excerpt of science fictionthriller novel Youngblood. Youngblood AMAZON Death’s Dream Kingdom* “I can’t breathe!” Youngblood’s lungs strained to inhale the last of the thin air but drew in only an empty breath. His heart pounded against his hollow lungs. His fingers stretched wide and then clenched. The last faint echoes of whining machinery died away as the fading glow of emergency lights sputtered out. He opened his eyes wide trying to make sense of the dark confined space. Where am I? Lying on his back in pitch black, he reached up and touched a smooth encapsulating surface without seams or latches. A coffin? Banging against the case, a raspy cry escaped his mouth, “Helppp.” He scratched with fingers until they bled; he smashed with fists until they bruised. “AUUGGH!” His face was a bulging purple mask with a protruding red tongue. Gory hands wiped away oozing goo dripping from his nose. Each passing second was a countdown toward imploding lungs. Coma and death were fast approaching—causing a spasm of raw cold fear—a deep primal terror like the first great scare a child experienced when his nightmare turned ‘real’ and the claws of a hideous monster squeezed his throat. “Air! I’ve got to have air,” he begged in a whisper. He balled his fist and punched him. He kicked. Again, and again. CRACK! A small fissure created a loud hiss as air trickled into the confined space. Finally able to inhale, Youngblood’s chest rose and fell with each precious breath. The visceral threat of suffocation lessened, but the injuries continued to throb. He pulled out some of the needles that feathered his body. It’s a hibernation chamber. They were supposed to revive him when they found a cure. Did they find a cure? For a moment, he opened his mouth and raised his eyebrows, then . . . Stupid! Stupid! This wasn’t a normal recovery. There were countless things wrong with this. Was this a random system failure? Someone should have been monitoring. His brain screamed. Why isn’t there an alarm and an attendant? They might all be dead. He tried to break out of the case. The straining structure moaned as he pressed against it, but his debilitated joints and impaired muscles lacked the strength to free him. As he continued to welcome the incessant wheezing of cool air filtering into the cocoon, he waited, but no one came. The only sounds of activity were the sparks of electrical wires far off in the distance. With stiff fingers, he massaged his sore arms and legs, but all his efforts to break out of the coffin-like container failed. He dug his fingernails into his palms to escape the deadness that gnawed inside him. Dark destructive thoughts flooded in. The future that was supposed to augur health had turned into a nightmare. His mind stretched back to something very painful, a filament-thin memory, I was eighteen when the debilitating effects of the illness began. Father said hibernation was the only solution. I trusted him. Lies! All his words were lies . . . he just wanted to be rid of me. Lingering on the ghost-like memory as it waxed and waned, it was the end of hope. At that moment, everything came crashing down inside of him. The chamber grew claustrophobic. I’m done. He closed his eyes. It’s over. He let the minutes pass, hoping the pain would end, wishing he would end . . . but neither did. Finally, he opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Focusing his thoughts, he pushed back against the black despair. No! I won’t give up. I’m going to survive . . . somehow. But it was undeniable, he needed immediate medical aid, or this chamber would become a coffin. He screamed when he yanked out the rest of the needles. He cast away the trailing tubes that had sustained his life for . . . How long? No way of telling. You can do this. You must. He pressed against the case once more. It creaked and groaned like a living thing and it took many more tries before, at last, it broke open enough to allow him to squeeze out. Leaning over the edge, he shifted his weight to let it carry him over the side. Hitting the floor with a thump, he began to crawl. It took an hour to reach the wall a mere twenty yards away. There were other chambers along the way, but none appeared operational. “Is anyone there?” he called out—repeatedly. There was never a reply. In a moment of raw honesty, he understood: No one else escaped. Moving along the wall until he reached a door, he wobbled to his feet and managed to stand and press a button. It slid open. He tried to walk, but his legs were unwilling. Leaning against the wall, he let his body slide down to the floor like a sack of sand. There was a dim glow of light at the end of the hall, but crawling took an interminable effort. The light was coming from a control console inside a small room. The dark surroundings offered little information about the devices inside. Exhausted, he hoisted himself into a chair and listened to the rhythmic sound of blood drops