Women in ICT

Fresh from working on the Gender Action Plan for EGI-InSPIRE, I was pleased to join a session last thing yesterday exploring how to encourage more women into ICT, run by ECWT (European Centre for Women and Technology). While women represent around 60% of graduates in the life sciences, when you look at engineering, the figure drops to around 19%. As you move through the career path, women gradually start to disappear – as a whole, there are more women than men graduating from first degree courses, but the numbers decline for graduates of higher degrees, in management positions, and reach almost zero in many countries when you get to board level. In some regions, such as India, proportions of female ICT graduates are much more even, so how can women, and men, be encouraged into science and engineering?

ICT suffers from an image problem – it’s seen as lower status than careers such as medicine, it’s ‘difficult’, lower paid than other jobs and generally just not very appealing to young people. So if we want to see more women coming through into management positions down the line, there are two problems to solve: encouraging women into the field in the first place, and keeping them in it once they’re there.

The speakers at the session all seemed to agree on the nature of the problem, but solutions were a little trickier. A combination of top down and bottom up approaches seems to make sense – grass roots efforts, such as after school clubs running practice businesses, work shadowing, bringing role models into schools. This doesn’t work without the top down approach as well – buy in from top level managers who really believe that encouraging more women into management positions makes good business sense. Mckinsey figures show that businesses with more women in senior management have weathered the recent economic storm much better than those who don’t. Evidence seems to suggest that women show a wider range of the core management skills – they are interested in people, give rewards for achievements, issue clear instructions and are participative managers.

So what is the picture at ICT2010? I’d be interested to know what the breakdown of attendance figures looks like – for EGEE conferences, the percentage of women attending is usually around 20%. Looking around the exhibition area, there seems to be a good proportion of women here and 3 out of the 5 opening plenary speakers were women: Neelie Kroes, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn and Silvana Koch-Mehrin. But in the future developments plenary on Tuesday, there were no women on the panel. As one audience member pointed out, do women have nothing to say about the future of the digital agenda in Europe? Let’s hope they do.

Beers of Belgium

No visit in Brussel can be complete without tasting some of the great beers that Belgium offers. Last night with Manisha and Neasan we visited the Delirium Cafe, one of the Belgian pubs that offer incredible selection of beers. Take a look at the beer menu – it’s a book with around 100 pages, that’s several hundred types of beers!

Take a look at the beer taps – I was amazed that the bartenders remember which barrel stores which beer and which beer come with witch glass. Each beer comes in its own glass of course...

The interior is also cool – trays, beer glasses and other relics on the walls and on the ceiling.

If you are in Brussels don’t forget to visit the Delerium Cafe. It’s in the centre, only 100 meters from Grand Place.

(Sorry for the low-resolution photos, I had to rely on my mobile because my D40 is not here with me...)

Visit by Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the EC

As I wrote earlier, I attend ICT 2010 as a young researcher. Yesterday morning in the “Students’corner” – the base of young researchers –has been visited by Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European Commission. She gave a short a talk, and spent around 30 minutes with us discussing issues that young researchers are most concerned of. I have to admit that after hearing her plenary talk yesterday I did not expect much from this visit – a few sentences about the Digital Agenda, a few praising words about the greatness of young researchers and of Europe, but nothing more. I was surprised in a positive way! Her talk touched a few interesting topics, and included several “worth to take home” messages. On top of that the vice-president even mentioned the EC project that I am involved in in her talk: EGI‑InSPIRE! These were the key points that I would like to share with you:

· The digital agenda is a dialog. It’s not the EC dictating what and how to do.

· The older generation’s focus is more on competition (compete for success, compete with colleagues), while the young generation focuses more on collaboration (collaborate with colleagues, collaborate with competitors to deliver better services) Interesting observation.

· Europe still calls the glass “half empty” instead of “half full”. This is a sign of fear. We should face the future without fear, because fear parallelises the mind.

· A recently funded project (with 25 million Euro) delivers distributed computing infrastructure for European research communities. Yes, this is EGI-InSPIRE!

