1 Fabrizio Sestini New Paradigms and Experimental Facilities DG Information Society and Media "The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission" Dagstuhl Seminar on Architecture and Design of the Future Internet Schloss Dagstuhl, 15 April 2009 Future Internet for Sustainability FIRE Future Internet Research and Experimentation

2 FIRE goal : Understand how Internet is changing economy and society, and how it can improve society and environment Keywords: –Network –Complexity –Multidisciplinarity –Empirical approaches “network science”?

January 2009 Brussels

4 ICT can play a central role for sustainability “business as usual is simply not an option” “we cannot measure everyhting only in economic terms”: –How to measure “Global ICT Happiness”? –How to involve social stakeholders more effectively in the definition of ICT prioriies? –Should we add a sustainability evaluation criterion? Need to improve confidence in statistics (wiki for progress) Distributed information and energy production

5 ICT can play a central role for sustainability - 2 Need for multidisciplinary approach –Reconciling humanistic and scientific disciplines Specific topics: –energy efficiency, e-health, e-democracy, environment and animal monitoring, distributed databases … Need for open and free standards Global cooperation needed to solve a global problem

6 Socio-economic “Drivers” for a future internet scenario: Multiple crises –Financial –Environmental –Energy –Social How can Internet help the transition towards a more sustainable future? –Environmental-friendly way of living –Sustainable economic development –Participative global governance

7 What can ICT do Environmental sustainability –Improving energy efficiency –Monitoring environmental changes –Distributed grid of renewable energy production Internet economy –Empowering individuals –Distributed information production –New opportunities and market models Distributed governance –Effective cooperation –Knowledge sharing across borders –Low-cost access

8 Beyond GDP –ICT to improve quality of life (health, culture, social integration, etc.) Distributed wikis to discuss policies –Creating a “wikipedia” for statistical data –“Mutualisation” of global resources European strenghts –Creating a new Society across State boundaries –Multidisciplinary approaches –Need of preserving open access and network neutrality Towards a new model of progress?

9 9 GLOBAL AWARENESS scenario global network allowing mutually -trusted global awareness, cooperation and governance COST Foresight 2030 workshop Selection criterion among 5 scenarios (ICT for the World): sustainability to help the transition towards a more sustainable future: –Environmental-friendly way of living –Sustainable economic development –Participative global governance

10 Challenges for 2030: universal wiki concept: open access to –distributed digital libraries / information spaces –managing information including statistics and multidimensional data –integrating physical and virtual worlds –cooperative tools for aggregating/ organising/ augmenting information generated in a distributed manner –mutual trust and management of ownership and privacy

11 challenges (2): multimodal multicultural interfaces (for humans and machines): Natural Language Processing automatically enrich the information space with semantics (for searching and filtering) global pervasive networking and data handling infrastructure make everyone connected –through low cost technologies