- to print invisible secret codes onto surfaces like documents.  

Tokyo development to enable quantum encryption in net designs
The University of Tokyo's Nanoelectronics Collaborative Research Center and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have jointly developed technologies that generate and measure single-photons in data transmission wavelengths, a development that could make quantum encryption a reality in networking designs.

SensorNet Queries and Data Acquisition

This just in, sorry for the late notice. Yes it is the same place as the Future Salon, just in the middle of the day and the Thanksgiving week where everyone has time :-), still it sounds really interesting and relevant. Check it out. [Crosspost at SDN]

SAP Research Presents:

SensorNet Queries and Data Acquisition: Research at UC Berkeley and Intel Research

Please join us on Tuesday, November 23, at 1:30pm PST for an SAP Research Forum session featuring Dr. Joseph M. Hellerstein on "SensorNet Queries and Data Acquisition." Dr. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of Intel Research at the University of  California, Berkeley.

UC Berkeley and Intel Research have an active and open collaboration in a number of research areas, including wireless sensor networks, planetary scale services, collaborative Internet monitoring, and technologies for emerging markets.  In this talk, Dr. Hellerstein will focus on one important branch of our SensorNet agenda: query processing and data acquisition architectures for wireless sensor networks.  This work has been influential in the research community, and serves as the software core for Intel's open-source TASK sensor kit.

He will describe their work on the TinyDB system, including its features for in-network and acquisitional query processing.  He will also describe more recent work on BBQ, an alternative architecture that incorporates statistical methods to improve performance and minimize power consumption, and which points to new in-network technologies for fault isolation and anomaly detection that they are currently exploring.

Dr. Hellerstein's research focuses on data management and networking, including database systems, sensor networks, peer-to-peer and distributed systems. Before directing Intel Research Berkeley, he was a co-founder of Cohera Corporation (now part of PeopleSoft), where he served as Chief Scientist from 1998-2001. Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source database systems including IBM's DB2 and Informix, PeopleSoft's Catalog Management, and the open-source PostgreSQL system.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, a master’s degree from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree from Harvard. He spent a pre-doctoral internship at IBM Almaden Research Center, and a post-doctoral internship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Date: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 1:30pm - 3:00pm PST

Location: SAP Labs, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto - Southern Cross Room

Raising CollectiveIQ?

The theme of the Future Salon this Friday is Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution[Details]. We are always trying to push the boundaries. This time we are giving you the opportunity to  comment, post questions, tips, tricks and links relevant to Doug's presentation ahead of time.

Raising the CollectiveIQ?

The following link leads you to the questionnaire: http://feedback.sap.com/efs/vote?campaign=2f3b0ee67fe33a81c9d7c16d6b4b7d5e&org=4

There are some general questions and then all the slides that he will use on Friday.

Please post feedback to the slides and use the post-it like functionality too (drag the icons from the top of the screen to the area where you want to comment) for praise, hints or links to specific areas within the slide.

Do it right away, we will send Doug a snapshot of the feedback on Thursday evening. Sorry for the short notice. We are really curious about the results. See you on Friday.

P.S. Lots of RSVPs already. Still I will keep the Southern Cross room for better interaction of audience and speaker. I'd rather be standing/sitting on the floor than loosing some interaction.

Heart is Nodal Point for Body Mind & Emotions

The heart is a primary generator of rhythmic patterns in the human body, and possesses a far more extensive communication system with the brain than do other major organs. In addition, the heart plays a particularly important role in the generation of emotion. With every beat, the heart transmits complex patterns of neurological, hormonal, pressure, and electromagnetic information to the brain and throughout the body. As a critical nodal point in many interacting systems--physiological, cognitive and emotional--the heart is uniquely positioned as a powerful entry point into the communication network that connects body, mind, emotions and spirit. [more via Quote-a-Day]

Geek out this weekend

The weekend is shaping up to be geeky busy:

Thursday:  Planetwork Monthly Networking Meeting is Thursday,
November 18 6-10 pm, at the McBean Theater in the Exploriorium in San Francisco. It's a really nice setting with lots of good interactions.

Friday 19th 6-9pm: Future Salon with Doug Engelbart Theme: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution. I know I am biased, but you shouldn't miss that one if you want to get the big picture from someone who has worked on the big picture all his life. (SAP Labs,Building D; Room Southern Cross; 3410 Hillview Avenue; Palo Alto, CA 94304

Finally Sunday: Our Cybersalon Friends in Berkeley are haveing one about Open Source Software with really interesting participants. Details further down.

Swing by, geek out, see you there.

(Disclaimer: Not sure if I will make it to all three events)

BERKELEY CYBERSALON, 6-8 p.m., Sunday, November 21, 6 - 8 PM. The
Hillside Club, 2280 Cedar (at Spruce), Berkeley. $10 donation at the
door for light refreshments.


Open Source Software

Open source software provides the foundation for the Internet, and
approaches to managing large-scale, distributed open source projects
are now being applied to an enormous number of software projects, and
even to other issues, such as publishing.

On Sunday, November 21, we'll
be discussing open source development as a process, open source values,
and why some open source efforts have been so long lasting with some of
the people who have led the large-scale development efforts, including:

Eric Allman, the author of the Sendmail program. In addition to writing
sendmail, he also authored syslog, tse, the troff -me macros, and trek. Allman is a former member of the Board of Directors of USENIX and currently serves as the CTO of Sendmail, Inc. Allman holds an MS degree
in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Brian Behlendorf, co-founder and CTO of CollabNet, started in 1999. Prior to that he was CTO at Organic Online, as well as the founding engineer at Wired Magazine and Hotwired. He was also a founder of the
Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation, where he serves as board member and previously as president.

Kirk McKusick. Marshall Kirk McKusick was responsible for the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD, has written numerous
articles and books, has contributed to textbooks, developed the Soft Updates feature used in BSD filesystems, and teaches technical classes on BSD internals and the history of Unix. McKusick is a past president of the Usenix Association and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from
U.C. Berkeley.

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB (invited). Mårten Mickos brings a strong track record of leadership in global high-tech companies to MySQL AB. Prior to joining MySQL in 2001, Marten was CEO at MatchON Sports, which he grew to become the twenty-fourth "hottest e-business" in Europe
within nine months of its inception. Marten was also previously the CEO at Intellitel Communications, where he was instrumental in transitioning the company from a development lab to a commercial
software vendor.


Doors open at 6:00 and a $10 donation is requested for light refreshments. The panel discussion starts at 7:00 p.m.; thoughtful
audience participation is encouraged.

Directions:
The Hillside Club is an easy walk from the Downtown Berkeley BART: walk north on Shattuck, and then east on Cedar St. If you’re driving from Oakland or the Bay Bridge, get off at the University Ave. exit in Berkeley and make a quick RIGHT under the freeway and onto the frontage
road; turn RIGHT at the 4RENT sign, which is Cedar Street, and drive up
2 miles past Shattuck. Park. If driving from the Richmond Bridge on Highway 80, get off at Gilman St., exit east, turn RIGHT on San Pablo for a few blocks; and LEFT on Cedar, up 1.5 miles past Shattuck, and
park.

Interactive TV finally at an Amazon near you

The years old marketiers dream of interactive TV, where you can buy anything that is shown in the moving pictures right there is finally coming through at Amazon Television.

Lame-o story packed in a short film with Minnie Driver as the star to give it the air of sophistication. At the end of it you can buy the things you saw right there at Amazon. Great marketing idea, soso execution (BMW Films did a better job, probably better budget too). Still it will be a sure success and make Jeff Bezos more to shoot it into space, for the greater good of all of us I am sure.

Jaron the Musician & Co

As I read to you at the AC2004 Jaron's Wikipedia entry starts with Jaron Lanier is an artist, musician, ...

Last Sunday you got a glimps of his brilliant mind. Come out this Sunday 14th 6pm to the Wheeler Auditorium in Berkely for an earfull of his muscianship. He will be playing with a couple of other excellent musicians.

The evening is called:
The bird of fairy tale.
Classical Persian Composition Meets Innovative Avant-garde Soundscapes Music

It is worth going for alone to hear the different instruments that I have never known existed.

I love music and musical instruments yet besides of indian drums and soprano sax I have never heared (of) any of the intruments he is listing further down. It will be a treat just to hear these.

