Futures Microsoft’s European Innovation Magazine Special Issue | October 2012

The best of Futures including, the ‘virtual’ human and the classroom of the future Máire Geoghegan-Quinn: The commissioner who wants €80 billion – for Europe’s future

5TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

www.microsoft.eu/futures

Colophon Editor in Chief, Lisa Boch-Andersen, Senior Director Communications, Microsoft Europe Managing Editor, Fabien Petitcolas, Director for Innovation, Microsoft Europe

Editorial Board Gail Edmondson, Editorial Director, Science|Business Jan Muehlfeit, Chairman Europe, Microsoft John Vassallo, Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Europe Peter Wrobel, Founding Director, Science|Business

Additional contributors to this edition Ann Morrison, editor. Raluca Anghel, Anisia Avram and Rachel Howard Production Science|Business Publishing Ltd Design and layout Chris Jones, design4science ltd Printing Holbrook Printers Ltd, Portsmouth PO3 5HX, UK Photography INRIA p 2 (centre) The European Commission p 3, p 7 Smart Cities World MENA 2011 p6-7 Microsoft Research p 8, p 9, Veera Lipasti p 10 Aalto University Design Factory 2010 p 12, p 13 Aino Huovio p 12 Microsoft p 13 (bottom) p 15, p 41, Aalto University Venture Garage p 14 (top) Ville Tajamaa p 14 (bottom) Hasso Plattner Institute p 16, p 17 Robert Scoble p 19 Iain Maclean p 20-21 Spenta p 22 (top) NextBus p 22 (bottom) Julio Verne School p 27 ETH Zurich p 34 (left) Johannes Kleske/Silicon Allee p 34 (right) Tech City UK p 35 Karolinska Institutet Science Park 2012 World Architect News p 37 Physiologyonline p 40 Ronald Halbe p 42

Contact us Fabien Petitcolas [email protected] Microsoft Europe Nerviërslaan / Avenue Des Nerviens 85 B-1040 Brussels www.microsoft.eu

Disclaimer The content of this magazine, including news, quotes, and other information, is provided by Microsoft and its third parties for your personal information only. Views imparted by third parties do not necessarily reflect the views of Microsoft Corporation. Copyright Microsoft 2012 PRINTED ON FSC CERTIFIED PAPER

STEPHEN BAKER is author of Final Jeopardy (2011) and The Numerati (2008). Before that, he was a senior technology writer for BusinessWeek in Paris and New York. He blogs at TheNumerati.net Freelance writer JOHN A. CAREY is a former senior correspondent for BusinessWeek, where he covered science, technology, medicine and the environment. Recent stories have appeared in Conservation, Scientific American and Yahoo News. STEVE CONNOR is Science Editor of The Independent in London and an award-winning science journalist. He has also worked for the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and New Scientist.

GAIL EDMONDSON is editorial director at Science|Business. She covered European technology, industry and economics for BusinessWeek magazine for more than 20 years.

Europe’s technology hotspots enjoy an ecosystem of university talent, venture capital and networking opportunities, like this “start-up sauna” in Helsinki

Page 34

DIANE HOFKINS is a writer, editor, journalist and consultant in education and children's issues based in London. She was a senior editor on The Times Educational Supplement, and now freelances for newspapers, charities and academic institutions. CRISTINA JIMENEZ is a freelance journalist based in Barcelona. She has worked as a science writer at CERN in Geneva. Some of her articles on science policy and innovation have appeared in Nature and Science. MICHAEL KENWARD OBE is a freelance writer based in the UK with nearly 40 years’ experience covering technology and innovation. He edited New Scientist magazine throughout the 1980s. NUALA MORAN covers the European biotechnology sector for the US publication BioWorld and is a contributor to Nature Biotechnology. She was formerly managing editor of Nature, innovation editor of The Independent on Sunday and deputy editor of Computer Weekly. ANN MORRISON is a journalist with more than three decades of writing, editing and teaching experience. As an editorial executive for Time Inc., she was based in New York (Fortune magazine), Hong Kong (Asiaweek) and London (Time). CORMAC SHERIDAN is a Dublinbased technology writer. He is a regular contributor to Nature, Biotechnology and BioWorld International and his work has appeared in Scientific American and The Scientist.

The first computer model of a biological organ was of the heart, thanks to a team led by University of Oxford researchers and their supercomputers

Page 38

Futures Microsoft’s European Innovation Magazine Special Issue | August 2012

Microsoft Futures Special Issue | August 2012

Circulation number / Frequency 2,500 copies / Bi-annual publication

WRITERS

The best of Futures on innovation, SMEs and more The data privacy challenge Plus: Commissioner Maire Geoghegan Quinn on Horizon 2020

5TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

www.microsoft.eu/futures

This illustration by Mike Lemanski represents the building of ideas starting with a simple square

Contents FUTURES VIEW Looking back over the past five years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Ahead: An important challenge – securing online privacy . . . . 4

NEWS European Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn defends the “realistic” budget proposal of €80 billion for Horizon 2020 . . . . 6 Inside Microsoft Research, where ideas are exchanged speed-dating style and collaboration crosses continents . . . . . 8

Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn: “The only way to build a sustainable economy is through investment in people, skills and technologies”

Page 6

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY Finland's model for an innovation university . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Forget the mouse: Researchers around the world are creating intuitive methods to interact with ever-smarter machines . . . 15 Why teens need social networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Big Data: the next frontier for innovation and growth . . . . . . . 20

Some of the most dramatic opportunities for natural user interfaces – like handsfree controls – come from the world of video games

SKILLS & EDUCATION The classroom of the future is here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The world’s report card, country by country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Page 15

ENVIRONMENT Software helps researchers study the role of forests in tracking and mitigating the planet’s rapid changes . . . . . . . . . 30

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SMEs How a Dublin company uses cloud computing to deliver human resource management tools around the world quickly . . . . . . 33 European tech start-ups flourish in spite of the economic storm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

HEALTH

Innovative teachers + technology + smart policies = the active learning and collaborative skills required for the 21st century

Page 24

Creating the virtual physiological human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 What happens when biology meets computer science . . . . . . 41

DIGITAL POLICY A former chapel in Barcelona is now a supercomputing centre that will revolutionise the way we use cloud computing . . . . . 42 The fight against cyber crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

To understand the role of vegetation in the climate, researchers collect data on tree cover to build sophisticated computer models

COMMENTARY Dr Alan Davies explains how to turn the idea of personalised healthcare into a reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

All articles are also available online at www.microsoft.eu/futures

Page 30

FUTURES VIEW

Looking back

A

s Futures magazine celebrates its fifth anniversary, this special issue brings together some of the best stories from the past as well as forward-looking features from Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, and others. The past five years have brought huge changes to Europe and the world, and the global economy is still reeling from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. However, even the most challenging situations can also be times of enormous opportunity. As we saw when the dot-com bubble burst, economic downturns can stimulate innovation and help drive opportunities for successful companies to be created. I am convinced that the information and communications technology (ICT) sector will continue to enable economic transformation and growth. In the EU, the ICT sector is directly responsible for five per cent of GDP, which amounts to €660 billion per year, and it directly contributes far more – 20 per cent – to overall productivity growth. But the state of our educational systems is worrisome. Shanghai now ranks first in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranking, a list previously dominated by Northern European countries. And, on most international university rankings, European institutions are not well represented. Again, ICT can play an important role in helping modernize education, preparing students for the jobs of the future, and enabling lifelong learning. Also, as demand for knowledge workers continues to grow, cultivating a technologyliterate workforce should be a national priority for all countries. Over the last three years, Microsoft’s Community Skills Training program has trained more than 11 million people in Europe on the latest technologies to help improve their employability. Technology skills are paramount as ICT has become an increasingly critical component of

Europeans’ lives and businesses. The advent of cloud computing has helped drive costs down for business and enabled start-ups to go global overnight. Another major trend in computing is our ability to interact with computers in an increasingly natural way. In 2012, after decades of research around voice, face and gesture recognition, this concept of natural user interface came to life in a single device, called Kinect. It allows people to interact with a computer with voice or gesture, bringing us closer to a vision of computing “without the learning curve.” With its formidable human capacity, Europe has the potential to lead a new wave of technological and service innovations, from computer-assisted learning to cloud computing and beyond. Microsoft believes in Europe: since 2007 we have nearly doubled the number of researchers and engineers employed in the region. We have been investing in the region for more than 30 years, and are committed to being a long-term partner for growth. We know that where Europe succeeds, we succeed. In the very first Futures issue, Microsoft Europe Chairman Jan Muehlfeit said: “When the future historians look back on these years, they will examine us on two things, our innovation and the purposes to which we put it.” That comment is as relevant today as it was then, and we are optimistic about Europe’s ability to innovate for a better tomorrow.

Jean-Philippe Courtois President, Microsoft International Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation

F 4

Ahead: securing

F

or all the advantages of the online service model – from e-mail to social networking – the Internet has one big downside: the potential for a user to lose control of personal or professional information. Data, from date of birth to shopping history to confidential business memos, which were previously private, or shared only with select people, is now processed by online services or search engines. Social networks encourage users to share much more personal information than was customary before. There are valid concerns about the use of this information for targeted advertising and price discrimination; the possibility of companies and governments profiling users’ most intimate thoughts; or for example, the adverse effects social networking chatter can have on a job interview. In this context, what is the future of privacy? Can technology, which opened up all these privacy concerns, also offer solutions to the problem? An important aspect of online privacy is ensuring that user data can be protected from unauthorised access and that user confidentiality can be assured in processing the data. Since privacy seems such a fundamental issue, how can certain online services routinely require users to surrender some control over their personal data?

An important challenge – online privacy Technology enabled the accumulation of immense amounts of personal information on the Web. Can it be used to increase confidentiality of that data? BY GEORGE DANEZIS, Microsoft Research Cambridge

Clearly, these services provide advantages to both users and operators. Users can access the services from anywhere in the world and with any device. Their data is always available, and is in a form that is easy to share with others. Cloud computing allows operators to scale their systems, large reliable storage can be used simply and software can be updated quickly. Although the majority of users do not know where their private data is kept, they generally are aware of increased risks of data breaches due to the increased frequency of high-profile cases. Interestingly, the emergence of mobile computing may be disrupting the model of traditional online services. Current smartphones are fullfledged computers, with enough local storage and computing capability to run a number of traditional services. Their software is as easy to update as that of online services. Furthermore, they are always on, travel with the users

in most places, and have connectivity most of the time. As such they are the perfect platform for users to run the equivalent of a “digital butler” that could, for example, prioritise email or coordinate messages with a digital calendar. Such a platform could also unlock the possibility of more privacyfriendly service architectures. A number of Microsoft Research technologies use a hybrid mobile / cloud approach to support privacy. Melissa Chase, Seny Kamara and Tom Roeder at Microsoft Research Redmond, have developed schemes for users to securely store data on clouds in a way that is easy to search and retrieve without the cloud operator being able to read the data. Research by Kristin Lauter, at Microsoft Research Redmond, goes even further, and allows for important families of computations to be performed by clouds on encrypted data, to preserve their confidentiality. Her recent

F 5

work with Thore Graepel, of Microsoft Research Cambridge, shows how services can run machine-learning algorithms on encrypted data. At Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cédric Fournet, Markulf Kohlweiss and I are working on ZQL, a technology that allows complex computations to be run on user devices, thus preserving the confidentiality of the personal data involved. We have used this to demonstrate that complex energy bills based on detailed smart meter readings can be calculated, without revealing the energy consumption of individual households. A number of key technologies also help operators that have personal data to share access to those data sets while still ensuring the confidentiality of the records. The work of Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry and Ilya Mironov at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley allows third parties to make arbitrary

queries on private data sets without being able to infer personal information about individuals. This ensures that, for example, medical databases with private information can be used for research without violating patient privacy. All these technologies demonstrate that modern mobile devices can be used to design online services and mobile applications in ways that recognise a user’s privacy. Users’ data can be more or less opaque to service providers, yet shared and enjoyed with friends, family and colleagues at the user’s will. Even highvalue business transactions can be performed, such as billing for utilities and services, while preserving privacy. The challenge ahead is to get those technologies adopted, by integrating them into user platforms and developer tools, and making their use as simple as building an online service today.

NEWS

Horizon 2020 – moving from vision to reality

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, makes the case for continued financial support, even in tough economic times.

I

n November of last year the European Commission proposed sweeping reforms to the way the European Union funds research and innovation. Since then, the economic crisis gripping the continent has intensified. Governments everywhere are under pressure to cut spending, and some may see research budgets as a soft target. The European Commission believes that what we need now is more science, research and

F6

innovation. Our proposals for Horizon 2020 are rooted firmly in Europe’s wider growth agenda for the next decade. The premise, accepted by all EU leaders, is that the only way to build a sustainable economy is through investment in people, skills and technologies. The proposals reflect the awareness that having the best researchers is not enough in the face of global competition. Europe must do more to turn its great ideas into tangible products,

“Our economy, our society, and our well-being, all depend on being able to create jobs and improve our quality of life in a sustainable way.” Máire Geoghegan-Quinn The smart city is one of three priorities for 2012 under the current framework program

services and - ultimately – jobs. Research and innovation should go hand in hand. In bringing all EU funding for these two under the same programme, Horizon 2020 represents a true break with the past and a roadmap for the future. Key legislation underpinning Horizon 2020 passed its first hurdle in May. EU Member States gave broad support to the idea of putting together research and innovation funding in a single programme with a

simplified structure focused on just three priorities: excellent science, industrial leadership and tackling societal challenges. We want to see the same level of support for our new rules on participation. These lie at the heart of our ambition to cut red tape, reduce approval times for grants and encourage more researchers and companies, especially small- and mediumsized enterprises, to take part in EU projects. The Commission’s ambitious but realistic budget proposal for Horizon 2020 of €80 billion was welcomed by businesses, researchers and many others, including the European Parliament. However, the negotiations on the overall EU budget will be difficult, and I hope that investments into research and innovation will not become a victim of budget cuts. While the legislative and budgetary debate continues, we are thinking hard about how we can follow through on our vision by introducing a more strategic approach to implementation. For example, could we maximise Horizon 2020’s impact through prioritising, in advance, which areas and challenges to focus on each year? We are already moving towards this in the current framework programme, where this year’s calls will focus on priorities such as understanding the brain, smart cities and oceans of the future.