· Marie Curie scholarship is a successful mobiliser for European researchers, 5000 applications have been received only this year.

· Researchers should always keep in mind the impact of their work. The goal is to deliver solutions that are capable of improving people’s life.

After the talk the floor was opened for questions, and a very interesting discussion emerged between us, PhD students who are involved in EC ICT projects, and the vice-president. It deserves a separate post...

In the exhibition hall

It’s the last day if ICT2010 and even though it’s only a three day event it’s been packed full of interesting things – most probably due its sheer size!

Over in the exhibition area there are over 200 different stands covering ten categories from ‘Safety and security’ to ‘Content and knowledge'. Among the 3D televisions and various robots on show I’ve seen demos showing how to manufacture silicon chips and how to detect bacteria in real-time thanks to raman spectroscopy. I've just been speaking to the people over at the VisMaster stand, a coordination action which finishes tomorrow. VisMaster aimed to bring together researchers working in the field of visual analytics – a discipline which takes large amounts of data and visualises it in easy-to-understand way. This can allow researchers to discover links and trends that may be otherwise hidden in massive data sets. VisMaster has now put together a roadmap which considers the future of visual analytics research, and can be found on their website.

Other exhibits of note include the jungle-themed SOA4All stand, the free smarties from the RESERVOIR project and the SIM-e-Child demo, whose Health-e-Child demo won the ‘Best demo prize’ at the last ICT conference. This year the Sim-e-Child team have made use of the iPad’s augmented reality feature to display paediatric cardiology models constructed with the help of grid computing.

For me one of the many highlights of ICT2010 was the keynote speech by Hermann Hauser back on Monday. Hauser spoke how we’re now entering the 5th wave of computing – the mobile phone – which follows the previous four waves of mainfraimes, minicomputers, workstations and personal computers. Hauser suggested that the mobile phone (or similar devices) are set to replace the personal computer, and in the future they will be cheaper, faster and generally better than the PCs and Macs we’re all used to using at the moment. In any case it seems that ICT is continuing to develop and evolve in all sorts of ways. Who knows what developments there'll be by ICT2012?

Discussing the future at ICT2010

How do high level researchers at ICT2010 envisage the future? The panel discussion in Tuesday’s plenary, led by Clive Cookson of the Financial Times, gave us some ideas.

John Wood of UCL and former chair of ESFRI, compared his experiences of Cambridge – data gathering at the lab all day, write up the paper with a colleague over wine in the evening – with those of his son, who can access facilities around the world without leaving his room. Professor Wood predicts the emergence of the data scientist – someone who can cope with hexabytes of data, counter data terrorism and tackle data provenance issues. How do you know whether to trust the data you’re getting from a dozen different sources?

Christian Joachim of CNRS in France talked about reversing what he called the miniaturisation process – instead of breaking down a complex system (like the brain) to try to understand its parts, what happens if you build one up, atom by atom? Does it look like the brain, or do you get something completely different?

Dieter Fellner, of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany introduced the challenge of data handling in a knowledge society. Object oriented computing will lead to applications as we understand them disappearing. Since the 90s, digital libraries have stored text in a way that is searchable and retrievable. We still do not yet handle other media types and 3D objects as well as we handle text – at the moment we still store this computer-born data as pixels, then re-render it. The semantics should be stored with the data, currently we now leave it in the user interface. We should work with these types of data more like we handle music – you search for what you want, listen to it, and download it.

Roberto Saracco of Telecom Italia reminded us that moving from ideas to innovation takes time, money and regulation. You couldn’t justify developing the brain just because it would move your little finger, you need to get the big picture. Businesses will start to think less about selling stuff, and more about the services that go with the stuff – in the future you won’t be able to buy a washing machine without getting a service along with it.

For Martin Curley of Intel Labs in Ireland, the key themes for the future are digital transformations, sustainability and mass collaboration. You can now get a cloud computer on a single chip. For exascale computing you need billion way parallelism and this is 10,000 times away from where we are now. There is also a move to try to make innovation in technology more predictable and hence more profitable – for example, film photography, one of the industry’s biggest money makers is now officially dead with the growth in digital photography. But this year, more photos are taken by mobiles than digital cameras, so is the digital camera itself already on the way out?

