Ray
Kurzweil and The Law of
Accelerating Returns
The last JavaOne Keynote kicked-off with
renowned inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, who offered
mind-bending predictions for the future of technology, and the future
of humanity. As the principal developer of such game-changing
innovations as the CCD flat-bed scanner, optical character
recognition, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first
commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition technology
(among many other innovations), when Kurzweil predicts, people
listen.
He
began by pointing out that anything progressing at an exponential
pace, when viewed in a linear sense, initially appears to be
progressing deceptively slowly. But when viewed logarithmically, one
can predict profound developments and paradigm shifts. He detailed
the exponential progression of the computational space - from
vacuum tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits, to predicted 3D
molecular computers that will someday become self-organizing. In
1965, when Kurzweil first arrived at MIT, the sole campus computer
had 32k of memory. He then pulled out his Java enabled cell phone,
noting that it was "a million times cheaper, and thousands of times
more powerful. That's billions-fold increase in price performance
since I was a student."
Moore's
Law, predicting exponential increases in computational power, is
really just one example of what Kurzweil calls "The Law of
Accelerating Returns." While a given technology paradigm
eventually reaches the physical limits of a particular technology, a
new technology paradigm shift ultimately comes along to take its
place, as seen with vacuum tubes, the transistor, the integrated
circuit, and so on. According to Kurzweil, this principal applies to
any information technology, and even biology has now become a part of
the information technology space. The Human Genome Project, Kurzweil
noted, was only 1% complete half-way through its 15 year time period.
But with the evolution of genetic sequencing technology, the project
completed right on schedule.
Using
this long-term perspective, informed by the exponential patterns of
technology development, Kurzweil predicted in the 1980s our current
era of small, massively distributed, embedded, and networked
computing systems. And this was at a time when few even owned a PC.
Kurzweil ultimately sees thousands or even millions of
nano-computational devices, running languages like Java, inside our
bodies, augmenting our senses, and solving medical problems. "That's
no more crazy than these projections were in the 1980s."
Java
Innovators Push the Technology Envelope
From
here, Richard Bair, Chief Architect for Client Java, explored several
End-to-End (E2E) innovations using Java technology. The
first was Gephi, an open-source graphic visualization software
package based entirely on Java technology. Gephi is presented as
"Photoshop for graphs," and allows users to manipulate and
visualize large quantities of data, to reveal hidden patterns,
structures, and associations. Gephi is built with Java SE 6 on top
of the NetBeams Platform, and uses a variety of Java libraries,
including JOGL for its 3D rendering engine.
Gephi reveals patterns in large data sets
Next
came MLB.com and their Fantasy Baseball Live application. The
application has approximately a million users playing throughout the
year. Using Java SE 6, Swing, and JavaFX 1.2, MLB's Fantasy
Baseball Live offers a rich client application, allowing online
fantasy managers to assemble their dream team, and interact with
thousands of fantasy leagues, including instant messaging between
managers, real-time updates of roster selections, live real-time
stats, fantasy points, and league match-up updates. Managers can view
game schedules, player bios, scoreboards, and live streaming game
videos.
Another
application showcasing JavaFX was the Vancouver Winter Olympics site,
developed by Effective UI and the JavaFX team. Accessed by millions
of virtual fans during the Winter Games, the site provided
interactive comparisons based on medal types, athlete gender and
profiles, country populations and GDP, and included live results
tickers listing recent, current and upcoming Olympic events.
EffectiveUI incorporated census and other statistical data into
search results to give users a depth of perspective into each
country's background. JavaFX provided rapid development workflow
during the development process, and ready access to the final
application across multiple platforms, including the Web, desktop,
and mobile technology.
The
final E2E demo came from Pulse for Integrated Solutions, with its
Health Intact application. Health Intact offers remote telemedicine
solutions to the developing world--transmitting patient information
and monitoring data (blood pressure, blood sugar, ECG, etc.) to
doctors via Bluetooth connections and mobile handsets, as well as
integrating with existent hospital medical record systems. The
server portion of the system employs JDK1.6 and Java EE 6 (Struts
application with some exposed Servlets and Web Services), Java
Encryption APIs (for secure patient privacy), JDBC (for integration
with existent hospital systems) and Java Mail APIs. Meanwhile, the
mobile/PC client applications use J2ME, CLDC 1.0, and MIDP 1.1, push
registry, Bluetooth APIs, File Connection APIs, Java SE 1.6 Swing,
and RMS to persist application settings.
Greg
Bollella, Chief Architect for Embedded Java, took the stage,
showcasing three demos he described as JavaOne "repeat offenders"
that have presented at past conferences, and have continued to stay
at the forefront of technology innovation. The
first demo in this segment was Livescribe's Echo smartpen.
Livescribe's previous smartpen, the Pulse, was selected as a 2008
"JavaOne Show Device," and allowed users to take handwritten
notes while digitally storing their pen strokes, and simultaneously
recording ambient audio synced to the note taking. But the company's
latest smartpen offering, the Echo, takes the technology many leaps
forward with the advent of an app store that provides Java
applications for the pen, such as music, language translation, and
more. "We now have about 10,000 developers writing Java apps for
this," said Jim Marggraff, Livescribe CEO. Draw a piano keyboard
with the Echo, then tap the drawn keys and play music. Or write a
phrase in English, tap on it, and hear the phrase spoken in Spanish,
Mandarin, or Arabic. It really has to be seen to be believed.
Next,
Perrone Robotics showcased the cutting edge of tollbooth technology
with their Pennsylvania Turnpike Laser-based Vehicle Measurement
System. Detailing the evolution of tollbooths from human toll
takers, to mechanical change counters, to RFID-based facilities such
as FasTrak, Perrone's Brian Geiger detailed how their technology
takes the concept a quantum leap forward. They've implemented a Java
RTS-based solution that uses advanced lasers to measure vehicles at
180 points, every 13 milliseconds, gathering vehicle info in either
stop-and-go traffic or at speeds of up to 100 mph. Information
gathered includes vehicle type, height, width, length, and speed, and
it can register motorcycles, cars, trucks, and tractor-trailers.
The
final demo took attendees from smart highways to smarter cars.
Marcial Hernandez, from the Volkswagon Engineering Research Lab in
Palo Alto, had "Shelly" onstage, an autonomous,
self-driving Audi that first premiered at JavaOne 2009, but that has
now had many more successful test runs. The ultimate goal of the
project, Hernandez explained, is not to have cars driving by
themselves, but to augment drivers at the limits of handling, during
high-stress, or even during low-stress. Oracle worked closely on the
project, providing the Java RTS infrastructure that handles the GPS
processing and the monitoring visualizations that communicates with
the Stanford system which provides the autonomous driving
capabilities.
Hope
you had a great JavaOne 2010 conference, and don't forget to look for
JavaOne as it goes on the road:
- Latin America, December 7-9, 2010 (Call For Papers)
- Beijing, December 13-16, 2010
- Russia 2011 (date TBD)
- India 2011 (date TBD)
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