However, at the same time we want to remain flexible, with a challenge-based approach that gives researchers the freedom to come up with creative and innovative solutions. Considering the scale, complexity and costs of new technology development, and of tackling challenges such as finding new vaccines or sources of energy, is the best way of achieving certain research goals always through EU-level funded calls, or do we need to better coordinate EU, Member State and private sources of funding? Achieving the Horizon 2020 vision will require more participation by business and more collaboration across the EU. We have made a start in our current research programme. We now have six “joint technology initiatives” with industry. For example the Innovative Medicines Initiative recently launched calls for research into new anti-microbial drugs. There are also ten “joint programming initiatives”, under which Member States seek to tackle common research challenges, such as Alzheimer’s disease, or the redevelopment of blighted urban areas. There are also other examples of new forms of collaboration, such as the European Metrology Research Programme, which brings together over half of all Member States’ research on

F 7

new measurement methods. In the coming months and years, we will need to consolidate these experiences and draw lessons. Some of the joint programming initiatives are just now publishing their first project funding calls, others are not even that far. In line with our efforts to get Member States to better coordinate and open up their national research funding systems to create a true European Research Area, we will be looking at how to accelerate the implementation of these programmes. Horizon 2020 was a product of careful consultation of all relevant actors, and at a time of fiscal constraint it is especially important to make the best use of scarce public funds by cooperating between countries and where possible leveraging private investment or resources. But in going down this path, we must keep things simple and avoid a plethora of new or overlapping initiatives. We must also keep our focus on excellent science and ensure EU funding is open to the best researchers across Europe. Our economy, our society, and our well-being, all depend on being able to create jobs and improve our quality of life in a sustainable way. I know only one way of addressing these daunting challenges: by putting research and innovation at the heart of our efforts.

NEWS

Hands-free? Surgeons can use Kinect to manipulate medical images, left Real or not? The balls, below, are illusions created by an interactive 3-D technology called Holodesk

Inside Microsoft Research An open, intellectual atmosphere promotes creativity and collaboration and sparks innovation.

BY ANN MORRISON

W

hat if surgeons could manipulate medical images during complex procedures without using their hands? How would gamers like to get to physically interact with virtual objects, like balls? Could the skin on the finger act as a graphical interface? How about taking a virtual voyage to the beginning of the universe? Today 850 researchers in 12 labs on four continents turn ideas like these into reality at Microsoft Research (MSR). Since its start in 1991, MSR has been on a mission to advance the state of the art in computing through basic and applied research. So in addition to contributions to products such as the PixelSense computer screen, around which several people can work without a

mouse or keyboard, and the popular Xbox gaming console, MSR also concentrates on long-term scientific challenges unconnected to products and production cycles. Among them: mapping the ecology of a forest and computing the structure of DNA. As Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, says, “Unlike other companies, Microsoft has included research among its corporate objectives, so as to go beyond just product development.” A look inside Microsoft Research shows how it tries to encourage innovation by promoting a culture that is not very different from that of an elite research university. Though there are no undergraduates and no classroom teaching, there are PhDs, intellectual rigour and time to focus on individual projects. “Our big advantage over academic research is that here it is more likely that your research will have an impact

F8

on millions of people,” says Christopher Bishop, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Freedom is central to the culture. “It’s what attracts world-class experts,” says Bishop. “It frees them to set out research directions and to go off and do them.” And they appreciate it. Nathalie Riche, a young researcher, says she feels a “sense of total autonomy” at Microsoft Research in Redmond, where she works in the VIBE (Visualisation and Interaction for Business and Entertainment) group: “Here you have projects that are a little crazy, and you talk with people as crazy as you are, and you come to discover ideas…that are not so crazy at all.” Bishop agrees. “Here we want people to take risks and do crazy things, even though they probably won’t work.” And if they don’t, “we want them to try something else.”

Where did we come from? Chronozoom, right, centralises all known chronological information about the cosmos, earth and human life A computer interface? OmniTouch, below, allows almost any surface to work like a touch-screen – even the human skin

How then is success measured? By impact, says Bishop. A researcher can advance the state of basic computer science though papers and their citations, at conference presentations or by winning prizes in his or her field. Or an individual can have an impact on Microsoft itself by transferring technology into the development of a new product. Collaboration is key too. “In science, it is hard to have a genuinely new idea,” says Bishop, “It’s easier to take an old idea into a new domain and come up with something entirely new.” That’s how Microsoft’s research arm and product groups work together and why MSR builds partnerships with governments, universities and industry. At Microsoft Research, collaboration also crosses continents and disciplines. For example, MSR regularly organises “mind swaps,”events that bring together researchers from different Microsoft Research labs to exchange ideas on a specific topic of shared interest. And at MSR in Cambridge, for example, researchers give frequent “lab talks” on their field to an audience of researchers from other areas, with wine and nibbles afterward to keep the conversation going. The lab has also hosted “speed-dating”-type meetings, with

researchers given three minutes each to present a research problem to the expert facing them, before they go on to talk to different partners. Even the coffee machines are positioned, says Bishop, “so people have to bump into each other”. He is realistic about these engineered encounters. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time nothing comes of them, or something entirely different comes from them.” Then there is that other one per cent. The software magic behind the Xbox

“It’s easier to take an old idea into a new domain and come up with something entirely new.” Christopher Bishop, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, UK

F 9

would qualify. Years ago, thinking that Cambridge researchers needed a challenge unrelated to product development, Bishop asked: Why can a 3-year-old child recognise the objects around him – table, desk, chair, window – but a computer can’t? This led to basic research projects in object recognition. In the early days of the programme, Bishop, after taking photographs and videos of farm animals during a family holiday in Scotland, devised an algorithm to distinguish between sheep and cows. When the Xbox team came to Cambridge for help in making the game console respond to human movement, the object recognition researchers were able to construct a skeletal tracking system that can, for example, recognise a left hand from a right foot 30 times a second – even faster than a teenage player can move. The result was used in Kinect for Xbox 360, the fastestselling consumer electronic device to date according to Guinness World Records. What’s the next big thing? For Bishop, it’s machine learning to process and analyse the torrents of data that are produced each year. And yes, he does have collaborators. Among them, a team from MSR India. Alice Gracel contributed to this article

The Finnish experiment Aalto: the university reinvented

Mikko Möttönen, an Academy Research Fellow at Aalto, demonstrates that quantum physics can be fun

F 10

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

Finland has set out to create a university that has innovation built into its foundations, merging three institutions into one along the way. Is Aalto a model for universities in other countries? Futures heads north to find out.

BY GAIL EDMONDSON

I

t’s a brisk autumn afternoon in Finland and managers from 19 companies have just arrived on the wooded Aalto University campus near Helsinki in search of young innovators. Each manager will have five minutes to convince students to tackle their real-world engineering and design problems. “We’re looking for challenges that are a ‘mission impossible’ – where the risks or the costs are too high for anyone else,” says Kalevi Ekman, professor of engineering and director of Aalto’s Design Factory, which hosts the annual matchmaking event. Aalto’s hands-on Design Factory is a showcase for Finland’s bold new experiment in higher education. Officially launched in September 2010, Aalto University merges three major Helsinki universities in technology, art and design, and economics. Its mission: a radical shift toward multidisciplinary learning. Finland is betting that by 2020 Aalto’s selfproclaimed “open-minded and boundary-smashing approach” will help the university to a place among the world’s top universities – and seed a new generation of innovators. The centrepiece of a radical education reform in Finland, Aalto was created to

groom graduates for a world transformed by technology, information overload and global competition. “We need to teach students how to be critical and solve problems,” says Tuula Teeri, president of Aalto University. “Building more lecture halls is not the way to move forward in an information society.” European Union Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has lauded Aalto’s new approach. In a 6 October Innovation Union communication, she points to Aalto as a model for Europe to bridge the gap between academia and business, to produce graduates with skills that better match industry’s needs. In Ekman’s one-year master’s course on product design, 140 students in engineering, design and business form 15 cross-disciplinary teams to tackle the “mission impossible” innovation challenges posed by companies. The 4,000-squaremetre Design Factory is their extended classroom – a hub of innovation, meeting rooms and a cutting-edge prototyping laboratory with everything from computeraided design to an electrical workshop. Exactly what business needs Students steer the projects with guidance from academic and company advisors. They are free to seek out experts across the

Since this story was published in December 2010 (Futures 7), Aalto University has continued to innovate. In May, it launched the Appcampus programme, funded by Microsoft and Nokia, to encourage entrepreneurs to create new mobile applications and services. In June, it opened Finland’s first Fablab (fabrication laboratory), a prototyping workshop for making physical objects using technologies such as 3D printing and laser cutting.

F 11

three campuses – in everything from industrial design and architecture to computer science and electrical engineering. They also choose the problems they want to solve: companies that don’t make a convincing pitch won’t get a team. Nokia challenged students this year to tackle design problems with mobile phone accessories. At the same time, Aalto researchers have set up shop in Design Factory to study innovation in progress, while companies are free to collaborate with professors on projects. “Aalto is exactly what business needs – it doesn’t need more programmers. It needs people that work in global teams and get over the silo mentality in organisations,” says Bruno Lanvin, director of INSEAD’s E-Lab research centre in Fontainebleau, France. “Aalto’s crossdisciplinary approach addresses so many things that are missing in European universities. It’s a huge learning opportunity for Finland.” Companies like the model: nearly 20 firms line up each year to engage student teams despite a €15,000 sponsorship fee, which covers the cost of the research but does not include any guarantee of success. Last year’s class developed 13 new products including a portable terminal to gather weather data in extreme conditions for Vaisala, a Finnish weather forecasting technology company. The idea for a Finnish “innovation university” was first broached in 2005 by Helsinki University of Art and Design Rector Yrjö Sotamaa, who said integrating technology, business and design was vital to driving technology-based innovation. Finland’s primary and secondary schools >>

“All you need is love, design,

Brainstorming with paper and pens and post-it notes

>> already lead global rankings in excellence in education, but the country’s universities were small and weak in international comparisons. Finland’s fragmented university landscape lacked critical mass in research. Sotamaa won over the rectors at the Helsinki University of Technology and the Helsinki School of Economics. The three launched a manifesto for university reform, arguing that the country’s system of higher education had become a bureaucracy driven by civil servants, and was in danger of sapping Finland’s competitiveness. The manifesto sparked two years of heated national debate on university reform. Finally in 2007, the government voted to back a national innovation university and a new statute for public-private universities.

“We were looking at global developments in China, India and elsewhere and thought if we stand still, we will be left behind,” said Heljä Misukka, state secretary in the Finnish Ministry of Education. Education as a growth strategy Successful global products like Apple’s iPhone helped Aalto’s backers convince sceptical university staff to break down the educational barriers between technology and design and create joint advanced degrees. “The government saw this as a way to find new fields of growth,” says Misukka. “We think investing in education is the best policy to ensure Finland can compete in global markets – which are tougher and tougher.” The innovation university was eventually

“We need to teach students how to be critical and solve problems.” Tuula Teeri, president of Aalto University

F 12

named after Alvar Aalto, the influential Finnish architect, designer and engineer known as “the father of Modernism” in Nordic countries. Many of Aalto’s clients were industrialists, and whether designing buildings, furniture or glassware, he spent his life exploring a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving. With the mandate to reinvent university education, a working group of rectors, professors, students and Finnish companies benchmarked the best universities in the world, including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Cambridge. They also met with global technology companies to understand what would make Finland’s new innovation university an interesting partner for business. Microsoft Research agreed to fund two projects. One will focus on radical new concepts for web search at home. “The idea is to break with the office orientation – in the home there are different ways of sharing and searching for information,” says Giulio Jacucci, professor of design research at Aalto and a professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki, who will lead the research team at Aalto. The study involves design, computer science, anthropology and sociology, and the Aalto team will collaborate with researchers at the Microsoft laboratory in Cambridge. “We need to break the rules about how we think Web search works. Maybe we don’t need a computer to do search at home,” says Jacucci. Aalto researchers already are working on interactive home artefacts, such as coffee cups that warm themselves or signal when they are empty, and chairs and sofas that can capture breathing and heart rate signals. Fabrizio Gagliardi, director of external research for Microsoft in Europe, Middle East and Africa, says Aalto’s joint expertise in computer science and design is unique.