Zoran Stancic, European Commission, DG-INFSO had the final word. The EC is interested in using pervasive ICT innovation as an enabler of science and technology. E-Infrastructures, for example, go way beyond normal research infrastructure- they can support the flow of ideas and generate new ones. Establishing European innovation partnerships is also important. In the context of the economic crisis, when we think about boosting support for innovation, we must also support science-driven research to meet long term as well as short term aims.

Asked to think about e-Infrastructures in particular, the panel encouraged us to think about the democratisation of resources – for example what is the impact of the Square Kilometre Array on the local population in Australia or South Africa which hasn’t yet seen a broadband connection? Investment by countries should keep pace with their ability to take part in the infrastructure.

Turning your brain blue at ICT2010

In the last 60 years, there has been a million billion times increase in computing power. By 2040, never mind exascale computing, we’ll be up at the yottascale, 10 to the power 24. Trillions of 0s and 1s are generated every day. If we build computers using existing technology, it would take 3 Gigawatts to deliver exascale computing – the aim is to use just 20MW.

Henry Markram of the imaginatively named Blue Brain project at EPFL thinks we should use our brains to tackle this problem – not just to think the issues though, but literally to make computers more brain-like. Already, we expect our interactions with computers to be human-like as possible so it’s a natural direction to take.

Despite its massive processing power, the brain uses an amount of energy equivalent to a weak light bulb – just 30 Watts. The CPUs in the brain are neurons – but neurons in fact are slow in comparison, a billion times slower. They are however, hugely parallel, with trillions of connections. The brain also shuts down any parts you’re not using to save energy, reacting in millliseconds.

These are all principles that chip designers can take on board, slower individual chips but vastly increased numbers of them. The problem is, if you put millions of chips together, the potential for failure and errors sky rockets. Your brain can gracefully lose 10,000 neurons a day without batting a metaphorical eyelid - theoretically you get wiser as you get older. Unlike chips, neurons are diverse and heterogenous, they match the solution to the problem. They also have many many connections to each other, there is no single point of failure. As neurons deteriorate, the signal weakens but doesn’t disappear altogether.

Neurons also have lessons to teach us about memory and storage – information is fragmented and distributed across millions of them, no one neuron holds the key to your most treasured memory. Each one holds tiny fragments of many memories. The secret is in combining these back together – and the brain reuses old memories to store new ones. If you’ve already stored a and t, you don’t need to store them again, just reuse them.

As anyone who has ever waited for a big file to download will know, we also have a bandwidth problem – you can’t cheat, you have to transfer all the data. The brain gets round this by ignoring large chunks of the data it absorbs every day through your senses – it actually only sends you hints. As the receiver of the signals from your eyes and ears, you may think you’re getting the whole picture but your brain imagines most of what you experience as the world around you. Every now and then it picks up hints to check that this imaginary version bears some relationship to reality – the rest is millions of years of evolution, plus your own experiential learning.

If computers could visualise data at the same time as processing it, like the brain does, some exciting possibilities could emerge, such as interactive holographic environments, real and imagined worlds that could be used for business and research interactions, or entertainment. With a better understanding of how the brain pulls off this trick, truly intelligent robots could become possible, able to learn, adapt, to develop behaviour and cognition.

As panel member Professor John Wood said in reaction to this presentation – spooky!

The internet of people

Since I started working at GridTalk (now e-ScienceTalk) I’ve heard mention of the ‘Future Internet’ but have never quite known what that means. In an attempt to find out more I sat in on the ‘potential socio-economic impact of the Future Internet’ session at ICT2010 this afternoon. There was quite an animated discussion from keynote speaker, Jonathan Cave, along with panelists Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento, Italy), and Graham Vickery (OECD, France). I won’t go into everything they covered but here’s a few key points:

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- What is the internet? It began as a protocol, then a network. Now we talk about the internet of things, ideas or services. Most of the speakers at the session spoke of an internet of people.