smacking onto the floor like a drum beating Taps. As his face blanched, he trembled with dizziness and nausea, his tunnel vision narrowed, the room blackened and spun . . . and then . . . nothingness . . . *** Youngblood woke in a cold sweat. His head throbbed but the room had stopped spinning. He was still sitting at the dysfunctional control panel though only a few dials remained lit. As a computer science major, he thought he should make sense of them, but they were as foreign as a Gödel puzzle. Damn! His fist smashed into the console. HUMMM. He heard the distinct sound but couldn’t pinpoint its location. With every sense alert, he sat waiting . . . “Hello? Is anyone there?” The cold dark concrete walls and poured concrete floor echoed his words but offered no response. There were a couple of doors further down the hall. He stood up. Simply stretching his body took all his effort. His entire body hurt, but slowly he managed to shuffle toward the doors. The first door was locked. The next one was too. He twisted around a corner, but a misstep caused him to fight his own momentum to forestall crashing headfirst into the unyielding wall. The impact to his shoulder knocked him back and whirled him around. Reaching out, he grasped a handle and yanked it to steady himself. The door opened. A storage closet? Catching his breath, he strained his eyes against the dark shadows to identify several large cardboard boxes and a few wooden crates. The largest box was next to a cabinet with symbols he didn’t recognize. Yet, a Red Cross sign was visible on the furthest crate. He stretched his hands toward the old dirt covered wooden crate and pried open the thick heavy lid with his fingers. “Argh.” The cry of anguish was from his own mouth. He placed his suffering hands under his armpits and squeezed until the strained fingers returned to normal. After several minutes, he pulled the lid away and let dirt rattle down into the container. He reached inside to grab a medical package. Thanks. He used the meager emergency rations to stop the bleeding and applied analgesic wherever he could reach. The medication flowed through his veins, stifling the shock and blood loss. He started to relax but his parched throat cried . . . water. He was unable to make out the markings on the other boxes, but he opened the nearest one and groped inside for something familiar. No. Next. No. The last cardboard box . . . Yes. A bottle of water. Taking great gulps, he guzzled what seemed a treasure from an extinct world. He looked for more. There was only one. He tackled another wooden crate. Inside was a flashlight, but it didn’t work. There were batteries on the bottom, but they leaked acid goop. Yet, a few seemed OK. He tried them and felt like a rich man when the flashlight lit and offer the first real peek at his surroundings. There was a nearby room with more defunct hibernation chambers. Another room had medical equipment for reviving patients. But there were no windows anywhere. It’s a bunker. But why put hibernation chambers underground? Putting the puzzle aside, he dug deeper into the storage containers. There were useful items; a butane lighter, a compass, nylon line, a hatchet, a shovel, a hacksaw and lots of basic tools for repairing electrical and computer equipment. He found a workman’s jumpsuit coveralls hanging from a hook on the closet wall and a pair of large black boots. These will come in handy. He moved on and found another closet full of boxes. These were sealed with a plastic wrap, but there was no auxiliary power system visible. There’s got to be a communication device somewhere. He returned to the console and found a diagram framed on the nearby wall. It appeared to be a network of underground tunnels connecting bunkers. An annotated alphanumerical system designated this bunker HB11. Several others had similar designations, but there were also two unique identifiers, YO and SP. The HB might be for hibernation, but he had no clue what YO or SP might represent, nor could he guess how to access the network of tunnels. As he stared at the tunnel map, memorizing the layout, he imagined all the places he could travel to and the places he might visit. What kind of facilities were at each stop along the way? Maybe someday he will find out. He examined some instruments on the console which still had power. The computer system seemed functional, but there wasn’t any written material or operable viewscreen that could offer him instructions. The instruments were as complicated as a spaceship’s and when he attempted to patch into the AI system, he heard a noise. He held his breath. Is someone coming? A humming sound continued from a device in the next room. He must have activated it with his random actions. The machine was marked with English letters and symbols that indicated it was a medical treatment apparatus. He could read several tags on the valves and dials and guessed it was a