Here some more notes from Jaron's email:

"The Bird of Fairy Tale"

(Jaron's first interpretive note: This show is a
collaboration with musicians from Iran, so the
language used throughout is "Iranglish.")

BERKELEY, California- The Iranian Student
Alliance in America at UC Berkeley, invite you to
join them for a night of exquisite live world
music, "The Bird of Fairy Tale", at the Wheeler
Auditorium, UC Berkeley campus, on November 14,
2004 at 6:00 p.m.

Following a series of hugely successful
performances these incredible musicians have
returned to Berkeley for a follow-up performance
where Classical Persian composition meets jazz,
blues, and world music within a ground-breaking
context.

WHAT: "The Bird of Fairy Tale", a World Music concert

WHERE: Wheeler Auditorium, at UC Berkeley campus, Berkeley, CA 94729Š

WHEN: Sunday, November 14, 2004, at 6:00 p.m.

FOR MORE INFO: (408) 224-8540 or visit:
<http://www.artnvision.com>http://www.artnvision.com

ONLINE TICKET SALES:
<http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/622>http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/622

FEATURING:

Alan Kushan - Santur (Persian Dulcimer)
<http://www.alankushan.com>www.alankushan.com

(Jaron's interpretive note: Alan is the living
master of this instrument, can play faster than
anyone on anything- like a pitched version of
Zakir, and makes his own instruments, which are
weird large extensions of the usual santoor.)

Mark Deutsch - Bazantar
<http://www.bazantar.com>www.bazantar.com

(Jaron's interpretive note: The Bazantar is
Mark's design; a cross between a standup double
bass and a sitar, with sympathetic strings and
buzzing bridges.  Amazing thing.)

Jaron Lanier - World Instruments
<http://www.jaronlanier.com>http://www.jaronlanier.com

(This time I'll play duduk, super rare bass
duduk, contrabassoon, zheng, khaen, tabor pipes,
seljeflote, soprano sax, and even more.)

Shirzad Sharif - Tonbak (Persian Drums)
<http://www.sommamusic.com>http://www.sommamusic.com.

Michael Zerang - Percussion
<http://www.geocities.com/%7Emzerang/>www.geocities.com/~mzerang/

Kousic Sen - Tabla

Nahid Ziaee - Persian Vocals

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:

Michael Lewis - Tabla (Indian Drums)

Future Salon with Doug Engelbart: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

Doug Engelbart was the most inspiriring speaker at the AC2004 conference. He is a true visionary and a real role model.

When he was young he set the principle for his life:

Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged:

As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

50 years later this goal is still driving him. Makes me think: Ahm, what was that again that is driving my life? 

He compares us (the world) to a bus with little compartments (different countries). The bus is traveling over a bumpy road it is dark and the headlights are not working very good so the collective visibility into the future is not very good. From the compartments people are trying to steer the little bus. The problem is, that the bus is going at an ever faster pace (Accelerating Change). How he is asking can we collectively bring this bus back under control. (By the way he is looking for a cartoonist to illustrate that vision. Get in contact with the Bootstrap Institute if you want to do such a project.)

What we need is to augment our own collective capabilities. We need to develop a CollectiveIQ as he calls it a CODIAC system - Concurring Developing, Integrating and Applying Knowledge. A dynamic knowledge repository.   

What fascinated me in his speech was how often he said "and then I saw" or "I had a vision and all in a sudden it became clear to me".

By looking at the world from his goal's perspective he was able continuously see possibilities that all others overlooked.

Once asked: "If it doesn't fill him with pride, that his invention the mouse is on every desktop?" He answered something like: "Not if I think of where we could be."

He was over his time already and when he asked "How much more time do I have?" Without a beat someone in the audience shouted: "Take the rest of the day."

Unfortunately that was not possible. But because I knew that would happen, I invited him to the Future Salon this month.

He has graciously accepted that offer. Therefore Next Future Salon on Friday the 19th of November with Doug Engelbart.

Theme: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution.

SAP Labs is proud to be the sponsor of this event.
We will have light refreshments starting at 6pm the presentation will be from 7pm until 9pm.

To make sure we have enough space please RSVP by sending an email to mona [dot] bhardwaj [at] sap [dot] com.

SAP Labs North America
Building D
Room Southern Cross
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 101)
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 280)

This one you shouldn't miss. As always free and open to the public.

AC2004: Day 2 Notes

Here are my Day 2 notes below for the Accelerating Change Conference 2004. My brain is totally overwhelmed by late morning (and sleep deprivation plays into it) and undoubtedly I probably don't do justice to the quality of the presentations.

Day 1 notes are here.

Day 2: Accelerating Change Conference 2004

Theme: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface

Keynote: Will Wright, Electronic Arts/Maxis, Sculpting Possibility Space

Intro: Mark Finnern, co-producer of conference, is saying that he has seen the future and it is Second Life. One day Second Life will allow you to 3D print what you created in Second Life; even something as large as a house.

Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims, co-founder of Maxis. Topic: Sculpting Possibility Space is the first keynote. [It's much too early in the morning.]

A lot of people consider games related to story. You can put story on one end and game-play on other end of spectrum. Story games like Myst have a branching structure topology.

In a story format, the topology is linear and the game developer creates narrative. In interactive format, the topology is dense and the player creates the narrative. Thus the appeal is empathy in story-games, and agency in games.

You could look at a game as a possibility space, a landscape. You want to have a wide set of options. Showing a 3D terrain graph and there are peaks and cliffs and the players want to move "uphill" in achieving the challenges.

Sims there are material, social 3D terrain and success is highest summits in this 3D landscape.

There is also issue of language - it's a different language than designers are using. If you come across a dog, you might parse out the following: Noun- dog - me Verb - bite - run or (more complex) Purpose - Companionship Safety

And advectives. Big or small tank.

Most games have primary metaphor or primary verb. And it's KILL.

They used a shopping catalog to give choices of nouns and verbs in the game. Shopping catalog gives description and gives impression of limited resources and trade offs.

Models. Communication is a process of constructing models. Science is a process to build models. Science is moving away from analytic models like calculus and more into simulation. This parallels game play trend.

These possibility spaces become scaffolding for the imagination of the player.

Dynamics. I think about the raw material we use to build these virtual worlds... How do these things interact over time (the behaviors)? What are the paradigms (network theory, cellular automata, system dynamics (Jay Forrester), cybernetics, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, adaptive landscape )?

Wright is showing a complex 3-D model of this "raw material" or game elements. The three dimensions are: Agents/Networks/Layers; Paradigms; Dynamics.

Dynamics could include: Propagation, grouping, allocation (gambling, shopping), mapping (matching), specialization

Interesting thing about games is the nested feedback loops. There are short cycles like 10 sec - each level has success and failure.

In SimCity (or Sims?), there is nested success/failure levels progressing from Basic Control -> Needs -> Job/Skills Economy -> Social-Friends -> (missed this last one). The game designers spend a lot of time on the failure scenarios. Find that players spend more time here and that they don't mind failing if they know why they failed and it's fleshed out in details and interesting.

The future is usually highly extrapolated. When skyscrapers just came out everyone envisioned Metropolis.

Cybernetics is about feedback structures - and by chaining these together you can have elaborate structures.

Cellular automata is the first that allowed for emergence.

SimCity is combination of  paradigms of system dynamics and cellular automata.

CAS have internal rules systems (neural networks, genetic algorithms fall into this area). An offshot of AI.

Actually what biologist calls fitness landscape influenced the idea of having 3D terrain maps to represent "possibility space."

Especially interested in scale-free social networks. People could define friends and enemies in Sims.

All of these are not reality - they are just trying to explain - they are models.

Relativity theory and quantum mechanics - but neither can explain the reality of a duck.

Other elements in the game toolkit: Disordered<-> Ordered, Local<-> Global, Cooperate <-> Compete

Just finished The Sims 2. In 1984, one person created SimCity and in 2004, took 130 people on the Sim2 project. If you extrapolate we'll need 2.5M people not too far in future.

Content teams are growing faster than rest of the project team. So how can we get players involved with creating content?

Maxis created 500 characters, 800 objects. And the fans created 16,530 characters and 10,600 objects.

In The Sims 2, players can also cast their characters into movies and shows and film them. This is something they call "derivative content."