- Why is the internet going to be about people? Giunchiglia gave this example: A competition asked participants to find the location of 8 different balloons. How was this won? The winner employed the technique of crowdsourcing, setting up a website which asked others to help him locate the balloons in return for a prize. While the ICT industry is focused on making computers faster and smaller this would be of no benefit in this sort of task. Looking for balloons is a problem for people not computers – after all they just have to look up.

- With this in mind the internet would not be a technological innovation but a place where human capabilities are at the centre. They would no longer be regarded as just an end user but involved from the very start of the process. In order to exploit the abilities of the internet, we should stop thinking about the technology first and start thinking about society.

- Following on from a point brought up by Henry Markram, the plenary speaker from this morning, the speakers remarked that hardware isn’t the problem, the problem is on the software side. How can we exploit the internet so it works more like the brain?

- As the internet becomes more pervasive there’s a worry that our collective intelligence could decrease as we all use the same network dominated by just few companies. In general innovation comes from outsiders and diversity both of which will be essential for the future. Is there a way to encourage a greater extent of diversity? This is a role for the EU and governments to play a greater role in.

Digitally driven to Brussels for ICT2010

I’m now in Brussels for ICT2010 ‘Digitally Driven’. As Belgium has the EU Presidency at the moment, Brussels is packed to the rafters – hotels in the centre are not to be had for love nor (a lot of) money. Never mind, from the taxi window I am discovering new parts of the city every day…

Yesterday I watched the opening plenary, chaired by Clive Cookson of the Financial Times (I was pleased to see he’d brought some free copies of the paper with him to pick up at the entrance). Clive introduced a host of European political heavyweights including Yves Leterme, the Belgian Prime Minister and Nellie Kreus, Vice President of the European Commission. Yves Leterme kicked off the discussions by stressing the importance of networking – both physical networks and networks of people. The more connections you have, the better your network. That said, he pointed out that common industrial projects are also needed to help generate jobs and solve the economic crisis, like the TGV.

Neelie Kroes reminded us that to outsiders, what we do in ICT can seem like magic, but we should remember that behind the scenes is a lot of blood, sweat, tears – and money. In times of crisis, expenditure has to be justified, and the Digital Agenda from the European Commission is focusing efforts to maintain the link between innovations in ICT and greater productivity. Innovation should lead us to greener technology, better health care and faster internet. As the representative of its 27 member states, the EC can help to stabilise the research area so that high risk research can be carried out, and the risk of investment shared, for example in the area of quantum computing where the first commercial applications are just being seen after years of investment. In the 70s, EU countries had a 10% share in the ICT market – 30 years later, this figure is now 25% of a much bigger market. But the EU has to stay in the race, and cannot be timid, slow or fragmented in its approach. We haven’t reached the limits of ICT by any means, there are still complex problems to solve and billions of Euros to make – we should think big and act big.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, Vice President of the European Parliament then spoke about the role of ICT in the political life of Europe’s 500 million citizens. The EC’s new initiative, the ‘Internet of Things’, of connected devices, needs also be an internet of things for people. We should be able to opt out as well as opt in. It’s all very well if our fridges let us know by email at work that we’re out of chocolate and should pick some up on the way home, but maybe we’re on a diet and don’t want to be tempted. (I was suddenly reminded that lunch should be on the way soon, no need for an interactive fridge to tell me!). ICT could also enable e-voting in the next European elections, but only if issues of digital identity can be solved. Currently up to one third of internet users regularly use alternative or anonymous identities while online. ICT could also narrow the gap between the electorate and the Parliament – you need a million signatures to put a resolution to Parliament, but again you have to know that these are genuine. Cheerfully she pointed out that, while we might still leave the conference confused, at least we’ll be confused at a much higher level.