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

engineering and business” “We’re looking for challenges that are a ‘mission impossible’ – where the risks or the costs are too high for anyone else.” Kalevi Ekman, professor of engineering and director of Aalto’s Design Factory Design Factory: Innovation in progress

“The EU can absolutely benefit from this kind of multidisciplinary approach,” he says. A key element of the reform spearheaded by Aalto is a voluntary shift in higher education to a public-private funding model. With founding capital of €700 million – €500 million from the government and €200 from the private sector – and an annual budget of €368 million, Aalto has the financial critical mass to hire top researchers, provide a competitive tenure track and fund new programmes. To encourage the shift, Finland granted tax relief to companies and individuals who would back Aalto, and it enlisted one of Finland’s wealthiest industrialists – Antti Herlin, owner of Finnish elevator company Kone, to lead a private fund-raising effort. The Finnish experiment in crossdisciplinary innovation is already is inspiring universities around the world. This spring China’s Tongji University set up a joint Design Factory with Aalto in Shanghai, based on the Helsinki model. The buzz about Aalto’s Design Factory started in 2008 when it was set up as a forerunner programme, two years before

the three universities merged. Now a dozen universities from Australia to Brazil are seeking to partner with Aalto to create Design Factories of their own. “China produces half a million masters in engineering a year. We produce 500. For Finland to be globally competitive we need to go beyond technology and combine disciplines, mastering the design side of innovation,” says Ari Rahkonen, general manager of Microsoft Finland. A hub for entrepreneurs Another Aalto innovation that has gone global overnight is Venture Garage. A student initiative launched in 2009 to support entrepreneurs, the 700-metre redbrick industrial hall next to Design Factory

has become the centre of Helsinki’s growing entrepreneurial community, drawing hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors and students to weekly events. For Aalto business student and Venture Garage founder Kristo Ovaska, the change couldn’t come fast enough. “We were angry back in 2008. There was no culture and no support for entrepreneurs in Finland.” Out of frustration, Ovaska launched an Aalto entrepreneurial society on Facebook that quickly topped 5,000 members. But the turning point came in 2009 when Ovaska convinced Aalto to grant €500,000 to establish Venture Garage, a hub for entrepreneurs and start-ups. At the suggestion of a professor, Ovaska set up a trip to MIT and Stanford to immerse a >>

“The EU can absolutely benefit from this kind of multidisciplinary approach.” Fabrizio Gagliardi, director of external research for Microsoft in Europe, Middle East and Africa

F 13

“Out of 400 boot camp applications each year, we hope to get eight to Silicon Valley.” Kristo Ovaska, Venture Garage founder

>> group of Aalto students in the world’s most vibrant innovation ecosystems. The Venture Garage group established vital links to US investors and entrepreneurs, which are now helping Finnish companies get off the ground. One is Finnish start-up AudioDraft, a year-old company housed in Venture Garage, whose co-founders have been to Silicon Valley three times over the past year, thanks to the initial trip led by Ovaska in October 2009. In April 2010, AudioDraft secured $170,000 in angel financing, and it won its first customers in July. “The culture for entrepreneurs has been changing a lot Student trip to Shanghai

in Finland and it’s all thanks to Aalto,” says AudioDraft co-founder and chief executive Teemu Yli-Hollo. Sporting a black tee-shirt, rumpled blond hair and jeans, Ovaska introduces a team of seasoned entrepreneurs for Venture Garage’s next bootcamp and exhorts a team of 10 would-be entrepreneurs to work their tails off over the coming two weeks. “Out of 400 bootcamp applications each year, we hope to get eight to Silicon Valley,” he says. Aalto’s goal is to seed 100 companies that grow to $100 million in sales, to ease Finland’s economic dependence on its one global giant, Nokia. “What has amazed me

F 14

is the speed of change,” says Antti Aarnio, business development manager at Aalto’s new Centre for Entrepreneurship, which opens officially in 2011 and aims to draw company founders throughout the Baltic region. Finland’s government has even begun fostering entrepreneurship in elementary and secondary school education as part of ongoing national reform of curricula to ensure the country has a workforce with skills needed in the future. “Students need to know how to collect knowledge and analyse facts, not just learn facts,” says Misukka. Finnish teachers encourage children from 8 to 12 years old to come up with ideas for new products and new companies – and to consider production cost and profit. Several challenges remain. Aalto needs a more international student body. Only ten per cent of Aalto’s staff and student body come from outside Finland, despite the fact that many courses and degrees are offered in English. The Finnish government aims to measure the success of Aalto by tracking a number of criteria, including Aalto’s ability to draw a growing number of foreign students and leading foreign researchers. Teeri insists the key ingredients for innovation are freedom and talent. “The challenge in Europe is to stop planning, stop making structures and spread good ideas. It’s important to have the best people and let them do what they want.” Aalto has already got that lesson down.

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY Motion machine: Instead of pressing buttons, this boy is playing hands-free with Kinect

Not just for kids anymore With smarter, new interfaces, business people will soon be gesturing and speaking commands to their computers, or perhaps even directing them with their thoughts BY STEVE BAKER

S

omewhere in the world, this scene is taking place. The lights are low in the living room, and a couple wants to switch from a video game to a movie. The dialogue: “No, it’s the other remote.” “This one?” “No, the one over there, under the table.” “Which button do I push?”

Sound familiar? These unlucky people are struggling to communicate with a machine by poking their fingers at a poorly designed interface. If only they could speak to the television in plain language, as if it were a person, and simply tell it to switch from Forza to Avatar. That future is at hand. Designers on three continents are busy creating more intuitive methods to interact with the growing ranks of ever-smarter machines. The systems

F 15

they are building make sense of our words, our gestures and movements, even our shrugs and facial expressions. This field is known as Natural User Interface, or NUI, and it’s exploding. Fuelling the demand is the proliferation of those information machines around us. Until recently, most people dealt with just a few computers, maybe one at home, another at work. These big boxes had keyboards and mice, and users mastered >>

As screens get smaller, it becomes harder to see what application the finger is touching. One solution, as demonstrated by Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute, is to place the touch interface on the back of a transparent screen.

perceptive machines. Traditional computers were deaf and blind. The only messages they could receive came from keyboards and the movements of a mouse on a two-dimensional grid. “For decades, humans have been the eyes and ears of computers,” says Anoop Gupta, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. “Now the sensors are getting powerful enough, and software sophisticated, so that computers can have eyes and ears of their own.”

>> the necessary clicks and commands. But new types of computers are on the rise, from phones to security cameras. And in the coming years, we will be surrounded by ever smarter machines, some the size of rooms, others practically invisible. They’ll be navigating the car, booking a plumber, tracking the dog, letting us into the office, adjusting the air conditioning, fine-tuning medications and handling myriad other tasks. Most of the time, we will be able to communicate with them without sitting down and logging in, and often without even taking the time to pick up a gadget. Someday, perhaps, we will be able to send signals by pretending we are holding the device. At the Hasso Plattner Institute near Berlin, researchers have discovered that people often remember with startling precision the layout of icons on their smart phones. In a new application, users can call up an app – perhaps to get directions or hear a voice mail – by simply moving their fingers in certain patterns in the air. These

movements are captured by a tiny camera in their lapel and sent to a handset nearby. “People should be able to control a lot in their device while it’s in their pocket,” says Patrick Baudisch, chair of the institute’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. That doesn’t mean that touch screens, a popular breakthrough in the past decade, are going to disappear. But they too are sure to evolve, especially as screens shrink. How can the user see what he or she is doing? One design at the Plattner Institute puts the touch on the back of a transparent screen, so that the finger does its work in the background. Other advances look to more ingrained body movements. At Microsoft Research, scientists are developing not only verbal commands for televisions and game consoles, but also systems that recognise everyday gestures. Instead of hitting an OK button on a remote, for example, a user might simply hold up a thumb. None of this would be possible without smarter, more

As this story, published in December 2011 (Futures 9) points out, the Natural User Interface field is exploding. In February, Microsoft launched a version of Kinect designed to work with a Windows PC, as well as software that would allow developers to create medical, industrial and workplace applications. Since then Microsoft has announced more than 350 commercial collaborations with partners like American Express and Toyota.

F 16

Inspiration from video games The sensors are becoming very perceptive, and this opens endless opportunities for new natural interfaces. Some of the most dramatic come from the world of video games. Five years ago, Nintendo introduced the Wii. Its controller contains motion sensors that allow the user to interact with hand gestures, whether hitting backhands or shooting skeets. This was a harbinger of NUI. People could easily forget they were dealing with a computer. Microsoft created a revolution with the November 2009 release of Kinect for the Xbox 360: the user does not need to hold a controller any more. Equipped with projected infrared light and other sensors, Kinect can detect the motion of players’ bodies, recognise their faces and process voice commands. It sold a record 8 million units in its first 60 days, driving home an important message: NUI sells. Perhaps more significantly, last June Microsoft released a development kit for Kinect programmers, which opened the door for a host of new applications for this breakthrough sensory technology. One of them is on display at a home for elderly people, TigerPlace, in Columbia, Missouri, where Kinect systems monitor the day-to-day movements of voluntary test subjects. The data capture each person as a faceless three-dimensional silhouette. This helps to protect their sense of privacy, while providing enough detail to

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

analyse changing patterns of walking or bending. These could be signs that the person is losing balance and faces risks of a fall. This may sound more like surveillance than communication, but Eric Dishman, an Intel executive who oversees similar inhome monitoring for the elderly in Dublin, Ireland, and Portland, Oregon, says that this type of in-home health care technology will increasingly interact with the people. One of Intel’s tools, the Magic Carpet, features a network of sensors underneath the tiles of a kitchen floor. If it determines by the subjects’ walking patterns that they are at risk of a fall, he says, “the same platform can literally lead them through exercises. And while they’re doing those exercises, you’re collecting even more data.” What if the person doesn’t feel like doing the prescribed exercises? The simplest solution would be an interface that understood a spoken sentence: “I don’t want to today.” Capturing natural language is a crucial component of NUI. In Floor sensors may detect that a nursing home patient is limping across the kitchen floor and at risk of a fall. But how to know who it is? Multitoe technology, developed at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, creates profiles of each user’s foot

laboratories around the world, linguists and computer scientists are working to expand the active vocabularies of machines, and to teach them to adapt to different accents and dialects. In essence, these computers will be going through an apprenticeship not only in Humanity 101, but in specifically comprehending each individual user. David Ferrucci headed the IBM team that built a question-answering computer called Watson. Early in 2011, the machine demonstrated advanced natural-language skills as it defeated two human champions in an American televised quiz show called Jeopardy! In Ferrucci’s vision, computers like Watson will soon accompany us, perhaps through our cell phones, listening to complex spoken questions and providing correct responses. “I look at it like the computer in Star Trek,” he says. “You forget it’s a computer and simply ask it questions. It works through a massive data base, which only a computer can do, and comes back with answers.” To many, advanced speech sounds like the ideal interface. But Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, argues that there is no such thing as ideal. The success of each approach, whether touch screens, hand gestures or speech, depends on its context, he says. Speech, for

example, works far better than a touch screen for delivering an important business message while driving a car. “But let’s say I’m landing at the San Jose Airport,” he says, “and I deliver that same message by voice. I might get fired if it turns out the guy sitting next to me is from a competitor.” In that case, the best interface might be a touch screen – or even a venerable qwerty keyboard.  The ultimate natural interface would be a system that directs our thoughts straight to a machine. It sounds like science fiction, but the early versions of such technology are taking form. Already, researchers have connected prosthetic limbs to the edges of people’s nervous systems, permitting them to move the limbs with signals from the brain. In European laboratories, from the University Medical Center in Utrecht, Netherlands, to the Institute for Knowledge Discovery in Graz, Austria, researchers are developing techniques to process more complex signals from the brain, allowing stroke victims and people suffering from locked-in syndrome to operate computers. Another project, financed by the National Science Foundation in the United States, is developing a generation of brain microprocessors. The goal is to have them ready by 2020. If successful, this brain-machine interface could spread to the population at large, eventually enabling us to control certain computer functions – play video games, pull up the contact list on our smart phones – with our thoughts. Conceivably, messages could be sent brain to brain, creating a digital version of telepathy. This would present thorny new challenges for designers – how to protect people, for example, from messaging their stray thoughts. In the meantime, though, we’ll be building vast portfolios of words and body signals to tell the machines in our lives what we’re up to. We’ve been yelling and gesturing at them for decades. Now, with NUI, the computers will finally be paying attention.

i F 17

More information http://research.microsoft.com/enus/collaboration/focus/nui/default.aspx

Why teens really do need social network sites Teenagers use Facebook and Twitter to form their social identities – in a world that may or may not include their parents

BY DANAH BOYD

“I

f you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” That’s what Skyler, 18, told her mother just five years ago, according to a web posting by her mother. For Skyler, as for many teens, their profiles on popular social media such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter define who they are. Social network sites barely existed a decade ago, and now they dominate teenagers’ lives. Why do teens flock to these sites? What are they learning

from their participation? Teenagers learn to define themselves and socialise by interacting with unfamiliar others. Public spaces are where norms are set and reinforced, where common ground is formed. The rise of the Internet, mobile phones and social network sites have created a new public arena for teens. Such sites can be understood as a type of “networked public”, connecting spaces and people through communication technologies to create a new

F 18

type of public environment. Learning society’s rules requires trial and error, validation and admonishment. Teenagers must decide how they want to fit into the structures that society provides. Their social identity is defined partially by themselves, partially by others. Teenagers must determine where they want to be situated within the social world they see and then attempt to garner the reactions to their performances that match their vision. A MySpace or Facebook profile can be seen as a form of “digital body”, where individuals must write themselves into being. Through profiles, teens can express salient aspects of their identity for friends and peers to see and interpret. Teens tailor their online presence to fit the audience they imagine is reading, which could include people they don’t know. In choosing online “friends” – a complicated process – teens write their own community into being. As social media networks proliferate, protecting an individual’s privacy has become a key policy issue. It is assumed that people are public individuals who deserve the right to privacy rather than the other way around. But by allowing us to have a collective experience with people who are both like and unlike us, public life validates the reality that we are experiencing. We are doing our youth a disservice if we believe that we can protect them from the world by limiting their access to public life. They must enter that arena, make mistakes and learn from them. Our role as adults is not to be their policemen, but their guide. At the same time, we need to empower them to be able to make reasonable decisions and to have control over how they present themselves.