rejuvenation machine. It took several minutes to surmise how it would work. I’ve got to try this. He climbed naked into the rejuvenation tub and opened a faucet. Synth-fluid and hot medicated elixirs filled the vat. Setting the timer for two hours, he lingered while the potions treated his many superficial ailments. A shame this can’t cure my disease. He relaxed during the treatment while it invigorated his frail body. What’s next? He dragged his body about and toured the bunker, returning to the original room. The flashlight shone on dozens of forsaken hibernation chambers. There was a twin room across the hall, but it too had become a graveyard. A tragedy. I should commemorate them . . . later. He considered revisiting the closets and the locked doors, but that could wait. He looked for more water. No water. The next decision would be critical for his survival. He wanted to use the rejuvenation machine while he restored the power and computer systems, but how long would that take? He had no food or water. Besides, even though he had been a computer whiz, this equipment was far beyond his expertise. Questions exploded in his head like a string of fireworks. Should I stay here? Should I go exploring? Running his fingers through his long shaggy hair, he concluded there was no choice. Putting on the coveralls and boots, he stuffed computer instruments and tools into his cargo pockets. He filled a backpack with survival items and even though it was heavy, he was chafing to get started. Where are the people? *** “I’ve never seen a sky like this,” said Youngblood, as he climbed out of the bunker’s hatch. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright sun peeking between a few windswept clouds. “Noon,” he mused and let the hatch drop down. Birds flew overhead, and a glimpse of motion alerted him to a nearby rodent, but there were no roads or worn paths visible. “There’s life, but where are the people?” Originally, he had been placed in hibernation in California’s Stanford Hospital. He had no idea where he was now, but it stood to reason he shouldn’t be too very far away. He surveyed the landscape around him. To the east, he saw a prominent hill rising about a mile away. It was surrounded by scrub brush poking out between a few scattered pine trees. “Hmm . . . a good vantage point.” He swung around and noticed similar regions to the north and south. But things were far different to the west. Where the sky kissed the horizon, blue turned into a mosaic of red, brown, and purple swirls, and the silhouette of a city’s barebone skeleton rose in the distance like a faraway mirage. An acidic stench of smoke and ash invaded his nostrils forcing him to cover his mouth to suppress a spasmodic cough. A brownish yellow haze floated on the hot dry air and dark soot settled on his coveralls. His mouth could barely speak the words, “I can’t believe they actually did it.” A single tear ran down his cheek as he brushed the barren residual ash off his clothes. Anyway, it’s better to die in a flash . . . than suffocate. He licked his lips and swallowed to relieve his parched throat. His fear . . . Where are the people? Became . . . Are there people? Swinging the backpack over his shoulder, he faced east and started forward. A slight cooling breeze sent him on his way as he marched toward the hill. He walked only a few hundred yards before he had to stop and rest. The process repeated itself until his muscles cramped and screamed. He wiped the perspiration off his forehead with his sleeve as he passed areas of dead trees and fall branches. He remained alert for a flash of color, or movement, or any sign of smoke.

excerpt of the technology book The Intelligent Wireless Web. The Intelligent Wireless Web AMAZON Chapter 10.0 Progress in Developing the Intelligent Wireless Web In this chapter, we take the components developed in earlier chapters and lay out a plausible framework for building the Intelligent Wireless Web including our evaluation of the compatibility, integration and synergy issues facing the five merging technology areas that will build it: User Interface – from click to speech Personal Space – from tangled wires to multifunction wireless devices Networks – from wired infrastructure to integrated wired/wireless Protocols – from IP to Mobile IP Web Architecture – from dumb and static to intelligent and dynamic. Finally, we present strategic planning guidelines and the conclusions you could reach as a result of this book. We began this book by describing what we meant by the “Intelligent Wireless Web and presenting an overview of the framework for plausibly constructing it. Our concept of an Intelligent Wireless Web weaves together several important concepts related to intelligence (the ability to learn), “wirelessness” (mobility and convenience) and its advances in telecommunications and information technology that together promised to deliver increasingly capable information