A whole online community around games formed. Comprised of: Collectors, storytellers, webmasters, content artists, casual players, browsers. 

Metrics. We can formally measure everything you do. We can build profiles on what the player tends to do and compare to other players. We can see what they buy. We can look at relationships they develop. We can even see how they are traversing through the possibility space of the game.  We can do things with that data - perhaps introduce them to other players, what content they might want to use. You see this happening in TiVo (at a much slower feedback loop). The computer could see where player is going in the possibility space and dynamically alter the possibility space (for instance, if you just met a new girl, your ex girlfriend could show back up in the picture).

Second Life players are more advanced than our audience. Sims audience is 55% female and most of them have never played another computer game. Both are very open-ended. (Also Sims mostly offline game.) If you have more women on your developer team it's like falling off a log - you don't have to do focus groups on how to reach women's market.

We found for our players biggest barrier to online game is business model - many (and I don't) want to pay $15/month. I like the computer understand what I'm trying to play and it starts evolving around me. It knows I'm doing a scary movie or if it's a sit-com suggests appropriate music. Your version of game and mine end up different after a month.

We see our players as co-developers. We spend a lot of time with the people who run the websites, etc. We ask them at Sim University (a gathering/conference) about what they think of microtransactions. Experimenting with microtransactions for allowing users to sell their content. We don't have digital rights management; so you could change a few pixels. 

Question on if you could have avatars move between two worlds - i.e. Sims and Second Life. Not now but it's theoretically/technically possible with Sims 2 characters.

Cleaned up version blogged: http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/will_wright_kic.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content Debate became a Panel

Definite Panelists: Steve Salyer (IGE), Jamie Hale, Gaming Open Market, plus 2 more

[Didn't catch new additional panelist's names or companies. I'll indicate by [guy in pirate hat] and [black T].  Being a total non-gamer doesn't help. I think [guy in pirate hat] may be from a game company call Three Kings (or similar) and [black T] has developed a "very innovative game" according to moderator Cory Ondrejka, VP of Product Dev, at Linden Lab (Second Life) called something similiar to Puzzle Parts. But obviously according to Google I must have heard completely wrong.]

Q: How do you work around restrictive terms of services by game companies and outright bans?
[Gaming Open Market] It's interesting to see what is going on Asia where it's at. You see the market approaching 1:1 in Asia (in Korea there is $440 million in trading alone).

We took a look at eBay and decided it wasn't an efficient way of trading "currencies" [exchanging in-game currency to real-world currency] - you can't see depth and breadth of the market, rates, and other things that resembles a stock market. We provide an escrow service, so not actually doing the selling and buying.

Trade becomes a meta-game. We sent a note to game developers about our service and showing the value...but it's often not accepted.

Q: Do you think the agreements players agree to restrict their trading?

[didn't capture panelist]If the provider wants to stop this. We can design out eBay elements out of the game - but how fun is the game for adults - becomes too restrictive.

[guy in pirate hat] Some players feel that the game is stacked against them because people are using real-world currency to buy better chances of success. It's like going to bank and using your own money to buy up more Monopoly money while you're playing Monopoly. Only way to stop it is to not have any in-game currency.

Q: Does it ruin the game? Besides currency, what about utilizing social capital ("twinking") to bypass the game designer's intentions?

[IGE] People behave the same way in virtual worlds as they do in the real world. And that includes political structures, commerce, and taking time to improve the quality of their life.

There are four main interests to games:

• exploration/discovery
• commerce and crafting
• socialization
• competition/game-play

The most successful games use elements of all four. I've personally only used currency to purchase something only once - and it was to have a castle instead of a mansion. It gives me great pleasure to drive up to that castle.

[Gaming Open Market] As long as their are those needs - upgrading from cottage - there is going to be trading. In Asia, there are often a "small business" (group of players) camped around a dragon 24/7 because they are defending their business and its margins. If this blocks other players from normal game-play - you can't get to dragon because this is their "business" - the game designer needs to worry about those types of situations.

[guy in black T] If you took a long time to build up the resources to buy a castle in the game, there are always players that are upset that someone else whipped out a credit card to buy a castle. And they will complain to the game developer.

[pirate hat] Even cosmetic things like castle makes an impact on game-play. When you offer a flat-rate pricing to play a game, everyone expects the same level of play.

[IGE] 78% of Korean players that like the secondary market believe that the items created are the player's property. Of those, 17% thought it should belong to the avatars.

Q: User creation exists in all these games. They are creating fan sites, social guilds, making movies in Sims 2. Should these players be rewarded for these 'external' activities? (btw, Electronic Arts owns the rights to these Sims 2 "movies".)

[IGE] Players feel they emotionally "own" the game. (Gave example of a hacker taking over his password and then stealing everything from the castle while he was on a conference panel like this no less; he was fairly upset.)

Anyone that can make $40-50K by playing a game ought to have that right.

[pirate hat] Probably just better to have a market within the game. Can you EVER get to the level playing field of Monopoly?

[black T ] We do reward those community members (i.e. free monthly membership) that add value.

Q: What about when game developer offers an extra item with game throwing in an extra sword perhaps as sign-up incentive?

[pirate] I'm trying to create a fun game. If this is allowed [legally] and it probably is in Korea then you will see designers selling and bundling items as part of their business model.

[black T] If designers want to do this, they'll have to offer escrow and dispute resolution, etc. It's going back to the game developer's lap if the trade goes bad....so how do we incorporate the secondary market into the game?

[IGE] [On argument of it's unfair to other gamers] Even having an extra sword won't help you in a competitive environment. If you're not a good gamer, you'll still get killed.

My guildmates like to buy high-level accounts (they already have high-level accounts, but don't want spend weeks to go through the drudgery treadmill again enforced by game designer for a new avatar). And I bought the castle because I didn't want to kill that many rats. [Basically sounds like circumventing parts that aren't fun for them, but game design confines.]

I hear Mike Korns, Las Vegas Futurists Salon, ask if you could incorporate this trading into the game and instead of squelching it you could "tax" it. Seems that this is exactly what Cory at Second Life suggested yesterday in his keynote talk.

--------------------------------

Keynote: Doug Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute (and inventor of the computer mouse), Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

I moved out to Bay Area in 1948. He's telling us story of his engagement to his wife. He was full of excitement about building a family. And then had a life-changing epiphany at 25. It really hit me that I didn't have any goals in my career.

Let me design a professional goal that would help mankind. His lifetime goal emerged: "As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems."

Decided on a computer career and went to Berkeley for grad school.

I still believe this goal is relevant, we really need to get collectively smarter.

Consider a community's collective IQ as its relative capability for dealing with complex, urgent problems. (Includes: to understand them thoroughly as possible, unearth best candidate possibilities, etc.)

Collective IQ emerged as primary strategic focus. He uses acronym CODIAK - Concurring Developing, Integrating and Applying Knowledge. A dynamic knowledge repository.

"Capabilities" become a key, central consideration. Humans' capabilities depend upon their augmentation system.

Human System: paradigm, organization, procedures, customs, methods, language, attitudes. Tool Systems: media, portrayal, views, study, manipulation, retreive compute, communicate. Basic Human Capabilities - Sensory, Perceptual, Mental, Motor. This interface between these is much more significant than "HCI" (human-computer interface).

How does a society adapt to where the future is going? If we are farther and farther behind in our paradigms than our options for the future, then ....

This augmentation model for collective IQ is valid over huge scale: from Individual/Human -> Community of Practice ->  complete country -> the world. (There's a whole science around dimensional scaling.)

Knowledge repositories must be concurrent.

The best thing is to try to faciliate the co-evolution; out of that comes ideas of dynamic knowledge repositories. But it also comes to socio-political-business as well - all needs to be evolving. 

I was calling a concept I came up with the Open Hybrid System before I know about Open Source. The means to train and manipulate objects must be open. "Run up to the bathroom and my bottle of whatever next to the mirror" and a six-year-old understands that. Need that kind of flexibility in dealing with the objects in the computer. Thinking about a new way to read faster by parsing language and indicating different words, etc. with colors, etc.

Doug Engelbart will be speaking at next Friday's Future Salon as Mark Finnern anticipated this AC2004 talk wouldn't be enough time today.

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Keynote: Richard Marks, Manager, Special Projects, Sony Entertainment, Topic: You Are Player One

eyeToy has sold 4M units.