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research and Innovation was next to take the podium and told us how pleased she was to see the exhibition at the conference – showcasing some of the biggest projects funded under FP7. This struck a chord, as the EGI-InSPIRE and e-ScienceTalk joint booth with EUMedGridSupport and EUIndiaGrid are part of the International Village – we hope she comes to see us! Maire also announced the launch of the European Innovation Union Flagship next week, which is part of the 2020 strategy. She talked about the ‘I-conomy’, the innovation economy, boosted at all levels through new products and services and global market opportunities. ICT is at the forefront in all these areas, enabling innovation not only in research but also in business processes and marketing. Google, Facebook and Skype, for example, are now so integrated in the way that we work, they are part of the language – when did you first start referring to googling something, or skyping someone? Maire also spoke about removing barriers to innovation, for example through legislation. Simplifying and streamlining patenting across Europe would be one advantage, so that researchers can benefit from their research without inhibiting others.

Finally, Christian Reinaudo, CEO of Agfa-Gevaert in Belgium gave the commercial point of view, speaking about how ICT is a key part of his business, not only in technology but also in business models. It is critical for the area of health care, as costs are reaching non-sustainable levels – up to 15% of GDP in 2011 compared to only 5% in the 70s. ICT can help improve systems and increase efficiency. For example, something as simple as sharing patient records across hospitals helps to avoid the costs of duplicating tests. Funding models across Europe vary, from 100% public to partly or entirely commercial – but for a newly diagnosed cancer patient the needs are the same, so standardisation is important. There are potentially 500 million people across Europe who could benefit from e-health but data needs to be secure. Levels of care should be universal, and ICT could help to even out the ‘postcode lottery’ – at the moment, as a stroke patient, you might have better access to specialist help in area A than in area B. Bringing things back to the Digital Agenda, the seven principles can all help to build an e-health system – a single market of customers, shared standards, secure data, better networks for sharing data, investment in R&D to ease the burden on companies, better user experiences and social changes that mean better informed, and better served, patients. A lot to think about and that was just day one!

ICT inside

I attend ICT2010 as a “Young Researcher”. The fellowship provides me with a free entry to the event, free entry to a few special sessions (more on these later), but also means that I have to write reports about some of the exhibitors. I have been allocated to the “ICT inside” category, so yesterday late afternoon I interviewed a couple of the 10 exhibitors that are in this category. Attending only grid computing events in the last 7 years just took me so far from hardware research and development that I was really impressed by the combined HW-SW solutions that these demos exhibit. My favourite demo was:

• Self-monitoring facility for patients (by the Austrian Institute of Technology): The demo consists of a carton table with different icons painted on it, each of the icon containing one RFID chip; and a SW that can be uploaded to any regular mobile phone (not just to the shiny touchscreen phones). The patient can use his/her mobile with this software to record blood pressure and other medical data and send it to the hospital. What I most like about the demo is how simple and intuitive it is: Open the mobile, touch it to the blood pressure machine, touch it to the relevant icons on the RFID flat table to express your generic feelings or to confirm that you took the prescribed medication. The SW running on the mobile reads data from the blood pressure meter, reads the icons from the table then sends the data to a pre-configured hospital. The whole process can be carried out without touching a single button on the mobile, and can be done even by a 70+ aged person. What makes this possible is the “Near Field Communication” (NFC) protocol, an emerging protocol for data short range wireless transfer between devices. The devices have to be really close (few cm), but the data which can be transmitted can have high level of complexity – not just a tag or an ID.

I recommend you to memorise the NFC acronym. I predict bright future for it.

What should NESSI do?

On Monday afternoon I followed the NESSI session of the parallel track. I found the overview way too general and “buzzwordy” (you know what I mean even if there is no such word). Besides stating several times that the NESSI roadmap will define the “coolest” network ever (see also self-* properties of SOA or the “Internet of things” concept), not much was said. The discussion that followed the presentation was way more interesting– not from a technical, rather from a philosophical point of view:

• A member of the audience stated that the barrier of adoption for many of the listed network properties is not the lack of technology, or the lack of security solutions, but the lack of proper political/licensing/legal regulations. Being provocative, he proposed that the NESSI consortium should focus on political regulations, because results on this front would be more valuable for future networked applications. Good point!
• He received a similarly provocative answer: even if a researcher sees that his results cannot be deployed in practice due to a missing element (in this case the political/licensing/legal regulations), he cannot turn his focus onto a different topic, he can only highlight the issue and continue working on his own subject. I am not so sure about that. This mentality seems more like the “ivory tower research attitude” to me.

