Keep it Sweet and Simple

I just finished reading the transcript of a talk by Hamming while at Bell-Labs (1986), which includes some great advices on research and work spirit overall.

http://www.chris-lott.org/misc/kaiser.html

These are some extracts:

‘ … each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn’t do you any good from one life to the next! Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?

I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck …. And I will cite Pasteur who said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” … The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is NOT … Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.”

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity ­ it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.

For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention ­ you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious.

I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling’ to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It’s very ugly; you shouldn’t have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, “Yes, that was good.” ‘

Clearly what has happened over the last days with the financial markets will give people lots of things to think about. Some will blame it on capitalism, others on politicians, others in human greedy nature, others in corruption and reckless financial engineering, others in the lack of regulation…

While all the above has had an impact, I believe that the root of the problem has been the failure of the trust and reputation tools used to determines the risk of financial assets. In the 21^st century, we do not yet know how to quantify *trust* in large uncontrolled environments (e.g. where financial assets get recombined all the time). In fact, the world has become so complex that we do not even know how to measure the value of what we create! … and this generates bubble after bubble after bubble.

And you may wonder why is it that I am talking about this? Well, because the Internet also suffered/suffers from similar problems, i.e. that of trust and reputation, and some Internet tools may help here. The Internet is too a large scale, unregulated distributed system, where information appears and gets mixed and re-mixed all the time (web pages, content aggregators, blogs, microblogging, etc). Before Google, it was rather cumbersome to find what you wanted and trust that it was the best page for that topic. But they provided a simple yet scalable way to evaluate the rank of a page, and even more, they managed to monetize such ranking information through ads — charging advertisers that want to appear close to highly ranked pages–, thus, probably creating the first bank and currency of the new trust economy.

As we move forward, reputation and trust will be among the most important things you will care about. After all, your time is finite and probably your most precious asset; and finding trusted goods is very time consuming. I would personally value being able to find a trusted doctor quickly, a reputed travel agency that offers me a good vacation package, or a good fund that won’t be full of subprime loans. And the same goes for companies, which will care about what is their reputation online at any point in time (e.g. right after launching a new product). So who will become the wall street of this new trust economy? Google? Facebook? Telcos?. Actually Telcos are in a very good position to become a bank of trust given that a lot of our online transactions happen through them.

Another problem with measuring trust is how to do it at scale. When a bank wants to lend to another bank or individual, it needs to determine the financial risk involve in that, however, with millions of customers and investments it is very hard to do it well. P2P has been very successful at scaling the delivery of information, so what about P2P lending and P2P reputation? This way, you scale the risk assessment process much better: each potential lender evaluates the risk of each potential borrower and rather than borrowing from the bank, you borrow from your neighbor. Done well, you shouldn´t have to pay higher interests than those offered by banks, and as a lender your risk should be lower. See CNN article on Peer-to-Peer lending

So I would say we pay less attention to the housing and information/IT economies and we focus in the new Trust economy

3D printers present a whole new range of opportunities for users and telecommunications companies. They could also completely shape the landscape of factories and shops as we know them today.

They look like basic printers (a bit bigger) and they can produce a 3D object from a digital model of the object by laying down layers after layers of a special material until complete. You can use different materials, ranging from polymers, titanium, or even gold powder.

What could you print? I can think of things such as industrial components (pipes, parts for cars), clothes (e.g. shoes), furniture, jewelry, and why not, chip designs for electronics, and food!! (see this article for a printer that produces sugar objects)

For now they are mostly used to build models for architects and fashion designers, and they are a bit slow, but you can imagine how the technology could improve over the years to come.

I first saw one working last year at the Renacer conference and since then I have been thinking about their possible implications.

How many times you have waited for a product that is out of stock? What if you could just download a detailed digital design of the product and have it printed at home?

At that point, a lot of factories and shops could well disappear! Everything would be intellectual property and data flowing around. We would just spend time thinking and designing, not so much doing hand labor. Finally, human kind would be freed to do what they can do best, thinking. That would be a revolution!