Interface is one of the limits on how people enjoy games. What would be the ultimate interface? Some people say realism. But really that's not the ultimate. The focus is on fun. Fun is #1. Then properties of: Intuitive, interactive, enabling (to do new things), and flexible.

He watched his younger son playing a driving game and he noticed he moved to the left four feet when he was turning and jumped up in the air over bumps. His older brother (or friend?) said that wasn't necessary to play. So he stopped doing it... but he doesn't have the same grin on his face.

Shows PlayStation 9 commercial. The PS9 commercial shows what people "THINK" is futuristic. [Ad plays to their expectations of "future".] It's perception of where people think future is. Includes: Blurring of reality and virtuosity. People think future is sensory enhancement. Most of the features described in the commercial around the interface.

Accelerating rate of adoption for the PlayStation (in million of units) is much higher than other consumer electonics, etc. [showing chart QUICKLY with against DVDs, PCs, etc.]

He works within PlayStation R&D for Sony Computer Entertainment. Our job really is to improve existing experience and enable new experiences. Most of that is through interface. We don't make games in our group at all - but we give the game developers tools to use for the creation of their games. We might prototype games.

Our researchers are also developers and they swap roles back and forth. They are expected to deliver libraries to the game developers. That is really different than other R&D groups.

Research Models:

• Push: [When no one is "asking" for it. Really this has been Sony's model for long time, no one asked for Walkman either.] No one asked for EyeToy - that's how revolutions happen - with push.
• Pull: What game developers are asking for.
• Stockpile: Everything else...

Games now, pretty constrained stuff. We want to provide more capabilities for the users in the future.

Voice Input: A lot of games are starting to use voice commands. Used in NFL GameDay, NCAA Gamebreaker, NBA Shootout. Far-microphone voice input in noisy environments. Speaker identification.

Video Interface:

• Video as input: joystick replacement (not focus to get rid of joystick), user does not see video it's just used by the computer. The user must get feedback on what's happening since they don't see the video.
• Enhanced Reality (or augmented reality). Like adding movie-like special effects, new entertainment genre

EyeToy. We made progress because we had limited resources such as a TV, and a camera. Shows a demo showing his son using a ball to interact with a CGI character dragon or with some butterflies by looking into a TV screen.

Design goals: Make it accessible and affordable for everyone; easy to use; and the camera needs to be small and unobtrusive. It could be multi-purpose. It's not just an interface but can be used for other things too (after all it is a camera, video input device).

EyeToy: From research to product. He worked with London game team for 3 months to learn about their world and for them to absorb R&D's ideas and thinking about the uses for EyeToy.

EyeToy: Easy to jump in and play, not too serious, very social, and has amazing demographics (weren't expecting grandparents to play).

Among features are motion detection, pattern tracking, simple compositing. Newer features: Freeform mouse-like input (i.e. Minority Report),  real-time face tracking.

Another demo: He says he likes myth and fantasy type games, like Harry Potter themes. He waves his hand over the "wand" (a ball). He casts spells (making circle, square, or triangle motions) to create rain effect, or fire surging out of the wand, etc.

Shows a "keypad" on the TV over to the side sort of like Minority Report. He "clicks" by squeezing a item in his hand and aligned over key in the keypad. In another game demo, he shows how can lean over to see around the corner of a building in a shoot-em-up situation and then quickly duck back behind the building by physically leaning.

A lot more possibilities with mobile systems soon. Mix a camera with a mobile platform. PSP + Camera. PSP is your window to an enhanced world.

New research. Using video with Z-buffer to mix video and graphics together. It's not just drawn over the TV screen, but looks like it is within the environment as well. First instance, the butterflies could be flying behind him as well. (There is no collision detection as yet, so the butterflies can fly through him.

Punching bag demo. Using real-time motion capture. Doesn't seem to matter that there is no force feedback. You can use audio to replace the effect of force feedback.

Basically EyeToy is a video tracking system for input device.

Interface is a key element of design.

• blend of technology and psychology (people don't want to wear things that much in the mass market)
• impacted by real-world considerations (absolutes matter; people want a full-size light saber)

[The future.] My 4-year-old walks up to the TV and waves his hand and he expects it to turn on. He's a little confused if it doesn't. He has high expectations. He probably expects in a year that he can talk to it. And soon all this will fit in his pocket.

Q on other applications, i.e. using it for Doug Engelbart's vision of collective IQ.
A: [Focused on entertainment.] But, we getting requests from hospitals that want to use this for physical therapy. We're not supporting other markets with the developer kits, but yes, these ideas can be applied in other scenarios.

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Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and now Clarium Capital, Virtual Money, Privacy, and Freedom

Strategy should be to allow trading and currency exchange in virtual world and tax it.

Economies: Based on value. Perhaps all the value exists in nature and wild animals. Or in large man-made objects (Marxist world). Or you can say you're productive because of amount of steel you produce. Things that are far more ephemeral could also have more value.

Intellectual property, financial products, ideas - all are more abstract levels.

Three models. That only things of value are physical, concrete. Fundamental building bits now are bits and not just atoms. A Von Neumann model of reality. There is an intermediate version - maybe bits, maybe stuff - but they are autonomous, separate spheres of reality. (1. Stuff, 2. bits, 3. both but separate, discrete worlds.)

A lot of modern philosophy in 20th century. John Locke - we have to move away from nature (opposite of Genesis when we had everything we needed [pre-Fall anyway]); a Hobbesian view.

Science. Descartes, Bacon were skeptics because the problems in the natural world seemed too complex. We could only be masters of our destiny by creating alternative worlds and models.

Historically, that was our reality. We lived in a hunter-gatherer society where everything was based on natural world.

As an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, there is an intellectual question that it does make sense to enable this alternative virtual world. Paper currency is the first example of this. Value doesn't just exist in stuff but there is also value in creating relationships between people whether that is to trade or communicate.

You could look at eBay as not creating any value at all if you look at the economy as just making 'stuff'. It's a zero-sum in that items are just moved around but nothing new is created, some argue. Some would say that it's not creating value then.

From a Liberterian freedom point of view, it is harder for larger political entities to control things in virtual world. If you have server in Bahrain and another in Iceland it's not possible to stop that in practicality. What's true of Napster's decentralization, is true for intellectual property and many other things. More and more of world's wealth exists in offshore havens and jurisdictions [rattles off LONG list of these].

Power is shifting completely from anything that is controlled in a [physically] geographical way.

Real world consisting of nation-states and objects blinds us to what's going on right now in the virtual world. In practice, we haven't completely decoupled.

I built a company [PayPal] around virtual space.

In many ways, we are living in a world that's effectively decoupled. You can't have a worker's revolution that takes over a virtual bank.

Dawkins' view is that humans are like industrial machines and you model them like machines. But post-Dawkins means humans are more like computers.

Q on aren't those offshore havens and other bank accounts still somewhere rely on physical. A: It's not about traceability. It makes difference if your money is held in a place where privacy is upmost and one where it doesn't.

Q on Center for Autonomous Government (Sealand).

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Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality, Google, Topic: Web Search as a Force for Good

The past. References a Woody Allen movie where a guy is pontificating about Marshall McLuhan's theories. Woody grabs Marshall McLuhan live and McLuhan says that "You know nothing about my theory." Woody turns to audience and says "Wouldn't it be great if real life was like that?" (Well now it is closer to that...not McLuhan himself but at least his work.)

So far. Story about kidnappers who captured a journalist and he said he was journalist...they released him because they Googled his name and found he really was a journalist.

Forming a marketplace for information. There is also a marketplace for goods - people can share and transact more quickly. And some of it not so good.

One of the services we've launched is AdSense. If you have a content site you can help pay for it to serve up AdSense ads that are relevant to the content of the site.

One guy was able to quit job because of the ads on his hobby site. Another story of full-time surfer that bought a near-defunct site and AdSense ads make its sustainable so he surfs.

Blogger is another way more information is being made available.

Search locally. With SMS messaging interface. Continuing trend towards more localizing, contextualizing within mobile scenarios.

Keyhole - recent acquisition - has access to satellite images and a way of integrating that information. [VERY cool.] You can fly in zoom-in fashion right into local maps and see local information such as restaurants.

Further. Searching for people. LoveGetties are popular in Japan - little handheld devices - you program your interests and preferences. If someone is a good match for you, then your LoveGetty starts beeping when you past them in the street.

