IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.
« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »
Alex and I are spending the week in Budapest at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which is sponsoring a conference called "Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence". It's organized by our new friend Kristof Nyiri, who wrote one of the most interesting takes on information technology ever - "Thinking with a word processor".
Alberto Lazlo Barabasi, one of the fathers of social network analysis, gave a fascinating paper (abstract PDF) on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communication", in which he described a project that uses large datasets of mobile phone subscribers to describe analyze how people move about cities. As his abstract states "cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before.
He began by explaining power law distributions - the mathematical curve that describes the distribution of many of the things we do. Put simply, human activity is bursty. This shows up in everything from Einstein's well-documented post correspondence to how often we visit the library. Barabasi was interested in whether this applied as well to our mobility patterns.
Animals have been shown to move in what are called Levy flights - a variant on the random walk distribution. Essentially, animal motion is fairly random. We can also see it in studies of currency movements like Where's George. Sociologists have looked at these data sets as measures of human movement, assuming that people are carrying these dollar bills around in their pockets.
Barabasi set out to do this for human activity using a huge dataset that recorded the time of mobile phone calls and the cell site ID - which allowed them to geolocate the callers to approximately the neighborhood level. They can then create metrics for each individual that describe their movement patterns in space and time - essentially a mobility signature for each person. Then you can look at the overall patterns, and as it turns out, we are not doing Levy flights - there are significant differences between how different people move.
This kind of analysis has many applications, but on of the most interesting he raised is using it during an epidemic to look at real-time flux of people across parts of a city. (one of Barabasi's appointments is at the Harvard Medical School) Using this data, you could develop a metric of how many people are flowing across every cell site boundary. I imagine you could also develop predictive models of this flow.
The next step in their research, something I have through extensively about from an urban studies perspective, is the effect of synchronization (using mobiles of course) affects the randomness of these mobility patterns.
This paper caught my attention because there are a number of interesting research projects that are starting to leverage the mobile as a real-time sensor, to create some very interesting pictures of emergent social phenomena. We looked at Nathan Eagle's Reality Mining project a number of years ago, and Carlo Ratti's Real Time Rome perhaps takes this to its logical conclusion. But Barabasi's paper has pushed the mathematical basis for these investigations even further... it's as if we're moving into a new world of social physics in which massive data sets enable algorithmic mining. Interestingly enough, it seems that Boston is emerging as the global epicenter for this new research niche.
Barabasi's research site is the Center for Complex Network Research.
I missed his 2002 book Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means (what a title!), but it's probably time to go back and take a look.
Alex is blogging the rest of the conference over at the End of Cyberspace.
Technorati Tags: Hungary, information technology, social networks
Ok, the social web is officially ridiculous.
What I'm referring to is the amount of crap I have to update everytime I want to do anything. It's gotten so bad today, as I prepare to leave for 10 days in Budapest, I'm almost afraid of missing my flight.
What's there to do?
Twitter something witty
Update my FaceBook status
Add the trip to Dopplr
Set iChat and Skype status
Blog about it in various places
And finally, check in for my flight. 7 blessed hours offline.
When are the social web integration apps coming? Please, when? I'll invest.
Technorati Tags: information technology, social software
I wish I was in town for this event at NYU on September 29, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Life by Design: Synthetic Biology's Implications for Science, Society, and Mass Media
Famed geneticist J. Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome and now heads a global effort to create "designer microbes" to address some of the world's most vexing global environmental and health problems, will keynote a symposium on the subject.
Venter's talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the far-reaching implications of synthetic biology, in which the tools of genetics are used to modify living organisms or even create new ones. Potential applications include new energy sources, improved pharmaceuticals and innovative ways to fight global warming by sequestering carbon. Panelists will include Kathy Hudson of The Genetics and Public Policy Center, Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio, Michael Stebbins of the Federation of American Scientists and Dan Vergano of USA Today. Moderating will be Apoorva Mandavilli of Nature Medicine. Venter will be introduced by Dan Fagin, associate professor and director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) in the NYU Department of Journalism.
Sep 29, 2007
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
NYU's Cantor Film Center, 36 E. 8th St. at University
Technorati Tags: biotechnology
David Pescovitz, Mike Love and I joined Bob Johansen at SQUID Labs today, where Bob talked about IFTF, our foresight/insight/action mantra, and his book, Get There Early. SQUID Labs is a unique breeding ground for innovation with a social bent. From their website:
At SQUID Labs we develop breakthrough technologies and find solutions to unique engineering problems. Our exceptional team has expertise in a wide range of technical fields: from chip design and electronics to robotics, materials, embedded systems and manufacturing. We have created a highly dynamic and creative work environment which helps to inspire our consulting and contract research efforts.