And for Telcos and networking companies that would be a great opportunity too. Imagine how many terabytes of data would need to be shipped from one corner of the world to another to describe with the finest level of detail a given product so that the printer could build it. Huge volumes of data would be flowing from designers directly to user’s homes, and that would need to happen in a timely manner. We would be talking about shipping bits, not physical goods anymore, and Telcos would then become the FedEx of the Internet! Who said that networking was a dead field? J

For more info you can also see this Economist article.

Has the iphone really been hacked or just a “particular software” version of the software has been compromised? For the latest versions of the software you are basically temporarily (or permanently) stuck. If you want a more permanent solution, you need to go into painful hardware-based solutions.

The reason I am saying this is because a friend of mine recently bought an iphone in the US hoping to use it in Europe with some unlocking software and give it as a Xmas present. However, the iphone is still sitting in the box hoping that somebody breaks the new bootloader (see this blog for some efforts related to this http://11246unlock.com/index.asp).

Even if somebody manages to unlock the latest software (which surely will happen eventually), the rate at which iphone software versions are being hacked is slowing down and Apple could easily keep turning the screw releasing new functionalities more often and making life harder and harder. And things could get worse if Apple decides to use some sort of revocation system, e.g. similar to those used in many DRM systems. With DRM, content owners or distributors can revoke access to all previous hacked DRM software versions forcing you to keep your deviced updated.

So I guess, after too much hassle, hackers having proved their point will just give up, and eventually consumers will do to.

It is a while I wanted to talk about Japanese food. I think it exemplifies very well for the title of this blog — “keep it sweet and simple”. And I am not just talking about sushi, but the large variety of small, delicately cooked dishes, which are put together in little plates and beautifully decorated bawls.

When presented with the food, you feel a bit like an orchestra director, with lots of different instruments to play with, or rather, different foods to try. You can combine different textures, sweeter or spicier tastes, in whatever order you fancy, and then whenever you want, you come back to the sticky rice, or the delicious soup, which set the beat and average out your pallet for the next food composition. And the fascinating thing is that in each round you can try something different.

This is very different to traditional European food, where courses come one after the other and there is very little degree of flexibility on how and in which order you eat things. Ah… and a very important thing: regardless of how much you eat, it always sits very well with you, making you enjoy it for hours to come– what good is it excellent food if it leaves you with a heavy and painful evening…?

Ok… new year and new twist to this blog. I have decided that from time to time, I will expand the topics and briefly talk about other things such as politics, food, and other interesting random things that I bump into (i.e. not just research).

So here is the first one: since I moved back to Spain I have noticed how much effort we spend discussing about issues such as terrorism or national identity, which although extremely important, are likely diverting a lot of the focus and energy needed to tackle some other main challenges that Spain faces over the coming years.

I have recently read two articles, which I believe crystallize very well some of these problems (e.g. education, labor market, culture). In general, a lot of similar things could be said for most of the southern EU countries, not just Spain.

The second transition (the Economist, 2008):
On the challenges that Spain faces over the long run and how to avoid a “gentle decline”.
[Article]

Locals vs Cosmopolitans (Xavier Sala i Martin, La Vanguardia, 2007):
Extremely well written article on how the world can be viewed both from a local or a global point of view, and the challenges that a country/region faces when globalization hits in and you still think locally.
[Spanish Article]
[Google Translated]

I have spent a couple of weeks in South Korea and Japan and in addition to being fascinated by their food and kindness, this trip has also given me a lot of things to think about. One of the things that surprised me is how the future IPTV is already a reality over there.

So what is happening today with IPTV? Well, IPTV is basically similar to Cable TV with about 100+ channels broadcasted using IP Multicast over DSL. All users are expected to watch one of those channels so dimensioning the system is easy. However, if all users start watching different TV programs at their most convenient time, then you have a major scalability problem since you need to handle a massive number of streams. Rather than dimensioning your network for the number of channels, you will have to do it for the number of users.