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

Historically, most people’s public lives were not documented and distributed for the judgement of others. The Internet has irrevocably changed this. Teens today face a public life with unimaginably wide publicity. Coming of age, online The fundamental characteristics of networked publics – persistence, searchability, replicability and scalability – have radically changed the equation. And the resultant social dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are unfamiliar to the adults that are guiding teens through coming of age. Yet, what teens are doing in networked public spaces is akin to what they do offline: they jockey for social status, work through how to present themselves, and take risks that will help them assess the boundaries of the social world. It is not accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity – the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highly publicised dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) portray a magnified and idealised version of the networked public that teens are experiencing, complete with surveillance and misinterpretation. The experiences that teens are facing in the digital public arena appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face. The long-term implications of being socialised into a culture rooted in networked public spaces are unknown. Perhaps today’s youth will be far better equipped to handle gossip as adults. Perhaps not. What we do know is that today’s teens live in a society where public life is changing rapidly. Teens need access

From the Boyd Blog As befits a researcher in social media, danah boyd maintains a lively personal blog — http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts —which takes on issues from not having a reservation honored at a Washington DC hotel to the role of technology in sex trafficking. In a 2012 post, she discussed a Pew Internet & American Life Project report on “Teens, kindness, and cruelty on social network sites.” The findings compliment this article, which is an edited excerpt from “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”, MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. It was published in June, 2011 (Futures 8). According to the Pew Report — http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Teens-andsocial-media/Summary/Findings.aspx — a huge majority of American teens (95 per cent of those aged 12-17) are now online and 80% of them use of social media sites. Here are some of the reports’ other observations. The majority of social-media-using teens, 69 per cent, say their peers are mostly kind to one another on social network sites. But that’s less than adults over 18, who say that 85 per cent of people on social networks are mostly kind. Teens rely most heavily on parents and peers for advice about online behavior and coping with challenging experiences. Most of the exchanges happening on social network sites are not taking place in full public view, as the majority of teens take various steps to manage their privacy online. Interestingly, there are no differences in privacy behavior between teens who are heavy social-network-site users and those who are not. Most than 85 per cent of parents of online teens say they have talked their children about what they do on the internet, have suggested ways to behave toward other people online and have discussed what kinds of things should and should not be shared online.

to these new public spaces – both mediated and unmediated – to mature and grapple with a fast-changing world. As a society, we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these new public spaces

The experiences that teens are facing in the digital public arena appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face. F 19

as adults, even if we try to limit their access now. Social network sites have complicated our lives because they have made the societal shift in public life very visible. Instead of trying to stop them from participating or regulating their usage, we should learn from what teens are experiencing. They are learning to navigate networked public spaces; it is in our best interest to figure out how to help them. danah boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting researcher at Harvard University's Law School. Her work focuses on social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society

Opening up big data Mining the vast amounts of information on the Web is the next frontier for innovation and growth This article was originally published in the June 2012 issue (Futures 10).

BY JOHN CAREY

T

he lochs and hills of County Argyll in western Scotland provided stunning backdrops for James Bond’s adventures in From Russia with Love. But these days, the local government is more concerned about its citizens than about spy thrillers. The biggest chunk of the £109 million spent each year by Argyll & Bute Council goes on social and health services, much of it on home care. Cultural activities are a mere blip in the budget, far below even catering. How do we know all this? Argyll & Bute Council is one of more than three dozen local governments in the UK and the US

F 20

that have opened up financial ledgers for all to see on the web – down to exact payments for cutting grass or repairing boat propellers. Ordinary people see exactly what their local governments are up to. Officials can spot ways to make their operations more efficient. And by knowing exactly what their rivals are getting paid, businesses can better compete for government contracts. “That drives down the cost of these services to the local authorities,” explains Luke Spikes, CEO of Spikes Cavell, a British analytics company that runs “Spotlight on Spend” programmes for governments. The financial transactions of Argyll & Bute Council are just one sign that we are “on

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

Argyll & Bute Council, which presides over this majestic part of the Scottish Highlands, has placed its ledgers online for all to see

some government databases for citizens and companies to use. This promotes greater transparency, which businesses and entrepreneurs can leverage to offer new products and services.

the cusp of a data revolution”, as former US federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra says. Think of this revolution in two complementary parts. “big data” refers to the vast amounts of information stored on the Internet, data sets from governments and businesses, scientists and social networks that are so immense that conventional software tools cannot capture, store, manage or analyse them. Companies that can rapidly bring order to this mass of information have a winning strategy, as do the organisations willing to harness big data’s potential for their own growth. The other aspect of the data revolution is “open data”, the unlocking of

Big data Hundreds of exabytes a year are flowing onto the Net from doctors and hospitals, smart electricity meters, weather instruments, supermarket checkout counters, government agencies, smartphones, Facebook pages, sensors on manufacturing assembly lines and countless other sources. Just as important, advances in hardware and software are keeping pace, enabling uses of data that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. “We can collect it, store it and process it,” says Greg Fairbank, CEO of Saratoga Data Systems, a California-based company. “It’s the perfect storm for big data.” The ability to open up big data is “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” says a recent McKinsey report. Retailers like Amazon, Tesco and Kroger were the first explorers of this new frontier, using their enormous databases of purchases to target customers with individualised promotions, boosting sales and earnings. Manufacturers can also profit. Real-time analysis of data from sensors on the factory floor can keep assembly lines humming better, while information sharing across R&D centres and manufacturing facilities can slash product development costs. In fact, McKinsey predicts that big data can cut development and assembly costs for many products by 50 per cent.

The ability to analyse huge amounts of information and make it more accessible is helping governments fight crime, nab tax evaders and track terrorists. And there are huge savings to be had, particularly in health care. Medicine is full of unanswered questions. Is it better to fight heart disease with bypass operations, stents, or drugs? What’s the best combination of medications to treat diabetes? Thanks to the tools of big data, the answers can be found by looking at how thousands of people were treated and how they fared. Such sleuthing, using data from Kaiser Permanente, led the US Food and Drug Administration to determine that the blockbuster painkiller Vioxx raised the risk of heart attacks, for instance. Now, Medicare is tinkering with reimbursement formulas “to see if we can get better health care outcomes as the result of changes in the payment system,” Chopra said at a recent conference. The potential health care savings? McKinsey pegs it at $165 billion per year. Opening up the data frontier has been made possible by clever software. In the 1990s and early 2000s, companies like Oracle figured out how to gather and store huge amounts of digital information. By 2003, the world had so much data that “when Google tried to index the entire Internet, it realised it couldn’t use oldfashioned methods,” explains Bob Gourley, founder of research and advisory firm Crucial Point and organiser of the Government Big Data Solutions Award. So in 2004, Google devised a new approach called MapReduce. The basic idea: Parcel out bits of the problem to many different servers or computers. This massively >>

“You can take this as far as you can take software – which goes as far as imagination can take you.” Mike Pilcher, president, SAND Technology

F 21

>> distributed strategy makes it possible to get answers or solutions in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks. Legendary programmer Doug Cutting took the MapReduce idea and created an open-source software package that he named Hadoop, after his son’s toy elephant. Now, companies like IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, along with government agencies such as the US National Security Agency, use Hadoop to process enormous amounts of data. Open data Governments and businesses are starting to appreciate the ramifications of big data and take advantage of all it can provide. And as more and more information finds its way onto the Web, big data companies are developing an increasing number of applications to make sense of it. As Spotlight on Spend and other examples illustrate, the other very promising trend is open data, which begins with the sharing of government public information among individuals and companies. Wind-turbine maker Vestas analyses petabytes of information on wind speeds, electricity prices and weather modelling research to give customers more certainty about the financial return from wind farms, explains Lars Christian Christensen, Vestas’s vice-president of plant siting and forecasting. Pictures from

NASA and ESA satellites are being used to guide geologists in their search for oil and valuable minerals. The German Federal Employment Agency, after crunching years’ worth of historical data on unemployed workers and implementing other measures, reduced its spending by €10 billion a year. “Many new businesses are emerging to analyse government data,” says Mika Hållfast, development director at Logica in Finland, which is running a pilot effort to collect data from Finnish Rescue Service Crunching real-time GPS data and historical traffic flow patterns makes California bus transportation predictable

F 22

Thanks to open data, citizens of some Spanish communities can report problems like graffiti and potholes – and track the city’s response

operations. The information could be used to provide services like sending real-time updates on road accidents to drivers on the same route. McKinsey estimates that “Europe’s public sector could potentially reduce the costs of administrative activities by 15 to 20 per cent, creating the equivalent of €150 billion to €300 billion – or even higher – in new value.” One government-related sector ripe for a data-driven transformation is transportation. Most people take buses only when they have to, because bus routes are often hard to figure out and schedules unreliable. That’s why a California company named NextBus grabs real-time GPS location data from every bus in cities like Boston, plots the positions on maps showing routes and stops, and then adds in historical information about traffic flows to predict how fast each bus can move. The crunched data is beamed to everything from LED signs at bus stops to smartphones. Suddenly, riders know exactly when the bus will arrive and where it will go.

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

“Citizens finally feel like they have a way to participate in the care of the city, and the governments benefit because they’ve essentially outsourced the task of monitoring the streets.” Jordi Plana, Spenta CEO

A vast array of services based on open data could translate into substantial growth for start-ups and software companies. Imagine adding real-time information from commuter rail, taxis and car-sharing services to display all the options for getting from point A to point B. Then, combine that with real-time location data from smartphones, so that transportation providers can cater to your precise needs – with no effort on your part. “I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we get out of the airport and there’s a sign that says, ‘Hey Mike, here’s a cab for you,’ but we’re not that far away,” says Mike Pilcher, president and chief operating officer of SAND Technology, a Canadian analytics company. Open data can make governments far more responsive. In several Spanish communities, people can report such problems as graffiti on walls or dead animals in the street over the Internet using a system developed by Barcelonabased Spenta. Then the individuals can track the government’s response.

“Citizens finally feel like they have a way to participate in the care of the city, and the governments benefit because they’ve essentially outsourced the task of monitoring the streets,” says Spenta CEO Jordi Plana. Similar efforts are being rolled out in Ireland and across Europe. “Open government policies in many countries are permitting citizens to interact directly with agencies, manage information about themselves – and in the process produce a more efficient government,” explains Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. The road to the data revolution has a few bumps, of course. “There are challenges with open data,” says Michaela Kraft, head of Microsoft’s open source strategy for Western Europe. One problem is that too often data are stored using different standards and formats. As a result, says Luke Spikes, “we need a Babel fish” – a modern-day version of the creature in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy who could translate all languages. When Spikes started Spotlight on Spend, 60 per cent of the financial records had to be “eyeballed” (manually validated) by real people, though more experience has brought that down to 16 to 17 per cent. That’s why Microsoft and others are creating such Babel fish, offering software tools that can read different formats and standardise the data. Another issue is resources. While opening up data promises to make government more efficient in the long run, the new efforts have upfront costs. The solution, policy experts suggest, is for individual governments to piggyback on the experiences of others. If Poland, for

F 23

instance, wanted to start a citizenreporting programme like those in Ireland or Spain, it would make sense for the country to roll out the same software platform. “Given the limited financial resources of the governments in the European Union, they need to make sure that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says Microsoft’s Kraft. Still, there are a few simple policy steps that governments can take: Commit to making data sets open and transparent. Bite the bullet on relatively small upfront costs to reap large savings later. Share best practice so that individual governments don’t have to start open data efforts from scratch. And hire a few good experts. For instance, the winner of the first Government Big Data Solutions Award was the US General Service Administration’s USASearch. “It delivers better search results to more than 500 government websites,” explains Gourley. The GSA’s secret? “They found a smart young programmer [Loren Siebert, also a noted San Francisco entrepreneur] and teamed him with GSA senior executives,” says Gourley. How big, how open and how farreaching can data get? Physicist and sociologist Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich has proposed a €1 billion system that taps into every conceivable type of data to predict the future. Says Pilcher: “You can take this as far as you can take software – which goes as far as imagination can take you.”

i

More information http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/ Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_ data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation

The classroom of the future is here Innovative teachers + technology + smart policies = the active learning and collaborative skills required for the 21st century

F 24

SKILLS & EDUCATION

BY DIANE HOFKINS

T

eenagers in Ghent, Belgium, track down farmers, asking if they can rent a chicken. Then they tweet their classmates to report on their hunt for eggs and to seek advice on growing wheat. Their assignment: produce a loaf of bread absolutely from scratch by next spring. This coming together of old and new technology, part of a project at Sint-Lieven school called Generation Y, brings new meaning to the idea of learning by doing and new life to the subject of geography. Welcome to the classroom of the future: a farm. In Hellerup school in Copenhagen, a couple of children curl up in a comfy corner, heads touching as they share a laptop, while trying to figure out which of the 7 million search results on wind farms will provide valid information for their environmental project. Welcome to the classroom of the future: a sofa. If a child was asked to describe a futuristic classroom, she might talk about riding her jet-pack to a desk-filled space where a whirring machine pumps her head full of information. But adults like Steven Ronsijn, the ICT coordinator at Sint-Lieven school, and Lisolette Nylander, Hellerup’s principal, recognise that learning does not need to take place in a classroom at all. Learning can be anytime, anywhere. It should be active and exciting and it will be assisted – not driven – by technology. Even the most brilliant teachers, the smartest bureaucrats and the savviest business people don’t know precisely what the jobs of the future will be. But they can identify the attributes that successful jobseekers will need: the ability to work in

Children at Hellerup school in Copenhagen are immersed in learning

groups, to solve problems imaginatively and to think creatively – skills that industry complains are in short supply even now. Schools themselves will become more like laboratories or art studios, to encourage the innovation and open-ended thinking that Europe needs to thrive in the 21st century. Hellerup school has already done away with traditional classrooms; its open-plan building was constructed nine years ago with flexibility, cooperation and adventure in mind. Lessons are introduced in home areas, and then students move to a quiet corner or a busy space to learn in groups, pairs or by themselves. Teachers act like mentors, guiding students toward ways of learning that suit them and the topic at hand. As for the curriculum, says Principal Nylander, “We believe [the students] need to do more than just the subjects, because subjects today are not the same as they will be in the future.” That’s where technology comes in. “Our children are really good at collaborating,” she says. “In policy terms, I think the single biggest thing is to stop thinking about technology as though we are going to insert it into a static curriculum,” says Professor Richard Noss, co-director of the London Knowledge Lab at the Institute of Education, University of London. “Digital technology is different to what came before because it’s possible to do things that were impossible before.” One example is the mathematics of change. You used to need to understand differential equations to visualise complicated scenarios, like global weather patterns or demographic growth. With animated computer graphics illustrating these variations, a class can have a more meaningful discussion about >>

This article and the “Education Report Card” that follows were published in December 2011 (Futures 9).

