Over the past 3-4 years, the ICT industry has focused principally on rolling out ever more sophisticated mobile and wireless ICT technology, which increasingly permeates all aspects of everyday life. We are coming to depend ever more on computers and communications networks. As individual devices have become smaller and more powerful, they have increasingly been linked together within complex networks. This trend will clearly continue in the next 7-10 years.
Before the end of this decade, seamless broadband communication networks will be spanning from the personal area to the regional and global area. This will be made possible by meshing all sorts of different computing and communication networks, whether these are fixed wired and wireless networks, 3rd or higher generation mobile networks, wireless PANs and LANs, satellites or whatsoever. The recent surge of WiFi-like technologies is yet another phenomenon coming in from the “edges” to conquer. Ever higher bandwidth communication networks and the integration of fixed and mobile, all-IP, communication infrastructures and their interconnection and interoperability will permit the seamless delivery of ever higher volumes of data and services anywhere, anytime.
However, other major trends in the near future will change the face of ICT.
The distinct processes of communication and computation are being linked together within miniature artefacts and objects “smart” devices that are embedded or “hidden” in the environment and communicate with each other. Because these artefacts have sensing and computational capabilities, their linked communications will underlie the creation of distributed and self-regulating systems that are adapted to human needs. These semi-intelligent and highly adaptive networks will augment the physical environment with new properties, enhancing its interaction with people, while keeping the underlying system out of sight. The aim will be to hide the overall system complexity, preserve human attention by delivering us only information which is rich with meanings and contexts and provide stable functionality, with functions being revealed only “on demand”. We expect indeed, it seems virtually certain that these new network resources will, especially in combination, stimulate a new generation of personalised applications and services. Such situated and cooperating smart artefacts, whether in the form of sensors, actuators, robotic devices, tags, or whatsoever will boost the creation of new ambient environments that are tailored to individual needs and will increasingly link the real and the virtual world.
These massively distributed systems will form “dynamic ecosystems”, immersed in computerized ambient environments, and growing and adapting themselves to the evolving needs of individual users and communities. Computing grids, data grids, pervasive computing composed of communicating objects, sensor networks, overlay networks, P2P architectures belong to the new paradigm of open, distributed and mobile architectures with no centralized control and with behaviour to be thought in statistical terms. Operating systems for example have to be revisited: their primary role is not so much optimal scheduling and memory utilisation but managing input-outputs from multiple networks (WiFi, Bluetooth, UMTS, etc.), managing mobility (who are the neighbours? Where are they?), managing reconfigurability (energy saving), managing security (is the environment hostile?). Fluxes of massive data, mobile codes, software agents acting autonomously or by delegation, in group will wander across these ecosystems to perform applications, and to compose and deliver services. On the one hand, programming such complex, often unbounded systems and ensuring their scalability and evolvability, their interoperability and their dependability and security are major challenges. On the other hand, being able to deal with vast amounts of data and information that are being stored and circulating over these networks and systems and getting sense out of them, by efficiently representing and organising such data around their content and semantics, and by efficiently fusing, analysing and interpreting them, and ultimately using them is another set of major challenges.
After the double convergence of the 2000’s (fixed-wireless, and voice-data) centred around UMTS, IP, XML, Java, one can see the emergence of multiple solutions more local, more autonomous, more adapted to the context and to the diversity of users and closer to their personal needs and preferences, to store, communicate, compute, leading to a renewed offer of “situated” services. This paradigm shift offers opportunities for Europe to build on its strengths (components, embedded systems, mobile devices, consumer electronics) and to take the lead in system architectures that are people-centric and that fully support personal and collective mobility, dynamicity and creativity. If the ubiquity of communication and computing poses enormous challenges for security and privacy, it holds also a lot of promises relying on harnessing collective intelligence of people. The development of open-source software is such an example.
[The coming composite revolution: research in ICTs meets the other sciences]
At the same time, ICTs are increasingly playing a major role in combination with other sciences. ICT for example, plays a catalytic role in bio-technology, to manage and analyse the enormous quantities of information that are generated in today’s wet labs and for modelling the living. Imaging and simulation tools from ICT are critical for research in molecular biology, nanotechnology or in the brain sciences. At the same time these sciences are providing powerful insights and metaphors that are at the basis of new approaches in ICT. For example, solutions for more robust, adaptable and highly complex systems have been derived from biology and evolution theory. This cross fertilisation will intensify as scientists from different disciplines learn each other’s ways of thinking. Prepared by this conceptual convergence, a new era of technological convergence between the nano-, bio-, neuro- and cognitive sciences is announcing itself. Scientists are learning to manipulate the basic building blocks of matter, life and intelligence. The notions of information and computation are at the heart of understanding the interfaces between these different fabrics of reality and pave the way for a deeper integration of ICTs with physics, the bio- and life-sciences. Over the next decade, ICTs will increasingly blend with the physical and biological world. Advances in molecular biology are completely transforming our ability to both understand and to program biological function at the micro-level. Programmable materials will become possible, and technological artefacts will increasingly involve and exploit the properties of living material, e.g. in the form of direct brain-interfaces. A better understanding of the biological and neural basis of cognition will enable ICTs to learn, evolve, reason and adapt to their environments.
The convergence between the bio-, nano-, info- and cognitive sciences will enable major advances toward realising the Lisbon agenda. This will be most clear in the health sector, through the design of new drugs and new diagnostic and therapeutic processes, but also in realistic efforts to develop implementations of "human augmentation" the ICT-based enhancement of human capabilities. Out of the collision between complex networks of increasingly sophisticated devices and the mingling of living and non-living ICT technologies, we anticipate, in particular, a progressive entangling of the virtual world of information and data, and the real world of matter and life. Over the next decade, it seems clear that the frontier between the real and the virtual will gradually dissolve, with tremendous consequences for the way we do science and business, the way we learn and work, and the way we live our daily lives. However, in order to meet these challenges the science of information, computation and communication will need to develop new theories, methods, components and even radically new architectures.
Note: the sentences in colors and the bold were not made by the authior in the original paper, but made by us just to show some of the common issues