One "bad" vision of future is that advertising is everywhere, non-targetted (billboards everywhere), non-contextualized. Already this is not happening.

"In the future search engines should be as useful as HAL in 2001 - but hopefully they won't kill people." - Sergey Brin. But really we've gone past that as it's not centralized as HAL was and the control is in the user's computer.

Learning from Data. Spelling corrections for popular terms, like Britney Spears [I probably misspelled]. It doesn't start from a dictionary. It starts from broader range than the dictionary. We also have proper names etc. not in the dictionary and we also have the context of the word within content.

Banko & Brill, 2001, Effect of Training Corpus Size, Microsoft Research. You take a word like bank - does it mean river bank or the money bank? About 80% accuracy. The research compares Bayesian filter, neural net, decision tree, and many other methods. In the end, it turns out the algorithm didn't matter so much as long as there is a great volume of data thrown at any particular algorithm. It's better to throw more data at the problem.

Personalization. References labs.google.com demo. Google personalized for you - typically Jaguar cars come up first in the search results for "jaguar". But since I have a more technical focus in my profile, the Mac software Jaguar comes up above the car in "my" results.

Semantic understanding. You can break the whole web into sentences. Then, run a part-of-speech algorithm looking for specific patterns and then using that to categorize. For instance, in sentence: "Software companies including Oracle, Microsoft, ...." The word 'including' signals that "software companies" is a category and "Oracle", "Microsoft" are its members.

Machine Translation. Shows examples of 'harder' language translations such as Arabic and Chinese. Opens up more information (even if not perfect, fluent translation) that's not originally in your language.

Q: Why did Google succeed over Yahoo..For years I'd been using Yahoo; now everyone uses Google.

A: Yahoo started and focused with being a directory. So they hired people to categorize. The growth of Web started to outpace this approach; they saw the search engine as secondary. So they subcontracted the search engine to third parties. Only more recently have they seen that it is more strategic.

Q: How about open source?

A: There are already open source engines available. So far I think we have the edge especially in ranking results (they put more effort in crawling, for instance).

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Social Software Panel

Panelist: Lada Adamic, HP Labs, Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace

Tracking Blogs and the "Epidemiology" of Memes

BlogDex is an early example of indexing blogs. Lets you see which blogs and when linked to a site. They are tracking popularity over time. Microscale Dynamics - tracking 'microbe' epidemics - first it shows up on a blog and then another blogger references and something like audit trail of "oh, I heard about this on this blog."  They try to infer if references aren't explicitly there (do they link to same blogs, do they often mention the same things).

Visualization: Zoomgraph tool.

iRank algorithm. Draw a weighted edge for all pairs of blogs that cite the same URL. Higher weight for mentions closer together.

Wired article on their research "Warning: Blogs can be infectious" turns to Slashdot's "Bloggers Plagiarism Scientically Proven." And finally somewhere along the way it devolves to 'blogs kills kittens'....Now, they are thinking they should study how these things [memes] morph.

Findings show: Most well-known blogs aren't the ones that find information first. 

Information Dynamics Lab at HP: hpl.hp.com/research/idl

Panelist: Peter Kaminski,  SocialText CTO, Enterprising Social Software: Wikis and Weblogs

[He's giving his presentation on something that looks suspiciously like a Wiki rather than strickly Powerpoint. Someone in audience asks about it.] Technical Notes on Slides: Spork - Spork Stands for Slide Presentation (Only really Kwiki). Spork is an HTML slideshow generator.

How can we make getting work done more fun? Augment a group's ability to work together? Accelerate change?

Socialtext is based on a Kwiki core and as a company uses a hybrid open source/proprietary model. The first deployments Jan 2002.

Use cases include: How can 10 people work on the same document? How can I best communicate with the whole team (and send out constant occupational spam)?

How can a team learn from its mistakes? (i.e. How can a team log exceptions so other people can manage next time? Where do we document work-arounds? How can we change process in real-time?)

Wiki was intended to be content-centric instead of author-centric (blogs are more author-centric).

Wiki is like a shared notebook. An information space, network-based/global access. Ward Cunningham (inventor of wikis) prefers to use  "CamelCase" (short noun phrases like ShortNounPhrases) and argues they make the best structure.

SocialText has many features not available in free Wikis. SocialText Wikis are private by default. Easy setup of multiple workspaces with different memberships. Directory services integration (with access control). Instead of CamelCase they went with free links (just use brackets) - but the downside is that it doesn't help with name space collision.

Socialtext still need to get to WYSIWIG interface. We have added information panels as most don't know how to navigate this freeform structure. Extras: Email in/out, RSS out.

Panelist: Zack Rosen, CivicSpace Labs, CivicSpace

People are listening to people like Bill O'Reilly every day (1 million people a night). DailyKos.com from Marco Zuniga ($100,000 a year in ads) and 350,000 hits a day. He's [DailyKos.com] earned this authority and he exerts it. It isn't just journalistic authority but he's also raising money (about $600,000 for DNC).

Blogs Have Broken News - examples: Fake memo on CBS (exposed on FreeRepublic.com), Trent Lott (ignored by news media), John Stewart (skewers the host on Crossfire) and news media following Crossfire just portrayed Stewart as a scary, scary guy. Bloggers contributed between 1-5 million downloads of the program (perhaps they had 800,000 viewers that evening).

[Zack was involved with the Dean Campaign and created "DeanSpace" - kind of the origin for CivicSpace].

Dean Campaign - 500,000 volunteers self-organizing in every state. Web real estate spread out over hundreds of mostly unofficial websites. All the good ideas like Meetup came from the bottom up, not the campaign  HQ.

Where is this going? See South Korea. South Korea has 4X the penetration of broadband in U.S. The have 2 of the most 5 trafficked websites on the entire internet. Most of the content at OhMyNews is from citizen media - and it is the biggest Internet news source in South Korea. Kuro5hin on crack. Best stories are opposing viewpoints side by side. Their candidate got elected. Then later got impeached by the Congress, then the readers and creators of OhMyNews won back the congress seats and put him back in office.

Republicans have a command and control core and they have tapped very strong existing networks.

Democrats have no core. And their networks are newer.

The blogosphere is Reed's Law at work. The blogosphere is granulated, diffuse, but interconnected. It's a network of ideas.

The progressive movement is granulated and diffuse. It is broken.

CivicSpace helps the network of networks coordinate and collaborate together.

Q: on echo chamber versus diversity of view especially shown by references that Zack cites for origin of breaking news

Zack says tried the best he could to find origins; willing to update [but still doesn't answer question]. Lada Adamic says that she noticed that pro-life sites a few years back were more interlinked than pro-choice sites.

Q: Do wikis require a particular corporate culture and/or change corporate culture?

A: Yes, but it's probably all predicted based on the 'champion' that brings wikis in.

---------------------------

DEBATE: Jaron Lanier, VPL Research vs. Will Wright (Maxis/EA) Finding Humanity in the Interface: Capacity Atrophy or Augmentation?

[Came in late...apparently in discussion around state of education and if technology helps or hinders.] [Doesn't appear that they actually disagree all that much. I'm really starting to totally fade...notes are a bit sketchy.]

??: Teachers aren't knowlegeable about computers and technology; but that will change with kids that grew up with computers become teachers.

Jaron: One problem is the monoculture (i.e. Microsoft).

Will: [Speaking of Maxis titles...] Standardization has made it easier in the PC side.

Jaron: There are ways to have open standards without monoculture.

Q: What can you do to slip in technology without people knowing it?

Jaron: I worked on a project that wasn't as graphically as good as Second Life but had some of those qualities and it was intended to help girls be exposed and gain more interest in computers. Textbook publishers got freaked out. Our success caused a reaction so that education system was pressured to only use their materials in California.

[Back to the software] You can become the dinosaur, the molecule, or whatever you are learning.

Will: Seven-year-olds know exactly what they want and they tell their parents, whom don't even know much about what it is. We sell much more directly than through schools. [Basically the kids know more about the computing tools than teachers.] Play and learning has become disconnected, but they go hand-in-hand.

Q: On the business of virtual worlds - aren't they essentially "company towns"?

Will: When you open a piece of software you implicitly agree to its terms. As far as I.P. that's created...It's not so different in that people own the stuff they create on Photoshop.