F 25

>> such crucial issues as climate change or population growth. While many schools and governments remain ambivalent about technology, experts such as Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Education at Microsoft, are confident that truly radical change is on the way. One reason is simple economics. Digital technology will become cheaper than textbooks, and provide a “more immersive” experience. For instance, technology can introduce Mandarin without a Chinese

teacher, examine atoms in 3D or, with gadgets such as Kinect, help students with physical disabilities. Much as the printing press transformed the world 600 years ago, IT is set to bring us into a qualitatively different era, he predicts – and policy makers across Europe must ensure their schools can make the most of it. The transformation will need teachers with top-quality training and support, parents who are involved and governments with an eye to the long haul, not the quick fix.

F 26

Julie Munkager is a maths teacher at Nordvestskolen in Elsinore, Denmark, where the local authority has provided every primary child with a netbook. “They grow with it,” she says. “It helps them improve different skills. They’re sharing. They communicate on a lot of different platforms. They’re better at connecting the visual things with the writing.” Research has shown that good hardware is a wasted investment unless the teachers know how to make the most of it – a lesson that governments have often missed. In

SKILLS & EDUCATION

Learning can be anytime, anywhere. It should be active and exciting and it will be assisted – not driven – by technology. Elsinore, Microsoft has worked with teachers like Julie Munkager through its Partners in Learning programme, helping them use technology more innovatively. “If there’s one thing that has an impact on the school curriculum it’s probably the assessment system,” says Gavin Dykes, an independent international education consultant. “The question is: If your students have access to the Internet during exams what questions are you going to ask them? In that one simple move you start to take on elements of 21st-century learning.” Obviously, in the world of work, web access is a given, so Denmark is piloting exams in which it’s okay to search the Internet for answers. The smartphones that children carry in their pockets present a similar challenge. They already enable students to communicate, calculate, do research and document their work with photos. Yet many schools ban them in class, where they can be a distraction, and in exams where, in an effort to stop cheating, their possession can be a serious offence. No mobile phones? Steven Ronsijn, who was named Innovative Teacher Europe 2011 by Microsoft for his GenY project, manages to stimulate his students – they give up their breaks and lunchtimes to take part in his sustainable energy computer-game and trafficmonitoring projects among others – in spite of the no mobile phone policy at Sint-

Lieven school. But GenY kids also go off campus, to rooms and real offices where restrictions on laptops, mp3 players and mobile phones are non-existent. As the GenY website says, “We do away with the taboo that ‘learning only happens within school walls.’” For Valerie Thompson, director of the eLearning Foundation in the UK, technology offers nothing less than the opportunity to close the stubborn attainment gap between rich and poor. This matters not only to individual children but to Europe’s economic well-being. Thompson argues that governments should focus on providing families in need with computer hardware and Internet access. “So much of learning outcomes between rich and poor depends on what happens at home,” she says. “Technology means for the first time we can actually address the kind of learning support that children get at home. For me, leadingedge schools are ones that acknowledge that children learn 24/7.” Skills development combined with universal access will help countries grow their technological footprint, says Salcito. “The connection between workforce readiness and employability skills is much tighter and much more aligned with the early years of schooling.” With so much innovation going on throughout Europe, can schools and government “scale up” innovation, broadening it to include more students in

F 27

more countries? Anthony Salcito argues that politicians’ obsession with finding out “what works” is a “waste of time”. Informally, the Internet makes it much easier for teachers to share ideas and to choose the ones they like. But systemically, it’s not realistic to believe you can capture one person’s ideas and plunk them down somewhere else, where the ethos, culture and children are different. Instead, we need to investigate “root cause thinking”; what processes did the innovators go through and what were the conditions? For policy-makers, technology should help these investigations. A Microsoftsponsored programme called PiLSR (Partners in Learning School Research) is studying how educational transformation actually takes place, with a focus on three aspects: learning beyond the classroom, IT integration into the learning process and student-centred learning. Governments and schools can use the online tool, which is free and available in 34 languages, to see how their individual schools and local authorities are doing and compare them with other countries. As Hellerup School and the GenY project show – each in a different way – technology helps students accomplish real-world things, with excitement, energy, collaboration and imagination. The classrooms of the future already exist. Europe just needs more of them.

While the West has the best universities... RANK

EDUCATION REPORT CARD International rankings confirm Europe “must do better” On most international rankings of universities, Europe does not do very well (holding only 13 of the top 50 places in the QS World University Rankings, even if you include Switzerland). And when it comes to 15-year-olds who take the standardised PISA test (see table opposite page), European countries trail their Asian counterparts, often by a wide margin. Among EU countries, Finland has the school students who do best in reading, math and science. One reason: for decades, all governments, left and right, have recognised that education is critical for economic growth. That focus helps explain why Finland moved up three places to No. 4 in the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Competitiveness Report. The strength of the Chinese education system is making the country more innovative, as the steep trajectory of its number of home-grown patents shows.

INSTITUTION

COUNTRY

1

University of Cambridge United Kingdom

2

Harvard University

3

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) United States

4

Yale University

United States

5

University of Oxford

United States

RANK

INSTITUTION

COUNTRY

28 National University of Singapore (NUS) Singapore 29 The University of Manchester

United Kingdom

30 University of Bristol

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

31 The University of Melbourne

Australia

6

Imperial College London United Kingdom

32 Kyoto University

Japan

7

UCL (University College London) United Kingdom

33 École Normale Supérieure

France

8

University of Chicago

United States

9

University of Pennsylvania

34 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) United States

United States

35 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland

10 Columbia University

United States

11 Stanford University

United States

12 California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

United States

13 Princeton University

United States

38 The University of Sydney

Australia

14 University of Michigan

United States

39 Brown University

United States

15 Cornell University

United States

16 Johns Hopkins University

United States

40 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Hong Kong

17 McGill University

Canada

41 University of Wisconsin-Madison

United States

18 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

Switzerland

42 Seoul National University

Korea, South

19 Duke University

United States

43 Carnegie Mellon University

United States

44 New York University (NYU)

United States

45 Osaka University

Japan

46 Peking University

China

47 Tsinghua University

China

20 University of Edinburgh United Kingdom 21 University of California, Berkeley (UCB) United States 22 University of Hong Kong Hong Kong 23 University of Toronto

Canada

24 Northwestern University United States

36 École Polytechnique

France

37 The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong

25 The University of Tokyo

Japan

48 The University of Queensland

Australia

26 Australian National University

Australia

49 The University of New South Wales

Australia

27 King’s College London (University of London)

United Kingdom

50 The University of Warwick

United Kingdom

QS World University Rankings, 2011-2012

F 28

SKILLS & EDUCATION

...China has the best school students LEVEL 5 LEVEL 6

READING

MATHEMATICS

SCIENCE

...and Chinese innovation is growing fast

EU countries SHANGHAI - CHINA

SHANGHAI - CHINA

SHANGHAI - CHINA

NEW ZEALAND

SINGAPORE

SINGAPORE

SINGAPORE

HONG KONG - CHINA

FINLAND

FINLAND

CHINESE TAIPEI

NEW ZEALAND

JAPAN

KOREA

JAPAN

KOREA

SWITZERLAND

HONG KONG - CHINA

FINLAND

AUSTRALIA

CANADA

JAPAN

GERMANY

BELGIUM

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

NETHERLANDS

CANADA

UNITED STATES

NEW ZEALAND

KOREA

NETHERLANDS

CANADA

UNITED KINGDOM

FRANCE

LIECHTENSTEIN

SWITZERLAND

SWEDEN

GERMANY

ESTONIA

ICELAND

MACAO - CHINA

BELGIUM

NORWAY

AUSTRALIA

SLOVENIA

SWITZERLAND

SLOVENIA

LIECHTENSTEIN

UNITED KINGDOM

FRANCE

UNITED STATES

OECD AVERAGE

ICELAND

CHINESE TAIPEI

GERMANY

AUSTRIA

IRELAND

ISRAEL

OECD AVERAGE

OECD AVERAGE

POLAND

SLOVAK REP

CZECH REP

IRELAND

ESTONIA

FRANCE

HUNGARY

CZECH REPUBLIC

SWEDEN

ESTONIA

DENMARK

AUSTRIA

ITALY

SWEDEN

POLAND

LUXEMBOURG

LUXEMBOURG

ICELAND

GREECE

POLAND

DENMARK

DUBAI (UAE)

NORWAY

LUXEMBOURG

CHINESE TAIPEI

HUNGARY

NORWAY

CZECH REP

UNITED STATES

SLOVAK REP

AUSTRIA

UNITED KINGDOM

ITALY

PORTUGAL

PORTUGAL

DUBAI (UAE)

DENMARK

ITALY

HUNGARY

LIECHTENSTEIN

SPAIN

MACAO - CHINA

SLOVENIA

LITHUANIA

LITHUANIA

SLOVAK REP

IRELAND

RUSSIAN FED

SPAIN

DUBAI (UAE)

PORTUGAL

CROATIA

ISRAEL

SPAIN

RUSSIAN FED

GREECE

ISRAEL

LATVIA

CROATIA

LATVIA LITHUANIA

TURKEY

LATVIA

MACAO - CHINA

RUSSIAN FED

GREECE

BULGARIA

CROATIA

BULGARIA

TRINIDAD & T

BULGARIA

TRINIDAD & T

TURKEY

SERBIA

URUGUAY

URUGUAY

TRINIDAD & T

QATAR

QATAR

URUGUAY

TURKEY

BRAZIL

QATAR

350 300 250

CHILE

SERBIA

THAILAND

ARGENTINA

SERBIA

ROMANIA

THAILAND

ROMANIA

KAZAKHSTAN AZERBAIJAN

JORDAN

COLOMBIA

MONTENEGRO

ROMANIA

PANAMA

ARGENTINA

KAZAKHSTAN

PERU

BRAZIL

MONTENEGRO

MEXICO

PANAMA

KAZAKHSTAN

PERU

PERU

THAILAND

ALBANIA

MEXICO

JORDAN

PANAMA

TUNISIA

TUNISIA

JORDAN

COLOMBIA

ALBANIA

TUNISIA

ALBANIA

KYRGYZSTAN

COLOMBIA

KYRGYZSTAN

INDONESIA

INDONESIA

AZERBAIJAN

AZERBAIJAN

KYRGYZSTAN

INDONESIA

150

50 0 2003

JAP

2004

2005

USA

2006

EPO

2007

KR

Patents issued for home-grown innovations. Thomson Reuters: Patented in China II, 2010

BRAZIL

MONTENEGRO

200

100

CHILE

CHILE ARGENTINA

MEXICO

BASIC PATENT VOLUME 2003-2009

(x 1,000)

AUSTRALIA HONG KONG - CHINA

Countries are ranked in descending order of the percentage of top performers (Levels 5 and 6). Source: OECD PISA 2009 Database.

F 29

2008

2009

CHN

Life support for the planet: Trees and climate change Software tools that help researchers study the role of forests could help predict and mitigate the rapid changes occurring in the Earth’s environment.

BY MICHAEL KENWARD

T

he notion that it is a bad idea to have your head in the clouds does not apply to trees. As they reach upwards in an attempt to outgrow their neighbours, trees play an important part in the Earth’s climate, soaking up carbon dioxide and returning oxygen to the atmosphere in the process. So, if we really want to understand our changing climate, it is important to know what is going on in the

planet’s tree cover. Forests contain two-thirds of Earth’s biodiversity: trees store as much carbon as is in the atmosphere. Such facts are critical to understanding the ramifications of climate change – and how we can best respond. But unlike other key factors such as ocean dynamics, the effects of forest dynamics – how tree populations interact and impact the environment – remain uncharted territory. Scientists from Microsoft Research in

This article comes from the December 2009 issue (Futures 5). More recently, research ecologists at the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group developed a wide suite of tools, including FetchClimate, a free, easy-touse, cloud-based, intelligent data-retrieval service for historic (1900-2010) climate information like wind speeds, temperatures and rainfall.

F 30

ENVIRONMENT

Birch forest on the Ural taiga

Cambridge, UK, are working to understand the role of vegetation, especially trees, in the climate. To do this, the researchers collect data on vegetation cover and weather from satellites and build sophisticated computer models. Drew Purves, one of Microsoft’s research ecologists, heads the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group (CEES), which is part of the Computational Science group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Coming at a time when concern about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions is acutely heightened, the need for such work, Purves says, is obvious. “I’ve realised that we have a real responsibility as ecologists to do whatever we can to address the problems of climate change and biodiversity,” he says. ”This really is an important problem.”