So, what do you think NESSI should do? You can provide input for the roadmap before the end of the year. The first draft will be available on the NESSI webpage sometimes in December, and will be open for public comments for one or two months...

ICT2010, a green perspective

Last year GridTalk released a GridBriefing on the topic of Green IT, based on a Communication from the European Commission. I was interested to see how this area has developed since then, so went along to hear the ‘Mobilising ICT for energy efficiency session’ this afternoon at ICT 2010.

The session brought together experts from industry – including Ericsson, Siemens, and Orange – to give their take on the issue. As the Commissions’ Communication detailed, there are two main questions here: 1) how can we reduce our own sector’s (ICT) emissions and 2) how can we use ICT to enable reductions in other sectors?

Elaine Weidman Grunewald of Ericsson explained that we need to shift from incremental emission reductions to using transformative technologies. For example developing a green car can help to reduce vehicle carbon emissions but holding a virtual meeting instead of using a car is a transformative change that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. In many cases the technologies needed for this change are already available, the challenge is implementation.

A big problem is how to measure carbon emission and savings made in switching from one method to another. As with grids, standardisation is important, according to the last speaker of the session, Matthew Bateson of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Switzerland. Current standards do not address indirect emissions, so the WBCSD have overseen a new set of new guidelines which address supply chain and product life cycles. These have been produced as a result of a two year programme and will be launched at the end of 2010.

With other talks focusing on how ICT can help cut emissions in buildings and through smart energy grids it seems that there is plenty of potential for the future, we just need to realise it.

ICT2010 Roundtable panel discussion

The plenary talks were delivered by key representatives of the European Commission (EC), the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament and the industry outlined the goals and vision of the EC’s Digital Agenda. The digital agenda lays down high level goals for European ICT sector for the 2010-2020 period in order to make Europe more advanced, more competitive, more .... The talks were followed by a panel discussion which involved CEOs of several large, international companies and a few EC and regional politician. The Digital Agenda is online and other bloggers will probably write about the plenary talks so I don’t waste valuable batter power on those.

I rather share a few interesting thoughts with you that I captured during the round table panel discussion. Despite all of the panel presenters agree and support the digital agenda, these thoughts show gaps between the views/goals of the commission and of the industry:

• CEO of Ericsson pointed out that the “Web of things” mentioned by the vice-president of the European Parliament in her talk is already happening. By 2020 it will include ~50billion devices. The 1995-2015 period is the installation phase of a new infrastructure, the Internet (and particularly it’s mobile broadband version.) By the end of 2015 there will be ~93% global coverage, there will be ~8 billion mobile phones/subscriptions. The following 20-30 years will be the deployment phase – deployment of applications, services on this infrastructure. This is a typical agenda with all the large-scale infrastructures.
• SAP’s vision of the next generation internet is the Businessweb. A robust, secure, mobile network – where companies can connect together and can make better business, can deliver better business for consumers. Just one use case: trucks packed by multiple companies would result better usage of resources, would help to reduce CO2 emission. (Which is one of the goals of the digital agenda)
• Senior VP of HP: Education is an important contributor for success in ICT. The quality of students is decreasing in all ICT related fields (programming, technology knowledge, mathematics,...). We (Europe) should investigate and understand the roots of the problem. We must learn from those regions, countries who are more successful on this front – e.g. China where large-large number (can’t recall the number, sorry) of highly educated students leave universities each year.
• Support for Small Enterprises is good – but small enterprises should not be the goal! Think big, act big, grow big and grow number one. No survival on today’s competitive market for those whose target is staying small.

Neerie Kroes, vice-president of EC liked the panel, invited participants for another meeting - either F2F or by telephone. Given the number of CEOs on the panel I doubt they would find a timeslot which suits them all...