In the course of our work (and play) we have developed novel and diverse technologies for a wide range of applications including printed electronics, lens molding, and high performance kites. SQUID Labs is characterized by our multidisciplinary skill set and our ability to combine those diverse skills to create novel solutions.
"We're not a think tank, we're a do tank"
While we at IFTF spend most of our time thinking about the future, the guys over at SQUID Labs are doing the future. IFTF is about foresight; SQUID Labs is about action. As one of the SQUID guys said today, you might think of them as the Institute for Doing the Future.
A great example of something to come out of their work is a SQUID spinoff company, Potenco. SQUID Labs co-founder Colin Bulthaup is the company's CEO. Their product is a pull-cord generator, intended for use with the XO Laptop (One Laptop Per Child Project). Check out their website for the specs. It's a great solution to the problem of providing electricity to places that lack an energy infrastructure.
One of the most interesting things that came out of today was an understanding of how the two organizations could really work together. We would be able to provide an idea of what areas or technology or engineering will present problems or dilemmas potentially needing solutions, and the SQUID Labs team could take cues from our forecasts to start working on these solutions before the problems really become problems.
They also happen to have a very cool location, in the control tower on the Alameda Naval Air Station.
My colleagues Anthony Townsend, Jamais Cascio and I are speaking at a conference in Budapest in early October:
Technology and society: global and local challenges
Each society has different paths of development; there are no generally applicable, global strategies. This is also true for Hungary. The conference aims to give an overview of predicted images of the future engendered by technological changes. All people from the areas of science, economy, and politics are welcome if they are interested in the topic either because they feel it is their duty to be informed or because they are to take an active part in the formation of the future of Hungary. Our aim is to find solutions to the everyday questions that are often neglected, disregarded or left open. It helps to alleviate the feelings of frustration and distress concerning our future. It can also help to recognize our own possibilities and become successful in making use of them instead of the mechanical adaptation of ready-made formulas or stereotypes.
It looks like it'll be a really interesting time. None of us knows much about Hungary, so it'll be a learning experience; and Anthony and I have a strong interest in the future of science in small countries.
Technorati Tags: conference, future, Hungary, science, technology
These folks are just up the street from the Institute.
Technorati Tags: Palo Alto, Silicon Valley
Since reading Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, I've been interested in-- though probably no better at correcting-- attentional blindness. This video nicely demonstrates how, in the course of focusing on one thing, we fail to notice others:
Technorati Tags: psychology
I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets. The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.
These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.
I attended an interesting panel discussion at the Asia Society in New York today. The event, sponsored by IBM presumably was to be about how technological innovation might transform the energy question in Asia, and when we say "energy in Asia" of course we mean "coal in China". Not suprisingly, though the discussion focused to a large degree around the economics of energy rather than disruptive technologies.
The most interesting part of the discussion by far was the brief presentation by Dan Rosen, a former White House economist turned consultant, whose China Strategic Advisory is based in New York. He recently released a paper in May, China Energy: A Guide for the Perplexed, which demystifies in a very clear and concise way, how the energy industry in China is organized. The main takeaway from his talk, in my view, was that China faces not one but two energy crises - an industrial one in the present, and a consumer one in the future. Rosen showed a number of charts demonstrating how single heavy industries today dwarf the sectors we in the West typically focus on as consumer-driven emitters. For instance, just the Chinese chemical industry uses more energy than the entire transportation sector. The steel and concrete industries combined use more energy than all of the household needs of China's 1.3 billion people.
Rosen also pointed out an interesting paradox - that while "China is huge for the future of alternative energy on Earth... alternative power is not necessarily huge for China... even in the most opotimistic scenario they will play a modest role in meeting the energy needs of China." He also argued that while China will drive down the price of renewable energy for everyone through scale manufacturing economies, it is already driving down the cost of dirty coal. Thus another paradox that China is simultaneouslt making it cheaper for countries to do the "right" thing as well as the "wrong" thing.
Rosen did offer one optimistic possible future though, around new global supply chains that could reduce emissions from the importation of raw materials like iron ore to China for export-based manufacturing. Today, steel sold in Brazil by Chinese steel manufacturers probably was made in China with iron ore shipped from a Brazilian mine. As Chinese firms begin to globalize, we may see them move more value-added production closer to the source of raw materials. Baosteel is already doing this in Brazil for example.
Technorati Tags: China, energy, environment, globalization
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