Purves leads the group’s Plant Ecology research unit and some of the work in the Spatial Ecology and Biogeography research unit. “The research undertaken within the Plant Ecology research unit aims to provide – eventually – a quantitative, scientific basis for the management of plant communities,” he says. Computational skills CEES is one of many groups around the world that are working on environmental issues. It is bringing Microsoft’s computing skills to the challenge by developing computational tools and methods to predict and mitigate the rapid changes occurring in the Earth’s life support systems. The research depends heavily on developments in computation. This includes computational modelling of

F 31

complex systems, integrating models and data, data acquisition and management, and visualisation techniques. And that’s not all. These software tools must also be usable, easily maintained and capable of being adapted in the future. Working for Microsoft marks a return to Cambridge for Purves. He studied ecology at Cambridge University before going on to a PhD in ecological modelling at the University of York. He then spent nearly six years in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University before joining Microsoft Research in Cambridge in 2007. “My research focuses on the dynamics of populations and communities of plants, especially forests,” says Purves. “Forests are made of trees, and trees are made of carbon. “And we know that >>

>> forests are processing and storing large amounts of carbon. When trees grow, they remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in wood. But eventually, every tree dies, and the wood rots or burns, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere. There’s a potential for a huge effect of that cycling and storage of carbon on the future of the Earth’s climate.” The research he and his associates are pursuing addresses fundamental scientific questions that could help conservationists and governmental officials decide how to protect the climate. His work has produced more than 20 scientific papers in such prestigious journals as Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Stephen Pascala of the Department of

unit works on such important topics as tree mortality. Important as this may be, there are still huge gaps in our understanding of the nature or magnitude of variation in tree mortality, how it depends on species, climate, or extreme events, or how best to include it in simulation models. “An overarching concern is the impact of climate change on plant communities, and what we can do to mitigate these effects,” says Purves. “Depending on the project, the research requires everything from pure theorising to making new discoveries about basic ecological processes.” The group’s work has implications beyond understanding trees and vegetation. “Hopefully, the new software tools that we are developing for this research will enable others to generate

“An overarching concern is the impact of climate change on plant communities.” Drew Purves, head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University co-authored the Science paper “Predictive Models of Forest Dynamics”. “Until now,” he says, “one of the most important pieces of the climate change jigsaw has been missing. We argue that we can significantly further our understanding of forest dynamics if scientists work together to use new computational techniques and data sources. We feel that these discoveries could unlock the climate change mysteries of forests on a global scale in as little as five years.” A part of the work includes developing accurate predictive models. “Most of the research involves nonlinear models, large amounts of data, and the computational statistics needed to combine the two,” explains Purves. Models help researchers to take their knowledge of what goes on in individual trees and to extrapolate it to whole forests. For example, the Plant Ecology research

predictive models for a wide variety of natural and artificial complex systems.” In recent years, a number of nations have invested in assessing their timber stocks, with an eye toward production forestry. For example, Russia has put a lot of effort into collecting data about its forests, which cover vast areas of the country. With more forests than any other country, Russia accounts for more than 20 per cent of global forests, an area larger than the continental USA. Timber is also an important part of the country’s exports. So it is important to understand what is happening in the country’s forests. A trillion trees Something like a trillion “canopy” trees – trees that when mature have proper crowns – grow around the planet. The fate of all those trees is important when we want to investigate the likely effects of climate change.

F 32

This is why researchers want to know where the trees are, along with other vegetation. While we have a reasonable understanding of ocean dynamics, we know much less about forest dynamics, how tree populations interact and affect the environment. Earth observation satellites are important tools in gathering data for environmental models. They can investigate vegetation cover in places that are inaccessible to people. Satellites can carry arrays of different sensors that can gather huge amounts of data. The challenge is to process and understand the information in that data torrent. Satellite monitoring of vegetation for large territories, as well as high-resolution climate modelling, can provide the missing data for the impact studies. The combination of satellite data and massive computer power, along with new mathematical algorithms, makes it possible to develop models of how tree populations interact and affect the environment. With the tools at hand, the researchers hope to be able to predict how trees and forests will develop over the years. Purves and colleagues use such data for more far-reaching purposes. Trees and forests are “a hugely underutilised resource”, he says, “some of the largest ecological data sets in the world in terms of sample sizes and potential impact. These are a bit like ecology’s equivalent of the Human Genome Project. They’re just enormous, millions of individual trees. It’s really exciting.” “We suggest that the convergence of recently developed mathematical models, improved data sources, and new methods in computational data analysis could produce a step change in the realism of these models,” Purves says. “That would give us truly invaluable information to help manage the world’s forests and understand their impact on our climate.”

i

More information http://research.microsoft.com/enus/people/dpurves/ http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/cambridge/groups/science/tools/

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & SMEs

Here’s how one Dublin company set out to deliver low-cost human resource management tools over the Internet

HRLocker CEO John Dennehy (centre) and his team set up operations overnight in China

Going global in 60 minutes BY CORMAC SHERIDAN

T

he arrival of cloud computing prompted John Dennehy to start another business. The Irish serial entrepreneur (he founded Upstart Games) was convinced that many small businesses would shift to buying software and computer services over the Internet – the so-called cloud – because it would allow them to save money, grow faster and go global at a fraction of the cost. “In less than one hour of engineering time, you can recreate your company’s entire infrastructure anywhere in the world,” says Dennehy, founder and CEO of HRLocker, a cloud-based start-up based in Cork, Ireland. In 2009, he set to work offering low-cost human resource (HR) management tools to companies that had outgrown informal HR management based on spreadsheets and paper records, but remained too small to justify the investment of large-scale “enterprise” software. HRLocker already provides services to 30 companies. Early adopters range from an Irish filling station using HRLocker to roster its part-time staff to an international Fortune 500 electronics firm, which has rolled out the software to cover 120 staff

members in 14 countries instead of adding them to its existing resource-planning system. Irish web analytics firm Bluemetrix, with offices in Dublin and Tokyo and a staff of 25, uses HRLocker for holiday-tracking. Dennehy launched HRLocker with €50,000 of his own capital and €250,000 in seed funding from Irish investors including Enterprise Ireland, the state economic development agency. “Two or three years ago, start-up technology companies would have been forced to use inferior technology to try to compete with the biggest and bestfunded companies in the world,” says Frank Walsh, a partner at Enterprise Equity in Cork, which invested €100,000 in HRLocker. “Now, the availability of infrastructure in the cloud has levelled the playing field, giving smaller technology companies a fighting chance against the big guys.” The shift to cloud computing also allows small companies to decouple their service from a geographic location: HRLocker markets throughout Europe and Asia. While in China, Dennehy was able to show HRLocker’s software to potential clients by tapping into a Microsoft data centre in Hong Kong with no need for remote deployment,

Since this article was published in December 2011 (Futures 7), John Dennehy, the founder of HR Locker, has launched another cloud-based venture, Zartis, which helps companies recruit talent using the Web and social media.

F 33

configuration or testing. “Our solution has to be available everywhere, and cloud computing avoids the need to install servers in other people’s premises, which is a nightmare to manage.” New software versions can be rolled out in real time. Companies that use cloud services pay a monthly information technology bill, like an electricity bill. HRLocker’s monthly charges are currently under €1,000. “We’d much prefer to be involved in a company’s core technology and value creation rather than in building the infrastructure to start that process,” says Walsh. HRLocker benefited from Microsoft’s BizSpark start-up programme. The scheme provides young companies free access to Microsoft development tools for the Windows Azure cloud-computing platform, and to its office productivity software. Support, training and business development assistance are also part of the package. Plus Dennehy “rents” IT infrastructure from Microsoft, thus avoiding the expense of buying and managing an in-house global technology platform. Dennehy’s top priority he says, is “to get a large volume of users”. As sales increase, scaling up its infrastructure is not a problem. HRLocker can upgrade any time to more powerful software and server capacity — and enter far-flung markets the minute Dennehy clinches a deal. For start-ups, going global is now a more viable game.

Zurich

Berlin

What economic downturn? European tech start-ups flourish in the storm University spin-offs are on the rise – and are surprisingly resilient – especially when they are backed by smart policies, out-of-the-box thinking and supportive ecosystems F 34

BY RHEA WESSEL AND GAIL EDMONDSON

V

ictor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, an online service that helps academic researchers organise and share the mounds of documents they collect, hardly looked up from his computer screen when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. He was immersed in the day-to-day routines of his start-up, including getting more users and securing the next round of venture capital. “We didn’t feel the effects of the financial crisis,” Henning says now. “Basically, if you have a great product and a great team and you can show that you have market traction, then you will always be able to find investment.” That comment comes from a 32-year-old entrepreneur in London – not Los Angeles. Despite the economic aftershocks of the 2008 financial market crash, which

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & SMEs

London

included a sharp decline in venture capital investment, Europe’s ability to innovate has not been choked off. In fact, it’s gaining momentum. In 2010, Europe produced a record crop of spin-offs from life sciences to information technology, according to an annual survey released in April 2012 by ProTon, the European Knowledge Transfer Association. And the trend line is up. The total number of spin-off companies launched in Europe in 2010 with the help of knowledge-transfer organisations (KTOs) was 579. That’s a 436 per cent increase from the 108 new ventures recorded in ProTon’s first survey in 2004. Now in its seventh year, the survey analyzes extensive data from 300 to 400 KTOs at universities and research institutes across Europe. This article was originally published in the June 2012 issue (Futures 10).

In the three economically tumultuous years since 2008, the number of spin-offs created at the European KTOs who participated in the survey rose on average by 6.9 per cent a year, and the number of active spin-offs jumped by an average 7.5 per cent per year. Better funding and mentoring That data may mark a turning point. Europe has long suffered from a syndrome of producing great basic research but failing to commercialise it. Now, despite Europe’s risk-averse culture, spin-offs like Mendeley, which was founded in Germany, seem to be multiplying – giving rise to hope that Europe can create the companies and jobs it needs to compete in a global knowledge economy. “More and more spin-off companies are being generated by academia and other research institutes all over Europe. They

F 35

are learning the game – and not only in the most advanced European countries,” says ProTon board member Andrea Piccaluga, a professor of innovation management at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) produced 22 spin-offs in 2011 and a record 110 over the past five years. “I think we’ve come to a point where we have reached critical mass,” says Marjan Kraak, business development manager in biotech, medtech and diagnostics at ETH Zurich’s tech transfer office. “Despite the economic and financial crisis, we continue to see so many startups forming.” What’s driving change? It took a decade or more of learning, but Europe is becoming more effective at nurturing entrepreneurs. Not only are European research universities and institutes developing better funding and mentoring >>

>> programmes, they are now linking with local and regional government offices and business angels to create more complete networked innovation ecosystems, Piccaluga says. Of course, the depressed markets may also increase the allure of starting a new venture in Europe, since jobs are scarce anyway. “In difficult economic times, people are much more obliged to think out of the box,” says Alex Brabers, who chairs the venture capital platform for the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. Besides, he says, the macroeconomic environment is much less important for early-stage ventures than for late-stage companies looking for growth. ETH Zurich’s Kraak concurs, but says government and university programmes are now helping make entrepreneurship a “manageable risk”. The alma mater of Albert Einstein, ETH Zurich is one of Europe’s leading spin-off hotspots, along with the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Finland’s Aalto University, Imperial College London, and the University of Cambridge. Each has devoted significant resources to supporting new ventures and hiring experts well versed in entrepreneurial best practice. Their programmes coach and fund company founders from lab to market, connecting them with both investors and industry – a far cry from incubators of the 1980s and 1990s, which mainly provided free office space and a bit of business-plan advice. Some universities even have developed specific entrepreneurship degrees, such as

Spin-offs per year

European spin-offs at a turning point?

Source: ProTon Europe

Karolinska Institutet’s Master’s in Bioentrepreneurship, and Aalto University’s new Ventures Program, which will offer a minor in entrepreneurship for students in economics, architecture and engineering this autumn. The University of Cambridge runs entrepreneurship modules for graduates and undergraduates at its Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, launched in 2003. Though many hotspots have been warming up for a decade or more – especially those in the UK and Switzerland – others have built critical mass surprisingly quickly. When the Technical University of Berlin launched its Centre for Entrepreneurship in 2007, spin-offs (recorded from 2000) were averaging 15.8 per year. That number has since doubled to an average 32.3 a year (2008 to 2010). “We’ve reached a point of strong growth,” says Agnes von Matuschka, director of the centre at TU Berlin, noting that a small core of promising companies have received international financing.

models, developers, analysts, headhunters and corporations. You name it. If you bring all these together, the chances of success increase substantially.”

