Tag Archives: predictions

Siemen’s Picture of the Future

Posted on May 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

15inno informs about Siemen’s Pictures of the Future, which is a magazine on research and innovation. In their spring 2010 issue, they focus on open innovation, green cities and molecular detectives

Here’s the section on Open Innovation

seimens picture of future Scenario 2020: Unlimited wisdom

Brazil 2020: A company develops complex solutions for customers all over the world. In its operations it combines the advantages of a global knowledge network with those of virtual space. That saves time and money and minimizes risk. A look at IT specialist Johannes Quistorp’s first day on the job

Trends: Tapping new worlds of ideas

Potentially, gamechanging innovations are everywhere. They are hidden in the minds of employees and customers and in projects at universities and research institutes. Tapping these sources is something employers are doing to an ever increasing extent. As they do so, they are opening the doors of their labs, exchanging ideas with external partners, and creating a world of synergies

Soft Tissues Revealed: Phase-contrast X-ray imaging

They’re used every day in hospitals, but X-ray images don’t really offer the kind of detail needed to determine the size and structure of a tumor. With a new technique called “phase-contrast X-ray imaging,” however, this may be about to change

All Charged Up: Integrating electric cars into the grid

Major cooperative projects are paving the way for the launch of electric vehicles. Experts from industry and universities are creating the technological basis for linking vehicles to the power grid. In fact, field tests are now under way, especially in Denmark and Germany. One key objective is to use electric cars as energy storage units that can compensate for fluctuations in wind power

Nuclear Fusion: Here comes the sun

By 2030, researchers expect to build a fusion reactor demonstration plant that produces more energy than it consumes. If successful, fusion power will provide a nearly inexhaustible and CO2-free source of energy. Related developments in materials research are driving improvements in many Siemens technologies

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The Internet’s impact on Institutions of the Future

Posted on April 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Pew Internet has released a new report The Internet’s impact on Institutions of the Future which shows that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.

    * “By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.”

Some 26% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

    * ”By 2020, governments, businesses, non-profits and other mainstream institutions will primarily retain familiar 20th century models for conduct of relationships with citizens and consumers online and offline.”

While their overall assessment anticipates that humans’ use of the internet will prompt institutional change, many elaborated with written explanations that expressed significant concerns over organization’s resistance to change. They cited fears that bureaucracies of all stripes – especially government agencies – can resist outside encouragement to evolve. Some wrote that the level of change will affect different kinds of institutions at different times. The consensus among them was that businesses will transform themselves much more quickly than public and non-profit agencies.

Many selected the “change” option, but said they were not sure drastic change will occur in organizations by the 2020 time frame. They said the most significant impact of the internet on institutions will occur after that. Some noted this change will cause tension and disruption.

The respondents who addressed the issue of “innovative forms of online cooperation” sometimes referred to activities between people and institutions that were post-bureaucratic. They argued that people could use the internet and cell phones to create alternative, un-bureaucratic structures to solve problems through network-structured communities.

Download the pdf version here

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Real-World Outcomes Predicted Using Social Media

Posted on April 4, 2010 | Leave a comment
On Slashdot : Real-World Outcomes Predicted Using Social Media

"Kevin Kelly writes that researchers at the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto have found that social media content can predict real world outcomes. In their study, the researchers built a model that used chatter from Twitter to predict accurately the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before the movies were released. When the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. To quantify the sentiments in 3 million tweets, the team used anonymous workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rate a sample of tweets, and then trained an algorithmic classifier to derive a rating for the rest. But predicting box office receipts may be only the beginning. ‘This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics [PDF], ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes,’ the researchers write. ‘At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.’"

hp labs logo The HP’s Social Computing Lab focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Their research includes collective intelligence (“wisdom of the crowd”), incentive design for accessing resources, social networks and their implications for information dissemination and collective attention.

HP Lab on twitter http://twitter.com/hplabs

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Study: The Future of the Internet

Posted on March 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Doc searls informs about The Future of the Internet IV, the study conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Survey respondents shared thousands of issues-exposing predictive statements tied to five "tension pairs" projecting their attitudes about the likely state of things in 2020. Experts were asked about the Internet and the evolution of: intelligence; reading and the rendering of knowledge; identity and authentication; gadgets and applications; and the core values of the Internet. The 45-page briefing as a PDF is available for downloaded here. In this report, you will find experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

1. Will Google make us stupid?
2. Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?
3. Will social relations get better?
4. Will the state of reading and writing be improved?
5. Will those in GenY share as much information about themselves as they age?
6. Will our relationship to key institutions change?
7. Will online anonymity still be prevalent?
8. Will the Semantic Web have an impact?
9. Are the next takeoff technologies evident now?
10. Will the Internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?

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Time To Take the Internet Seriously

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

I am a big fan Slashdot.org, the original mob destination for nerds and what else can be the better way to start this blog by posting my submission which was accepted there.

santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he’s also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious.

“6. We know that the Internet creates ‘information overload,’ a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it’s more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won’t be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. … 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.”

Also cross-posted on Slashdot

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