Jaron: The thing that bugs me is that it isn't as creative and imaginative as you would think. For instance, all the female characters are all cliche vixen. The narrowness of archetype is sad.

Will: The government in real-world still decides on zoning, and otherwise dictates its uses.

Q: What new things will be created? What skillsets are losing in virtual words?

Will: In modern world there is no separation between subjects. We teach outdated information even in math courses (might have been useful when we had pen and paper, but not computers available). Kids are being raised in information-rich universe - equivalent of the Library of Congress at everyone's desktop. Most of the battle is in the motivation side.

Jaron: In a manmade world it's not as complex as nature and infinite subtleity of reality. To play sports you have to do that.

Will: The computer has been an extension of our perceptual senses and our imagination.

Jaron: You have library of congress but you are once removed. You aren't at The Alamo. There was an argument about whether microscope were needed in a school lab anymore - you can get all the stuff on the Internet.

Will: Yeah, something about seeing it myself in telescope is different and I know look at Hobble photographs on the Internet. But I still get a thrill from seeing it in the telescope.
Jaron: [Along the lines of and you get a better understanding of HOW the Hobble photographs are gathered by doing it yourself.]

Q: [missed question, really tired, but appears to be about 'relationships' in virtual worlds]

Jaron: Why aren't there more women at these things? Ted Williams in another panel another conference said something before on this. The more time you spend with bits the more you lose touch with reality. Live music is thriving today - the real experience. People long for real contact with real people.

Will: There are a lot of people that came into The Sims that were shy. And they developed more social skills as they were accepted for who they were and they took those skills to real life.

Q: Give us a meme to change education?

Jaron: Dark thing to say but there is research that shows there is a strong correlation that the more uniform a race is the more they care about education. [Something to do with "they are like me".] I really think all of Richard Dawkin's metaphors suck. The U.S. is veering more towards a white majority for the first time. The prioritizaiton of education and stratification of it is going to create a uniform education. There is all of this talk of the "elites" and thus a huge distrust therefore of educated people. We scare them, 'heartlanders', when we talk about things like singularity. (Doesn't buy into singularity himself....long spiel why) What was talked about in "Future Shock" is coming true - people are worried about the future.

Q: What about those that play these games for 60 hours +?
Will: Addiction can happen with anything. In 1700s, it happened with books. People were surprised that they'd come into a room and the person didn't notice their presence - they were so absorbed in reading their book. I think there needs to be more of a social solution - others will nudge, Hey why are you online all the time?

Jaron: My feeling is that I want to turn the question around. I feel the best thing for any kid to achieve high-performance is that they be have a positive obsession about something. Is the thing you're doing productive? (There are finite and infinite games.) If it's an open system where you are growing, then maybe that won't be called addiction.

Q: But many of these kids and adults are unskilled when it comes to socialization, arts, culture, etc.?

Will: That's one of the reasons I went into the game industry. One of the best people we're hiring are those that have a balanced curriculum -  arts and technology. [Comment on that those that were primarily art students seem to strike balance better than tech students.]

Jaron: This has to do with monoculture topic again. The less diversity there is culturally and educationally then...[problem with microphone]. One of the problems in arts to the idea of a canon and it's kind of oppressive too. I think there is a lot of energy around creativity. The mainstream of it is kind of dull right now.

--------------

John Smart, President of Institute of the Study of Accelerating Change (i.e. conference organizers), Closing

Lots of thanks. [Just jotting down what's new to me.]

Accelaware: Thriving in a world of accelerating change

Now a LinkedIn community: (accelerating change)

AC2004: Day 1 Notes

Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research told us this weekend at his session on the My Life Bits project that categorizing and tagging all the data in his life would  take another lifetime, so that's why he's hired an assistant.

I decided I didn't have another lifetime (or even an assistant) to clean up all the notes from this weekend's intense Accelerating Change Conference 2004. And I'm guessing you'll value immediacy over quality editing.

Realizing most of us can quickly skim even long passages, I decided to share my notes "as is" (I've clearly delinated each new speaker) with you in their entirety. Divided into Day 1 and Day 2 as that is how I took the notes.

This will allow me to also blog on what I thought the highlights and key takeaways were in my view while I still have some energy.

If you find something that strikes your interest as you peruse the notes, then go to IT Conversations to hear the session in its entirety or consider buying a DVD (all the DVDs were available at the show, so it's just a short matter of time for the order form to go online).

And there's never any replacement for being there in person (virtually doesn't cut it), so jot down next year's dates, October 28-30, 2005 at Stanford University (more info) and I'll see you there.

Day 1 notes follow. (Day 2 coming after I grab some lunch.)

DAY 1. Accelerating Change Conference 2005

Theme: Physical Space, Virtual Space and Interface

John Smart, President, ISAC - Introduction/Opening

Life is too short not to pursue our passion, are the very first words from John Smart, president of the ISAC,  whom is kicking off the conference. He quotes Buckminster Fuller: You can't get an unbiased education, so the next best thing is a multi-biased education. [Great quote!] Let's look at issues from several angles to sift the truth. [I really enjoy the 'debate' format of several sessions.]

The goal of the Accelerating Change conference is to be the foremost futurist conference. And ACC sees technology as a lever, as Archimedes would say, for positive change.

John is encouraging us not to spend all our time (if you're not a blogger that is ;-)) in sessions alone. Just like in a university, half of your education comes not from the program itself but from your peers. All the amazing people in the audience have self-selected to be here - meet them.

How can change be positive? There's a lot of talk about offshoring especially to India and China. (And actually ISAC, a non-profit, outsources their own I.T. needs to India.) But the Chinese themselves have lost 10 million jobs to factory automation. Innovation is always disruptive - but is there a way to keep it creative as Joseph Schumpeter would say instead of destructive.

There is only so much this conference can cover in 2 1/2 days. There are many areas of innovation. For example...

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and now of the Omidyar Foundation, wants to innovate around the concept of microfinancing initiated by Grameen Bank and develop microcredit securities (via mortgage-backed securities) to spur local community economic development.

New Balance, the shoe company, does all their manufacturing in U.S. employing a lot of innovative automation and processes. Their market share went from 2% to 10% within last year.

Cleaned up version blogged: http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/accelerating_ch_3.html

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Keynote speaker: Helen Greiner, iRobot
(Topic originally: Mobile Robots - Saving Time, Money, and Lives) but changed to: Business Mechanisms to Accelerate Change

You may have heard of their most popular product, Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner. They've sold a million units. [BTW, it's rare to see the first keynote speaker at a technology conference as a woman.] Her background is in mechanical engineering and computer science background from MIT.

I'm going to talk about business mechanisms to accelerate change. First ten years we didn't even talk to venture capitalists - we were busy inventing the technology.

Robotics is not like a lot of other industries in terms of capital available and technical drivers. Our uber-mission at iRobot is "freedom from tedious and dangerous jobs."

We are creating a new industry in commercial robotics. We believe it's a technology trend for the next ten years - not just for vacuums. From tractors to construction equipment to automobiles. Our vision in domestic arena is to make household chores history. Dusting, window washing, bathroom cleaning. We've been building robots as a company since 1990 with mixed results - some didn't have a good business model. It takes a lot of experimentation and innovation. We need to take advantage of other innovation not just that in our company.

Mechanisms to Accelerate Change that iRobot has employed include:

Capital. It's very difficult to raise capital in robotics. 

Government sponsored research. So we also looked at other ways to raise money. We worked with DARPA to build robots to help Marines avoid going into dangerous situations. For instance, PackBots are used in cave clearing. They don't know what's in there - perhaps a land mine or weapon caches. They are using robots to see what's there first and then go in.

Tech transfer from university research. We partner with universities on research. We doing work on swarm intelligence - for instance, a swarm of 120 robots all working together and autonomously cooperating. In one case, the robots as a group are told to find specific orange items and eventually through biologically-inspired - i.e. ant colony pheronomes - algorithms when one finds the orange object they all do. Now imagine instead of a benign orange object that they are told to locate a chemical spill or a land mine.

Tech transfer from research labs.  A naval lab has used their robots in research on simultaneous localization and mapping.

Taking advantage of exploding exponentials. How can the robot be more intelligent and efficient through advances in other technology?