What government can do Targeted government programmes are an important part of the ecosystem. They include monthly stipends of up to €2,500 for researchers interested in commercialising their technology, an accelerator programme to help German start-ups establish US subsidiaries and apply for US patents, and a matching-funds programme for business angels. Under this scheme, Germany offers each angel €250,000 over five years, allowing the investor carte blanche to match up to 50 per cent of his or her angel investment in a particular start-up with the government funds. Finland’s Aalto University is also off to a quick start. Though it opened in 2010, when three Helsinki universities specialising in engineering, business and design were merged, it already has produced more than 25 spin-offs. Finnish start-ups are becoming Creating the right ecosystem “more and more robust”, says Will Cardwell, Before designing TU Berlin’s programme, director of Aalto’s Center for Entrepreneurship and a former US von Matuschka benchmarked successful investment banker and venture capitalist. entrepreneurship programmes at Stanford, “The coaching is a significant driver.” MIT and ETH Zurich. Her centre now As Aalto’s three founding universities were employs a staff of 25 professionals who merging, a student-led grassroots coach TU students, researchers and entrepreneurship society already was professors on how to set up a company, building links to Silicon Valley, sending its obtain venture capital and win government grants to commercialise their technology. best student entrepreneurs there for stints The efforts got quick traction: “A community of up to six months and sponsoring has formed with events internships at hot US start-ups. Last year, Aalto’s Center for Entrepreneurship inked a and places where entrepreneurs can meet,” three-year partnership with Stanford she says, a hive of spin-off University’s Technology Ventures Program that included joint programmes and activity. Berlin’s start-up scene workshops on innovation and has come of age thanks to entrepreneurship. All that networking is helping raise the this networked community, says Brabers, profile of Europe’s new spin-offs. Two-yeara 22-year veteran of the old Finnish mobile start-up Blaast, which venture industry. “In order was founded in part by Aalto researchers, to flourish, start-ups need raised €2.6 million last year in a seed capital good ecosystems. These round led by Ambient Sound Investments, a consist not just of VCs and company launched by four of Skype's entrepreneurs, but founding engineers. Silicon Valley start-up service providers, role guru Steve Blank and a group of Finnish

F 36

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & SMEs

Stockholm Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet founded this science park to commercialise its academic innovations. It is now home to some 65 start-ups

says Dominique Foray, chair in economics and innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

business angels also invested in Blaast, which launched the world’s first cloudbased platform for mobile “feature phones” – cellphones that are not fully fledged smartphones – in January. Tapping global networks Aalto’s award-winning Startup Sauna “open source seed accelerator” programme supports entrepreneurship throughout the Nordic region. It helped Tampere University of Technology spin-out Ovelin raise €1 million from Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Cardwell says that there are more announcements in the pipeline, and that spinout activity is bringing the Finnish university network closer together. The speed and ease of connecting in a globally networked economy are also fuelling intercontinental entrepreneurial ties. The Technology and Knowledge Transfer Office at the Budapest University of Technology told researcher Tamas Haidegger in 2010 that his technology to scan hands for infection was crying out for commercialisation. Encouraged, Haidegger founded his own company, Clariton, won a grant from Contact Singapore, a Singapore government agency helping people relocate to the island and conducted his first clinical trials of his hand disinfection monitoring system there. Clariton CEO Haidegger won the 2012 Science|Business Academic Enterprise award for young entrepreneurs.

The effort by European universities and governments to connect students and professors with entrepreneurial meccas in the US, Israel and Asia is a key driver accelerating the creation of start-ups. The exchanges, which run from two weeks to a year, create a viral learning environment, giving European start-ups three critical elements they lacked in the past: instant validation for cutting-edge technology, role models and bridges to dense networks of investors. Missing link Europe’s start-up scene still has a long way to go to match California’s. Its largest companies need to become more active in stimulating innovation and taking up new technologies. In the US, large tech companies nurture the start-up ecosystem by co-funding university research and adopting new products quickly. That creates a virtuous circle leading to more excellent research and more potential spin-offs. The European Commission has tried to bridge the industry-university gap by launching the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT). In addition, the EU’s European Research Council (ERC) provides grants to scientists that are based on excellence, a move experts say is strengthening European research – a result applauded by industry. “The quality of research is the main driver for innovation,”

F 37

Survival rate is key The real test, of course, is how many of Europe’s promising tech spin-offs will grow into globally competitive companies. The overall survival trend in Europe is too recent to judge, says ProTon’s Piccaluga. He figures that for every 100 spin-offs, there will be only ten success stories. “That is not a failure,” he says. “That is the price we have to pay to produce ten stars.” At ETH Zurich, which has been compiling data for over a decade, the aggregate survival rate for spin-offs created between 1998 and 2007 is 88.5 per cent (115 out of 130 spin-offs have endured). One survivor launched in 2008 is Optotune, which has invented adjustable optical lenses based on elastic polymers – a breakthrough that lowers the cost and increases the quality of lenses used for mobile-phone cameras, machine vision, microscopes and other optical devices. While financial markets were crashing, Optotune’s co-founders inked a contract with a US telecommunications supplier worth several million dollars to develop lenses for mobile-phone cameras. The four-year-old company, which now employs 30 and recently moved to a new 1500-square-metre office and labs, is funding its growth entirely through development projects. ETH Zurich’s spin-off dynamic is already producing enviable economic dividends. The 130 spin-offs tracked in its 10-year survey have created more than 900 direct jobs and in 2007 alone paid an estimated 18 million Swiss francs in tax revenues to local and federal government on estimated pre-tax income of 43 million Swiss francs. That’s a strong incentive to keep working on building a better climate for Europe’s entrepreneurs.

i

More information http://www.protoneurope.org

The virtual physiological human:

The search for computing’s supermodel

F 38

HEALTH

Is this the ultimate challenge: to use computational techniques to construct a model of how the human body works? Nuala Moran takes a look

M

uch of the costly failure of drugs in development comes not because a product is ineffective in treating the disease, but because toxic side effects make it unsafe to use. But what if rather than waiting until the lengthy and expensive process of preclinical development is complete, it was possible to test not only for side effects, but also activity on the target, in a computer model? Using computer models and simulations for early stage testing in drug discovery is but one example of the potential applications of the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative. This is a €72 million European Commission-funded group of projects that are setting down the framework for a computer model of the human body. The model encompasses physiology from single biochemical pathways, to the orchestration of these reactions in the cells, tissues and organs that make up the body. Like an architect’s drawing, this framework will provide the plan and the standards to allow researchers in any discipline, anywhere, to collaborate and contribute to the building of the Virtual Physiological Human itself. It will also mean the model is constructed in such a way that it can readily be customised, or rather personalised, by feeding in patient data to make the model relevant to a particular individual.

Denis Noble, emeritus professor at Oxford University and a founding father of computational physiology, is credited with initiating the modeling of human organs, creating the first model of the heart in 1960. Noble, still a leader in the field, has continued to develop his virtual heart ever since, and has been joined by hundreds of other researchers modelling myriad other aspects of the body. For example, researchers at the Computational Biology Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge are working on models that simulate the four-dimensional formation of organs. They have developed a model of the formation of the pancreas in the mouse embryo, which traces the development of the three dimensional structure over time – creating a 4-D simulation. When the program is run it gives a virtual real-time view of the growth of the pancreas from a few isolated stem cells to an integrated structure. The model is interactive. This means that the signal pathways that are activated in the model can be changed, resulting in altered patterning as the pancreas develops. In other words, the model can be used to test hypotheses about the specific factors that drive organogenesis, the process by which organs develop. While such experiments carried out by computer programs cannot yet replace live experiments, they can inform them, saving time and resources.

This article, published in June 2009 (Futures 4), was one of the first to set out the EC’s ambitious Virtual Physiological Human Initiative. Among the projects now funded under the initiative: technologies to predict the risk of bone fracture in osteoporosis patients; projects to simulate tumour development in certain cancers and to track their response to treatment; and imaging-based modelling to improve diagnostic and therapeutic devices for cardiovascular problems.

F 39

“From the work to date, I would say it is a realistic ambition to model a whole organism,” says one Microsoft researcher.i. “But it will take time and it needs a lot of effort.” Putting it all together In parallel with the rise of computer modelling of human biology, the reductionist techniques of molecular biology have provided deep insights into the thousands of individual components– genes, proteins, cells, hormones, enzymes and their associated effects on each other and on the body – that are involved in the functioning of the human body. Now the Virtual Physiological Human initiative aims to make it possible to take these Lego bricks of molecular biology and the partial models developed by Noble and his counterparts, understand where the individual pieces go, and glue them together in a single, comprehensive computer model that replicates the interactions and complexity of the human body. According to the roadmap for the project, drawn up under STEP (Strategy for the EuroPhysiome, a project funded as part of the European Union’s Framework 6 research programme), the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative is not aiming to create the model itself. Instead, it aims to create the structure that will enable researchers working on elements of the overall model to “share observations, to derive predictive hypotheses from them and to integrate them into a consistently improving understanding of human physiology/ pathology, by regarding it as a single system”. “The ambition and scope of completing the model itself is decades long,” says Peter Coveney, Professor of Physical Chemistry and Director of the Centre for >>

The translation of computer models and simulation technologies from fundamental research into clinical use “is one of the most important challenges in the coming years”. Rafael Sebastian, Barcelona Centre for Computational Imaging and Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine

>> Computational Science at University College London, who is one of the project’s leaders. “But the framework we will set up will allow other research programmes and funding agencies to contribute and continue with the work.” Not only is the framework meant to overcome the division of human biology into organ, tissue, cell, protein and gene, or subsystems such as the gastrointestinal, cardiovascular or musculoskeletal, but also to replace the fragmentation of expertise into different disciplines, each with a different lexicon. Within the framework of

the Virtual Physiological Human initiative, specialists from different disciplines will be able to work together, using a common language. Building a Virtual Physiological Human depends on recent increases in computer processing power, increasingly sophisticated algorithms and the development of grid computing, that make the project – if long-term – a realistic objective. It also requires a shift in perspective, from reductionist molecular biology to viewing the human body as a highly organised and massively parallel processing system. Microsoft Research at the University of Trento Center for Computational and Systems Biology in Italy is working at this intersection of biology and computing to develop new conceptual and computational tools that will enhance understanding of the processes that are responsible for the large-scale properties and dynamics of the human body. One discipline is now feeding off the other, as increased understanding of how the body processes information leads to the development of new, more powerful computing tools, which can, in turn, be applied to biology. Into clinical practice To highlight its practical value and demonstrate that the overall framework is appropriate, the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative is funding a number of individual projects, to show modelling and simulation in action. “The point is that models need to be timely,” says Coveney. “There needs to be the ability to pull out data on an individual patient and run the model fast enough to impact on clinical decision making.”

F 40

Rafael Sebastian and colleagues at the Barcelona Centre for Computational Imaging and Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine are building a system, which when fed imaging datafrom computer tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and three-dimensional ultrasound will create a model of an individual’s heart. These structural models are driven by software that simulates the electrical activity of the heart, making it possible to predict the response to cardiac resynchronisation therapy in particular patients. “Our ultimate goal is to impact on the process of patient selection and the optimisation procedure [that is programming the device] carried out in patients that undergo this complex, expensive and not fully understood treatment,” says Sebastian. The researchers are currently validating their model against actual clinical data. Sebastian believes that such translation of computer modelsand simulation technologies from fundamental research into clinical use “is one of the most important challenges in the coming years”. As the roadmap for the Virtual Physiological Human says, “Currently, we are investigating the human body by pretending that it is a jigsaw puzzle made up of a trillion pieces. We are trying to understand the whole picture by looking only at a single piece or, maybe, a few closely interconnected pieces; it is no surprise that we are not finding it easy.” Researching for the future is never easy. But when it is complete, the framework will enable investigations of the human body as the single, hugely complex system that it is.

HEALTH

Meet the new biology Biologists have long had to fight against the idea that theirs is a “soft” science. Now, armed with tools from computer science, they are changing ideas about life itself. BY STEVE CONNOR

E

rnest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, may have started the jibes against traditional biology with his famous remark that everything in science is physics – the rest is mere “stamp collecting”. But biologists are fighting back against the idea that theirs is a “soft” science. There is a growing consensus that they must go beyond mere observations of living subjects and try to understand how cells and organisms are computing the vital information required for life. Since the unravelling of the structure of DNA, and the decoding of the recipe of life in every living cell, it has become apparent that life forms are more than mere collections of genes and proteins. They not only store information in the form of the DNA sequence, but they also process it by complex computation so that life, and order, can be organised from the inanimate substances and potential chaos of the living cell. Now, for the first time, the tools developed for computer science are being used to try to understand the complex computation we know as “life”. Indeed, according to Stephen Emmott, head of computational science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, the study of computation is poised to become as fundamental to biology as

mathematics is to physics. “We’ve had 50 years of spectacular success in molecular biology, culminating in the mapping of the genome, yet we still don’t know how a cell works,” Emmott says. “Cells perform computations 24 hours a day, continuously carrying out complex information processing and decision making, but no one is asking the question of what is it that cells compute, and how and why?” Emmott’s lab is asking those questions. At the centre of this revolutionary approach is the idea that living things are essentially information-processing systems, not just vast collections of interacting biological components. This means thinking of the biochemistry of life as “living software”. It’s not just about genes as a set of fixed, digital instructions. It’s considering cells and living things as information processing systems. Consider the immune system. This collection of genes controlling a vast array of proteins, antibodies and cells, is critical for our survival, yet very little is understood about how it processes the information that can make a difference between health and illness, life and death. “We are made up of 1015 [a million billion] cells, yet there are 1017 organisms that live in or on us. How the immune system keeps that balance, we don’t understand,” says Emmott. “If we can understand what the immune system does

This article appeared in June 2010 (Futures 6). This past summer, Stephen Emmott’s “Ten Billion” lectures at London’s Royal Court Theatre and the Avignon Festival highlighted the environmental, ecological and human health costs of the rapidly growing global population.

F 41

Stephen Emmott: How does a cell work?

it will open the doors to a complete revolution in medecine.” The brain is another biological information processor and Emmott’s lab is about to begin a new project in neuroscience, the discipline that he himself trained in. Historically, the field has been dominated by electrophysiology – the poking of neurons to measure the resulting reaction. The method Emmott is adopting, from the field of computational neuroscience, is quite different. “It’s about asking ‘what is it that the brain does?’, rather than saying ‘from all these recordings, the brain must do this’. ”The approach, pioneered by the late David Marr, “completely turned the field of neuroscience on its head,” Emmott says. Emmott has recruited some of the brightest minds to explore this new way of thinking about biology, from individual cells to the planetary biosphere. “Everyone here [is] the new kind of scientist, both theoretically underpinned and highly computational, who will drive important advances this century,” says Emmott. “Every project we do has very real-world implications. That’s precisely why we do them.”

