Computing Systems Lecture 12 Future Computing

Past Trends in Computing Moore’s Law – Integrated circuits double in transistor counts (and approximate power) roughly every 18 months See paper online Towards Ubiquitous Computing – From one computer per organisation to computers everywhere Computers increasingly personal – From business tools to personal computers to persistent companions

Breaking the Physical Limits I Associated with Moore’s Law is an increase in the amount of power consumption of ICs – For many devices power dissipation (i.e. Heat) and consumption is a bigger problem than achieving very high compute power – A mobile phone that lasts ten minutes on battery and burns your hand isn’t very useful – Multi-core solutions break down computing tasks to multiple low power processor cores Rapidly advancing area of computing

Breaking the Physical Limits II Quantum Computing – Using individual atoms and photons for data storage and computation – Developing potentially unbreakable cryptography – Breaking speed limits of traditional digital computers Current quantum computers very limited and require very large labs for operation – 20 or 50 years from now?

Historical Trends: Media To consider how computer use may change in future, we can look more broadly at how technology has changed how we relate to e.g. media over a longer time period – Music – Film/Television

A musical analogy Budapest Orchestra, Lyricmac, CC-BY-SA, Listening to music over 100 years ago...

Phonograph, Norman Bruderhofer, CC-BY-SA Listening to music around 100 years ago...

Walkman, © Esa Sorjonen, Listening to music around 30 years ago...

MP3 Player, Locketudor, CC-BY-SA Listening to music in last 10 years ago...

Young woman with red hair, Jean-Pierre Bazard, CC-BY-SA Today...

Theatre, Film and Television From theatre...to Cinema...to Television...to Home Video...to YouTube/iPlayer Currently there is a generation of children growing up not knowing about having to watch what is on TV ‘now’

Where we are now… Mobile phones now have power comparable to desktops of less than a decade ago – Rich media & 3D capabilities with integrated still and video cameras – Mobile broadband internet & local wireless connectivity What happens when all of this is combined? What will happen when this becomes commonplace?

Light Touch Interactive Projector Pranav Mistry SixthSense SixthSense

Augmented Reality Apps

Google Goggles Camera powered search engine Can recognise e.g. Book covers, paintings, read barcodes, recognise some landmarks, etc

Siri Voice interface for iPhone Voice interfaces also available for PC (e.g. Dragon Dictate) with limited take up, and XBox 360 (somewhat more successful), and other devices Still have issues with regional accents! – Hence delayed launch of Siri in UK Will voice input become the norm?

Sony HMZ-T1 Available now (Japan)

Google Project Glass Not available now!

Digital Tattoos Patented, coming soon???

Always On Many people today are already always connected, always ‘on’ – Always communicating These developing technologies show that we are likely to be more deeply and more persistently connected in years to come – Will we be able to switch off? – How do we balance being somewhere and connecting with other people online?

Alone Together

Further Reading Halting State by Charles Stross Alone Together by Sherry Turkle Wikipedia: – SixthSense, Augmented Reality, Quantum Computing Quantum Computing tutorials: –