Intel, AMD, Freescale computer chips are innovating quickly. A lot of changes in: personal storage, price of gene manipulation, wireless bandwidth and range, to the home "wired" bandwidth, backbone bandwidth, cameras in the environment, speech vocabulary recognition, power supplies, etc.

OEMs in the field.

Strategic relationships. An example is in 1998 we started working in the toy industry. We were proud to have prototypes in the $200 range. That is until we started to talk to toy industry folks and they thought we were insane. We learned from our toy industry partners to achieve a price point closer to $20.

We also partnered with John Deere for applications in industrial equipment and vehicles. You can learn a lot from folks in different industries with different core competencies. [The book, The Medici Effect states that innovation comes at the "Intersection" - i.e. where two or more different fields meet - so this sounds like a great strategy.]

New applications. We didn't start out as a vacuum cleaner company or a defense company, but as a robotic company. For instance, there are shifts in demographics toward an older population but there are not enough care-giving to go around. Can robots help people be more independent? Also telemedicine.

Cleaned up version blogged: http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/business_mechan_3.html

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Keynote Speaker: Shai Agassi, SAP, Achieving Enterprise Agility

Shai Agassi, executive board member at SAP - one of the largest software companies in the world - is the next keynote speaker. He's responsible for SAP's overall technology strategy. His topic is Achieving Enterprise Agility.

I am considered the futurist in our company. Our company is very sales-driven so we're making futurist predictions when they talk about the next quarter - but I myself look out five years.

Nicholas Carr asks in his book, Does I.T. Matter? He equates computer industry to train industry AFTER all the train tracks have been laid. But the computer industry is different. Most of I.T. investment happened in the last 20 years reduces process execution time. We're at 200 millisecond transactions. So the question is valid, why would you invest to go from 200 millisecond to 20 millisecond.

The next challenge is "time to change."

However, products life cycles haven't moved as fast. And even change management - the corporate inertia - those events such as a merger takes 18 months in a corporation. A corporate venture can take 18 months to reflect in the business.

We look at systems that define core and context. (You have to read two books by Geoffrey Moore to work in the Valley.)

                                                CORE                               CONTEXT

                                                focus: differentiation          focus: productivity

Mission critical advantage           Innovation                       Standardization

Enabling activities                      Invention                         Commoditization

Source: Geoffrey Moore's book, Living at the Fault Line.

Core process is to fly the plane. We bring most of our airplanes back down to earth is not a differentiator.

It's a circle - which start at Invention -> Innovation -> Standardization -> Commoditization

we're starting to see emergence of something we call composition. There is a company in Europe that looks at the supply chain and asks every Monday what's cheap? A bit like using Google to type in what's in your fridge and getting a recipe back. And then they offer that for sale.

new I.T. capabilities required for this evolution

applistructure - the merging of applications and infrastructure

The four players microsoft, oracle, IBM and us. Our stuff makes your company run but doesn't really differentiate it. IBM says 'we'll run the stuff that's not critical to your business and we'll do it on demand". With Oracle we'll differentiate through your database - but it's one-off.

Microsoft is often where most people start with but it's arguable whether it scales.

Microsoft in the invention quadrant, oracle in innovation, ibm in commoditization, and SAP in the standardization quadrant.

There's about 10,000 objects are like the language or lingua franca of business - it's the core stuff that's in most of the companies in the world. Now at the layer above the composition platfrom (NetWeaver) will be about 10,000 companies. Composite applications are built from this platform.

SAP is in a remote place. If software wasn't dominant industry because of SAP

three tiers - database, application and client. Oracle standardized the database and Microsoft the client. In the middle there were many many applications - JD Edwards, SAP, etc. Composite solutions are what will be bought and sold. You don't buy the parts for a car, you buy a car. IT will take 5-8 years.

Linux is attacking at the desktop. And database engines will get attacked by companies like mySQL.

Longer Term Trends

Wired                                     Tired                       Retired

services platform                      database                 file system

event centricity                       transaction               batch

devices                    clerks                                     not knowing

(including, RFID enabled objects)

exception handlers                                MRP             planners

mobility                                             desktop             terminal                      (desktop become secondary)

modeling                                           offshoring            coding                     

(cheaper people not enough; we're moving away from code to visual models of process flows that can be managed by business people; as big a shift of what happened in telco industry when they were worried about running out of switchboard operators; code is hard to maintain - more system design oriented people than coders - just changes the skills not necessarily number of people; yes, less coders. You need to be close to the people to write these models.)

domain specific language                       java                     cobol

autonomous systems                           system integration      IT management

(system monitors its own health and its own usage)

grids                                                server farm                mainframe

office                                               office                        office

Cleaned up version blogged (much better tables!): http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/enterprise_agil.html

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David Brin, Author-Physicist, Evaluating Horizons: What Limits Our Ability to Cope With Accelerating Change?

Joking about transition from astronomer/physicist to becoming a sci-fi author to becoming a pundit for openness. There are two ways to look at the future and the past. Almost every civilization the golden age of the past is romanticized - they knew more, they fell from state of grace perhaps from hubris trying to appropriate the god's power.

Difference between these worldviews are profound and to a large extent mutually incompatible. The term: Eternal human verities. True, there are some fundamental truths. Post-modernism's everything is an opinion is just as dopey as pre-set stage for someone's acid trip 2000 years ago. Buddha and Jesus said we fool ourselves. This is the allegory of the cave by Plato. Therefore, you cannot know for sure what THIS is. So give up. Seek real truth through incantations of faith, reason, meditation.

Mathematicians actually believe you can prove something. Galileo said what he wants to see interferes with what he sees. But through repetitive falsifiable experimentation and the gift of criticism...and criticism is repressed by leaders. It's a threat to their personal power. The more you repress criticism of your mistakes the more trouble you're in.

Galileo said, you are right. I don't know exactly what THIS is. My preconceptions, etc. will get in the way. With the help of criticism I can find out what it is not. [Neti] If you're not making falsiable statements - it's not science.

I have been reading Theodore Sturgeon "More Than Human" soon to be out. Do you believe that caloric restriction will double our lives as it does for lab rats? We're already the Methuselahs of the world. We already living as long as the long-lived mice.

Look forward versus look backward worldviews. I'm a romantic. Late at night, I'm Shelley screaming at God. It's great stuff but it belongs nowhere near public policy.

We carry baggage from the past - huge amounts of baggage. Why can we look forward to a Golden Age?

Before the fall from Eden what was asked of us. Before sin. There is one moment that God asks us a favor: To name all the beasts. Can you think of a better allegory for science?

The will to believe despite evidence is the romantic one. We need to talk to people - not stymize them. We only fire their ire if we don't have a dialogue. If you look at distribution of votes within Ohio, within Florida - rural American is pitted against urban American. 70+ Republican papers changed their stance for the first time. But we were were showing our bigotry by only looking at urban America - but we're not all there is, are we?

Romantics don't have to be grateful, but they do have to be dragged into this century.

The way to do that is not aggressively, it's with love. Every citizen in Manhattan should adopt a small town in Ohio and invite them to their homes for a week.

The point is that we have to think about the topic of this conversation: Horizons. One of the reasons we are capable of looking to the future golden age has to do with certain basics of human sanity. Sanity was used as a bludgeon to disparage those that were different. Post-modernists don't want us to us the world sanity or truth - ever.

How many of you would say you and your neighbors are surrounded by propaganda?

You will not find a popular movie in which the hero does not bond with audience through some small eccentricity and shows suspicion for authority and the bad guy doesn't show intolerance. No one ever wants to believe that their own beliefs are the result of propaganda.

undue authority by elites

Sanity should be adaptability - ability to take new information and change your mind. It should have tolerance built into it. And it should have satiability. If you get the very thing that you said you wanted - shouldn't it make you happier? Most therapists throughout the world agree that mentally ill relentlessly show the trait of insatiability. When they get what they said they want - it doesn't make them any happier.

Tolkien and other romantic legends don't show us democracy. They have kings. Good kings, but kings nonetheless.

This is first society that the well off out-number the poor. That children may be better off than their parents. It implies that future can be better. We're in a diamond-shaped society - where previously it was a pyramid with the base the world's poor.

Go to my website to see why liberals lost the election Tuesday.

Emphasizing guilt and never imagining praise. The only liberal that ever did that and saw glass half-full was Clinton and he never lost.