Barcelona and the future for the cloud

BY CRISTINA JIMENEZ

A converted chapel in Barcelona is the home for a supercomputing centre that is helping to revolutionise the way we will use cloud computing

I

t almost seems like a metaphor for the new computer age. It certainly looks like a scene from a science-fiction film. The aisles of Torre Girona, a converted 19th-century chapel, no longer seat worshippers – instead, they hold one of Europe’s most powerful computers, managed by scientists at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the focus of Spain’s supercomputing effort.

That supercomputer is called MareNostrum (after the ancient Latin name for the Mediterranean Sea), and among the computer scientists who program it are people with serious ambitions for cloud computing. The BSC was inaugurated in 2006 to host the supercomputer, but the centre’s expertise in cloud computing had been building since the 1990s at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC-Barcelona Tech, which is strongly linked to the centre and provides

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center continues to research cloudcomputing applications for a variety of business services, such as workload management and machine learning. This article was originally published in June 2010 (Futures 6).

F 42

DIGITAL POLICY

Barcelona, eScience and cloud computing The BSC is taking part in a pioneering EU Framework Programme 7 project on cloud computing , Venus-C. This project aims to foster the development of a cloud computing platform based on virtualisation technologies not for individuals, but for industry and the scientific community. Several research communities across Europe, such as particle physicists or molecular biologists, are turning to eScience, sharing data and computing resources with grid and supercomputing technology. But these infrastructures are high-maintenance and not easy to sustain. Venus-C aims to incorporate virtualisation technologies with the goal of reducing the computing costs of eScience. In addition, the BSC is leading the Venus-C programming model task. “We are adapting our GRID programming model to enable the development of applications that could exploit the Venus-C platform,” explains Badia. Another goal of the project, which will finish in 2013, is to develop a toolkit to allow distributed computing infrastructures to provide their existing infrastructures as a cheaper service to the Venus-C user. The BSC’s EMOTIVE Cloud will be the testing ground to study the integration of the Venus-C platform with private clouds.

the lion’s share of its research force. As the Internet becomes faster and more robust, desktop or laptop computers will become, primarily, tools to access the cloud. “You will have a terminal – it can be a computer or any other gadget with an Internet connection – and just need a web browser to run a program or have access to your data,” says Jordi Torres, group manager of the Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms at the BSC. That in itself is not too much of a surprise. After all, the use of applications that live on the Internet has gained momentum since the beginning of the 21st century. Every time we check a web-based email, like Hotmail, or interact with our friends on social networking sites, we are

Jordi Torres, group manager of Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

“We introduce intelligent computing language in the software so that machines can take decisions autonomously and in real time.”

cloud computing. But the challenge for cloud computing now is for business to take advantage of it, says Eduard Aiguadé, director of the Computer Applications department at the BSC. It’s easy to see how cloud computing helps business: it cuts down costs because it optimises IT resources. The key to the cloud’s efficiency lies in virtualisation technologies. “They allow the creation of multiple virtual machines within a single physical computer,” Aiguadé explains. Virtualisation is to computing resources what a shared taxi ride is to fuel saving: with three passengers sharing a cab, you

get three times the service but only need the energy for one trip. Under the new paradigm, “tenants” hungry for computing resources will rent whatever computing power they need. With the hardware now cheap, it will be seen as one more utility, such as electricity or water. But much more is to come. A cloud that manages itself The ultimate goal of Barcelona’s cloud computing scientists is far more ambitious. “By applying artificial intelligence to the cloud, we are hoping to develop a system through which computers can manage >>

MareNostrum to help scientific progress Sahara dust forecasting, cancer genome sequencing or the design of computer’s next generation of microprocessors are among the scientific challenges that the BSC’s 63 teraflop (equivalent to the power of 210,000 standard PCs) MareNostrum is tackling at the moment. The internalisation of its research is also key to the BSC’s future, says Francesc Subirada, associate director. “We want to attract scientific talent to the centre, both from Spain and from abroad,” Subirada says. The BSC is one of the five core partners of the European Union’s PRACE project, a common effort to develop the next generation of petaflop supercomputers (a thousand times the speed of teraflop computers) to push European supercomputing to the level of that in the US and Japan.

F 43

Because it makes computing services easily available, cloud computing offers a huge range of possibilities to would-be IT entrepreneurs. >> themselves,” Torres explains. For example, computer scientists are looking to develop software that follows computers’ power consumption and regulates their operation according to the specific needs at any given time, thus reducing energy expenditure. Implanting artificial intelligence into codes that will run in the cloud to improve efficiency is one of the strong research lines at the BSC. It’s part of a drive to create applications, executed in the cloud, that go beyond basic automation to anticipate situations and take decisions in real time over the Internet. This type of application is what Torres calls Smart ICT. “We introduce intelligent computing language in the software so that machines can take decisions autonomously and in real time,” Torres explains. For example, the BSC was involved between 2006 and 2009 in the EU’s Framework project SORMA (SelfOrganising IT Resource Management). By creating intelligent algorithms for

businesses such as wholesalers of tangible goods (soap, say, or shoes), they aimed to maximise firms’ profits with the use of minimal computing resources. Another Framework project with the BSC fingerprint, which also finished in 2009, was BREIN (Business objective driven REliable and INtelligent grids for real business), building a bridge between today’s two main computing paradigms: grids, which are computing resources physically interconnected to achieve a common goal, and clouds, which are ondemand computing resources. If clouds could behave like grids, explains Rosa Maria Badia, GRID computing group manager at the BSC, it would be easier for companies in need of high-performance computing to outsource jobs by renting computer resources from the cloud, rather than having to purchase more of their own computing power. After the expertise gained in the SORMA and BREIN projects, the group led by Torres

Headquarters of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in calle Jordi Girona, Barcelona.

F 44

recently completed the development of a new BSC in-house cloud environment, EMOTIVE (Elastic Management Of Tasks In Virtualised Environments) Cloud-Barcelona (http://www.emotivecloud.net), an open source virtualisation software for implementing cloud computing solutions designed specifically to make life easier for scientists in need of highly efficient computing resources. Private clouds The BSC also leads the EU project Open Grid Forum – Europe, supporting the Open Grid Forum office in charge of standardising grid protocols and, since 2007, in charge of cloud-related topics too. One of the most interesting activities of the project at the moment, says Badia, is the Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group, which is looking at developing a standard interface for clouds. “This could allow private clouds to interact,” she points out. The future, Badia believes, is that corporations will own and manage their own private clouds. So, the outcomes of the Interface Working Group will have a significant impact on the business sector. But while some companies are already adapting to the new trend, many others in the ICT sector will have to adjust their business strategies to accommodate the coming changes. “A lot of companies will close their data processing centres and manage their IT systems remotely, which will compete only on the price of energy, as hardware is becoming cheaper all the time,” says Torres. Scientists estimate that about 2 to 3 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions come from computing-related activities. Because of this, there is an urgent need for optimised computing and there are many R&D efforts under way to address power consumption. “Smart ICT will be fundamental for a

DIGITAL POLICY

BSC-Microsoft Research Centre The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Microsoft joined forces in 2008 to create the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre. The centre focuses on the design and interaction of the next generation of microprocessors and software for the mobile and desktop markets. Computer architecture experts at BSC together with computer scientists at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, are looking for innovative solutions to the challenges and opportunities that massively parallel processing represents. “The vision of the centre is of a topdown computer architecture approach in which software requirements drive the hardware innovation forward rather than letting the hardware design condition software development,” explains Osman Unsal, director of the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre.

sustainable future because it optimises resources,” Torres believes. For example, power consumption sustainability is one of the key issues addressed by the BSC’s NUBAS project, which aims at developing a platform for business-oriented cloud applications using intelligent software. The project is led by Teléfonica R+D, the research department of Spain’s biggest IT company, and funded by Spain’s Ministry of Industry. But cloud computing also paves the way for the creation of new IT business. Because it makes computing services easily available, cloud computing offers a huge range of possibilities to would-be IT entrepreneurs. Torres, also a professor at UPC–Barcelona Tech, says to his students, “You just need to plug, go and have smart ideas.”

The fight against cyber crime An increasing global risk requires coordination from all stakeholders, public and private BY JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS, President, Microsoft International

E

very day more than a million people are successfully targeted by cyber criminals. That’s 14 adults every second. Malicious attacks are mushrooming and conservative estimates put the annual cost of cybercrime at $114 billion. Given this, it’s hardly surprising that the World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network recently elevated cybersecurity to a top five global risk, alongside issues such as income inequality, rising greenhouse gas emissions and fiscal imbalances. Recognizing the high stakes and potentially devastating consequences of a coordinated attack, many governments and organizations are stepping up their efforts to fight cybercrime. Devoting increased EU resources is a welcome step forward, but we must also acknowledge this as a global challenge. The network effect of cybercrime means that an attack is impossible to contain within geographic borders. There is a clear need for public-private partnerships to bolster Europe’s defenses – both at a regional and global level. That is why Microsoft hosted the EU Cybersecurity and Digital Crimes Forum in Brussels in May of this year. Bringing together European policymakers and many other stakeholders from the public and private sectors, we examined different aspects of the debate – from policy considerations to global cooperation. I was pleased to join Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner in charge of Home Affairs, Angel Gurria, Secretary-General of the Organization for

F 45

Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and many others to discuss the common goal we share – a safer internet – and how we can work toward it through improved collaboration and effectively combining private sector innovation with government for pursuing cybercriminals. For our part, we are deeply committed to working across the security industry and the IT ecosystem to create and deliver secure, private, and reliable computing experiences based on sound business practices. The experience we have gained since we established Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group ten years ago has given us deep insight into the current and future challenges faced by our customers and has also allowed us to create effective tools and methodologies to deal with those challenges. Addressing these risks is not easy, but it is fundamental to securing our economic stability. We look at the role of the ICT sector as a critical enabler of economic transformation and growth. In addition to being directly responsible for five per cent of GDP, around €660bn per year ICT has a huge impact on other industry sectors, which account for 75 per cent of the overall economic impact of the internet. Cybersecurity is of paramount importance as Europe seeks to identify new areas for growth. The region’s economic future depends on the protection of its internet infrastructure. This can only be achieved if global stakeholders, both public and private, all play a part.

DIGITAL POLICY

Personalised healthcare: the information challenge There is one game-changer that can turn the promise of personalised healthcare into a reality. It is healthcare IT, says Alan Davies.

A

round the world, the idea of personalised healthcare – broadly speaking, a combination of preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures to provide more precision to healthcare management and clinical outcomes – is gaining ground. In principle, the idea has been around since the Egyptian Imhotep first codified healing 4,500 years ago. Today, preventative and diagnostic elements may be anchored in one of a number of scientific and technical fields. They ensure better imaging, improved searching of patient databases or identification of biomarkers to predict health risk, provide targeted earlier diagnosis or monitor disease activity. The genomic revolution allows us to understand the increasing complexity of diseases we once thought of as single conditions. In the 1920s, for example, there were only two diagnoses for patients with bruising and fatigue: leukaemia or lymphoma. Today we know of around 38 types of leukaemia and 51 types of lymphoma, and the number is increasing. Each type is characterised by its distinct molecular profile, and this exquisite diagnostic guidance enables more specific

personalised treatment. But if the promise of personalised healthcare is to be fulfilled, the pace of innovation can only be managed by a convergence of technologies driven by information technology. At GE we think that healthcare IT (HCIT) will be the game changer for personalised healthcare – increasing consistency, advancing protocol-driven evidence-based medicine and delivering knowledge and healthcare at the bedside. An HCIT infrastructure of comprehensive electronic health records tied into patient-specific care will improve healthcare productivity and reduce medical errors. Take Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, for example. It found that by optimising processes it was able to improve clinical quality, and achieve 80 per cent evidence-based care across its facilities, compared with a US national average of 10 and 20 per cent. Currently, however, most HCIT is deployed in isolated systems and settings that do not interface well (the so-called “interoperability challenge”). This makes the systematic evaluation and enhancement of care across medical cultures and practices difficult. Standardisation of information exchange

Since this article was published in June 2010 (Futures 6), General Electric, through its healthcare IT business, and Microsoft have announced the formation of Caradigm, a 50-50 joint venture aimed at enabling health systems and professionals to use real-time, organisation-wide intelligence to improve healthcare quality and the patient experience.

F 46

Dr Alan Davies is Chief Medical Officer, EMEA, for GE Healthcare

between differing vendors and computer systems is a key challenge. Vendors and payers recognise interoperability as important and good progress has been made over the past 10 years with the development of global standards. But although complex, interoperability is not the really tough challenge for HCIT. Much harder is the “semantic problem”: how to interpret a diagnosis, preventative methodology or treatment in one culture and use the information in a different medical culture or language. With all these challenges, healthcare presents perhaps the most complex application of IT in any industry. Its intricate workflow interactions make digitisation more than just a technical or financial issue. That is why there is a compelling need for evidence-based evaluation of these HCIT systems to define their net benefits. Politicians talk of “meaningful change”. Healthcare systems will offer it not by simply setting out to replace paper, but as a first step towards higher-performing practice – improving healthcare productivity at an appropriate cost for as many patients as possible. If we are going to make the change, the insurance companies and reimbursement agencies that meet the health bills, and government, have no choice: they must work with industry to provide a consistent regulatory framework and incentives for healthcare providers to adopt broad-based and integrated HCIT.

Futures magazine was created in 2007 as a platform for debate and a

and case studies in innovation and R&D across Europe. It takes a unified

Futures 10, June 2012

showcase for best practices

and forward-looking view of current trends in areas like

technology and business.

After this 5th Anniversary edition, Futures will be

Futures 9, December 2011

science, environment,

exclusively online.

From now on you will

in your inbox. www.microsoft.eu/futures

Futures 8, June 2011

receive Futures directly