And this is exactly what is happening in Korea where a lot of people do not watch live broadcast TV anymore. Instead, VoD services offer all TV shows and movies that you could imagine for download. So you do not need broadcast TV nor have your VCR recording all the time. Instead, you can download the programs you missed whenever you want. As a result, most users are disconnecting their cable/satellite subscription as soon as they subscribe to the VoD service!

Of course, the content providers are cooperating and fostering this type of services by making the content available in a DRM digital form soon after it is aired (often within the same day). If most of the content is available through illegal P2P downloads anyway, they may as well try to engage the user through a legal VoD system and recover some of the revenue. This is an area where a lot of progress needs to be made in Europe/US before such service becomes available.

The cost of the service varies from $10-$15/month and you can basically download as many movies/videos as you want. Average download speeds in Korea are >30Mbps, so in the blink of an eye you have your favorite TV program. The system supports both progressive downloads for real-time viewing and background delivery.

What I found most interesting is the deployment model, which is based around Telcos (i.e. as opposed to VoD portals like Amazon or iTunes). The first generation of VoD services were target for the PC, however, the new generation is based on Set-Top-Boxes, which integrate better with the TV. The reason why ISPs are in a good position to provide this service is because the already have a relationship with the customer and thus, it becomes natural to provide users with a set-top-box which is ready for VoD. The set-top-box is given for free as long as the user subscribes for a given period of time (e.g. a year).

The fact that the VoD service is provided by a particular ISP is creating some interesting scenarios. For instance, some users are deciding to switch access ISPs but still keep their original VoD service with the first ISP. Of course, the traffic now is being carried through a number of visiting ISPs who expect some form of compensation, so the VoD ISP often needs to make financial arrangements with those visiting ISPs.

This all sounds very good, but it is posing major challenges in the IP distribution network since all users are pulling VoD content using point-to-point connections. So what is coming… well, you guessed it: P2P VoD and live-streaming in set-top-boxes, which should remove most of the heat from the ISPs VoD servers. We should expect some deployments of such P2P stb coming soon, so keep an eye…

These are some interesting companies to follow:

http://www.hanatv.co.kr/ (ISP providing VoD service)

http://www.icube.co.kr/ (VoD set-top-box company)

Finally, I forgot to mention how crazy young people are about Mobile-TV in their cell phones, especially in the underground. Here you have some of them, exhausted after watching their favorite soap opera J.

After three years of our initial research efforts with Avalanche, Microsoft is today making the resulting technology available as a public customer technology preview (CTP) under the name of Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD). See announcement at the Microsoft Research site for more details.

The MSCD technology is being used to distribute Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2. You can try it out and read more about MSCD by clicking here.

A major part in this success is due to the efforts that over these years Mitch Goldberg and John Miller’s incubation team (including my dear friend Armando Garcia Mendoza) have done at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Apart from what or what not Microsoft will do with the technology in the future, the fact that anyone can now experience a secured P2P system using Network Coding is a great step forward for the research community. If you get to use it, please do not hesitate to leave your comments below.

John Miller is also running a blog where he is talking about MSCD and addressing some questions.

Yesterday I saw a BBC Panorama program on the risks of WiFi radiation. According to the BBC journalist, the measured WiFi radiation in a UK city center is about three times higher than the radiation produced by a GSM cell station about 100 meters away. The journalist was trying to make the case that if cellular GSM masts are required to be located away from schools, then, why encourage kids to use WiFi-enabled laptops or why deploy city-wide WiFi networks, including at schools and homes.

I have always been very skeptical about the risks of such low power radiation devices. After all, a WiFi router radiates about 100,000 times less than a domestic microwave. Nevertheless, the program showed people that claim to get sick with WiFi radiation. If this picks up with the public opinion, it could be a serious problem for WiFi systems, regardless of whether the problem exists or not.

The methods used in the program were far from being “scientific”, and there is a lot to debate about the results presented. Still, the reason I am concerned about this is because I had hoped that the WiFi revolution (both when being used as base stations and to create mesh networks) would not only provide wireless networks with greater capacity (in the information theory way), but would also be perceived as a “greener” wireless technology, since less powerful base stations have to be deployed. However, this seems to be under debate now. Not a good start…