Neo-conservatives want to outlaw meetings like this. This is different from Bill Joy - the carping from within will help us find the mistakes while charging into the future - and we get across our wasteful technologies to technologies that empower 10 billion people to live comfortably.

I'm Mr. Openness and Mr. Optimism in most fields. But it's fun to be the contrarian. I'm on the SETI committee and they refuse to believe any possibility beyond aliens are friendly and benign. History has been filled with predation and quid pro quo...it's only recently that we've become more altruistic.

Exorarium by Sheldon Brown and David Brin. We're proving C.P. Snow wrong - that the two cultures of arts and sciences do get along. The visitor to a museum and you build a solar system and ecosystem and you get your own alien race. You can go to the extraterrestial terrarium to interact with other species, including humans. This could be done online as well. It's an example of a teaching tool. It's a way to get more people thinking about what we're thinking about now.

We also have to bear in mind that world is a dangerous place - and we always have to be saying "Yes, but..."

I've been a curmudgeon about "singularity now." I think we're all going to die. Replication is already happening ;-) What are the odds that this is an original event?

The satiable rich like riding the diamond out. It's the insatiable rich that flatten out the diamond to a pyramid.

Cleaned up version blogged: http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/david_brin_on_e.html

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Gee Rittenhouse, Lucent Tech, Future of Wireless Networking

Dr Gee Rittenhouse, Bell Labs Fellon

locating people after 9/11 to locate people via their wireless

The cellphone is on your hip. That device rings to you - not your office or your home or your car - but you. People not only can get to you, but EXPECT to get to you. It has social implications and transformation. Same will occur with mobile data services. In the future, the network expects to reach you anytime, anywhere.

The future is about you. It will be your world and how you interact with it will depend on you. The network knows where you are - that can be scary. Personalization and security are important. In the future, it will occur with a richness that's just about as good as being there. If best we can do is to deliver MP3 files and video over a 2X2 inch screen it's not good enough.

In order to accomplish all this stuff, there are really four areas:

Wireless applications/personalization:  In 4G, you'll have a virtual world, packet data, M2M (machine-to-machine, sensor-to-sensor), voice/IP immersion (something we call Internet immersion). Where does the intelligence lie? In your device and or in the Internet 'cloud'? Access control is also moving to the edge. Today we have applications - push-to-talk for instance coupled to a network via a network operator. In future, there will be another layer that will allow people to go to a provisioning portal where they can self-manage their preferences (via rules engine and user preferences policy management).

High-speed data: 9.6 kilobits/second is not enough. In order of increasing data rates and bandwidth, shows chart showing EV-DO, HSDPA (European) and 802.16. A lot of research is going on to improve quality of the link and provide higher data rates. About 7 years ago Bell Labs developed technology to provide 10-20 fold increase in radio transmission capacity (BLAST).

Making the Internet mobile:

Internet is very decentralized. But mobility implies moving from one basestation from another implies some control. The application is certainly I.P.  The network will be simplified in future.

Self-designing networks: Now these networks are fairly hand-crafted; but the network has to design itself in the future. Network auto-configuration is necessary (for instance, leaf foliage changes over season and affects wireless response or as population density changes). The networks will be able to design, configure and repair themselves.

[Most intersecting part of talk.] Learning from spiders. How do they build a "perfect" web that is so much bigger than they are? Spiders have very small brains, they have poor eyesight and viewpoint and can't see what they have built. And yet they are able to do this. They solve a second order differential equation without even with knowing it. They use local knowledge to infer what the global network must be like. Perhaps based on cellular automata. 

In future, you participate in the network whether you know it or not. Access will be personal. Social transformation will take place thorugh IP immersion that is similiar to what happened in the telephony world. The applications that we can imagine will pale to what actually occurs in the future. It's not just point-to-point between you and another, but being plugged into the community and the network.

The network in broad sense even today knows where you are. The 3G systems can get much finer resolutions if you hit "911" on your phone. That will occur with data devices.

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Innovation Managers Panel

Panelist: Cynthia Breazeale, Intel, Innovation Through IT: Enabling Systemic Innovation

At Intel they looked at the skills and credentials of I.T. I made a prediction that I.T. as a function about five years ago would move outside the corporation and that it would become a service - and we would pay for level of reliability, efficiency, security, etc.

Delivering solutions. Integrate and support the complex, critical, invisible "plumbing".  Deep understanding of customer needs.

distribution of innovation centers throughout world - Ireland, Malaysia, Israel, and Folsom, CA (didn't get all) . Many of the disciplines of Clayton Christensen, Complex Adaptive Systems and Knowledge Management for creating global "innovation pipeline". Use of the unique IT-engineer skillset applied to developing novel technology uses and new solutions, influencing future product designs. Looking at transformational business models (I.T. business value indexing).

Global centers serve as a catalyst of disruptive technology development. Disruptive technology prototyping lab. Developing new usage models. We do a lot of showcasing - bringing in students, teachers, and employees. An environment to conduct training and executive seminars.

Unlike most systems that go from convergent to divergent funnel. This looks at business value of each opportunity.

We're heavily engaged in peer-to-peer technology. We've driven down WAN utilization into tens of millions (see smart networks). We're aggressive about WiMax technology in communities - wireless Israel.

Industry solutions. Skoool.ie - works will with standardized curriculums. quickly being adopted in many countries with that education model; also learns the user's learning style. China, Portugal, Spain, and more.

PC Basics CD courseware in 12 languages.

Assisted Living. Video of Indian family. They have elderly parent that lives in another city. She forgets to take her medicine. Videoconferencing. "I can see right away if she's ok - if she's taken her medicine. She has a bracelet that communicates with sensors in the house. She has a light that goes on when we get home as well. "With this technology we know she's safe," says father (his mother I believe).

Innovation Manager Panelist: Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Discovering a Renaissance in Innovation (steve@dfj.com)

You're going to be learning more than in next 20 years than last 100 years. But there is a glacial change of human nature compared to technological change.

We funded in Internet in 1995. And now we feel that nanotechnology is the next wave. We think that entrepreneurship is global and there are talented people everywhere. DFJ is a network. Each one is locally run and locally managed. It's a network of networks. Surprisingly, no other venture capital firm is doing this.

We try to be a magnet rather than looking for needles (many of these are still stealth, they don't have a website). We speak at conferences, especially emerging technology conferences. And we try to pick the right haystack.

We did only one e-retailer, only one B2B exchange - so we look for diversification. We explore the edge - most venture firms deride the edge in the beginning. If something is unanimously 'good' then it's too late. So all the partners aren't going to agree to fund a firm.

We seek unlimited upside - not just doubling our money - because we have so many losses. It's rare event, but we look at billion dollar markets.

We look at 750 first meetings, 150 follow-ons, 12-24 funded

Similar to IDEO - 4000 brainstorm early drawings -> 200 detailed design work -> ???

Similar to Edison.

If there is a market research firm talking about it - we're not interested.

More eye-popping innovation happening now than 1999. Moore's law has not been repealed. Education primarily and then secondly immigration imperative are most important things we can invest in as a country.

Skype is growing faster than ICQ, Hotmail or Kazaa.

12 million registered users.

IT - look at how biology will inspire or influence and the blending of I.T., nanotechnology, and biology. It's leading to a renasisance in medicine. Leading to renaissance in material science, etc.

nanotech is interdisciplinary renaissance, it is a nexus of the sciences.

"We just try to bet on mammals and hope for the best."

Innovation Managers Panelist: Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute, Championing Nanotech Innovation: Lessons

Also author of Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work

Championing Nanotecch Innovation: Lessons Learned, by Christine Peterson, VP of Foresight Institute (really part of the public policy creating community)

creating and using structures, devices and systems that have useful properties and functions because of their structure at the 1 to 100 .......molecular ......

U.S. Nanotech is investing 3.7 billion over next 4 years (plus military) authorized. Near-term products is mostly new materials. It's defined to be nanotech now. Near-term: Nanoparticles (one example: gold-coated particles with biological functionality bind to tumor cells and then heated, to treat cancer). Concern about toxicity side-effects.

4th generation nanotech is molecular manufacturing. A new way to view matter. Today we can have atomic precision or ability to build large, complex systems - but not both.

These are machines - they are just at the molecular level - and they already exist in nature.

Extreme decrease in direct manufacturing costs (not including insurance, IP,