services to mobile users anytime and anywhere. We suggested putting these concepts together to form the “Intelligent Wireless Web.” We stated that it was certainly possible to develop intelligent applications for the Internet without media (audio/video) Web features or wireless capability. But, it was our suggestion that Web media, such as, audio could lead to improved user interfaces using speech and that small wireless devices widely distributed could lead to easier access to large portions of the worlds population. The end result could be, not just an intelligent Internet but a widely available, easily accessible, user friendly, Intelligent Wireless Web. Fundamentally, our vision for an Intelligent Wireless Web is very simple - it is a network that provides anytime, anywhere access through efficient user interfaces to applications that learn. Notwithstanding the difficulty of defining intelligence (in humans or machines), we recognized that terms such as “artificial intelligence”, “intelligent agents”, “smart machines” and the like, refer to the performance of functions that mimic those associated with human intelligence. The full range of information services is the next logical step along with the introduction of a variety of different portable user devices (e.g., pagers, PDAs, web-enabled cell phones, small portable computers) that have wireless connectivity. The results will be wireless technology as an extension of the present evolutionary trend in information technology. In addition, Artificial Intelligence and intelligent software applications will also make their way onto the wireless Web and that a performance Index or measure should be developed to evaluate the progress of Web smarts. In the following sections, we will bring together the components of the Intelligent Wireless Web and how it is being constructed. But building it will be a broad and far-reaching task involving more technology integration and synthesis than revolutionary inventions. Future Wireless Communication Process Ideally, the future wireless communication process should start with a user interface based on speech recognition where we merely talk to a personal mobile device that recognizes our identity, words and commands. The personal mobile device would connect seamlessly to embedded and fixed devices in the immediate environment. The message would be relayed to a server residing on a network with the necessary processing power and software to analyzed the contents of the message. The server could then draw necessary supplemental knowledge and services from around the world through the Internet. Finally, the synthesized messages would be delivered to the appropriate parties in their own language on their own personal mobile device. To build this ideal future wireless communication process we must connect the following inherent technologies of communications along with their essential components: Connecting People to Devices – the user interface. Currently we rely on the mouse, keyboard and video display; speech recognition and understanding deployed for mobile devices is a key component for the future. Connecting Devices to Devices. Currently hard-wired connections between devices limit mobility and constrain the design of networks. In the future, the merging of wired and wireless communication infrastructure require the establishment of wireless protocols and standards for the connection between devices; future smart applications require the development and improvement of intelligence services. Also needed is a method to measure the performance and/or intelligence of the Internet so that we can assess advancements. Connecting Devices to People. To deliver useful information to the globally mobile user, future systems require advances in speech synthesis and language translation. So lets start connecting the necessary technologies to fulfill the vision of an Intelligent Wireless Web. The physical components and software necessary to construct and implement the Intelligent Wireless Web require compatibility, integration and synergy of five merging technology areas: < >User Interface – to transition from the mouse click to speech as the primary method of communication between people and devices;Personal Space – to transition from connection of devices by tangled wires to multifunction wireless devices;Networks – to transition from a mostly wired infrastructure to an integrated wired/wireless system of interconnections;Protocols – transition from the original Internet protocol (IP) to the new Mobile IP; andWeb Architecture – to transition from dumb and static applications to new applications that are intelligent, dynamic and constantly learning. FIGURE 10-1 Building the Intelligent Wireless Web User Interface – from Click to Speech We have evaluated communication between humans and their machines and found the problem of how to obtain speech recognition functionality in a handheld or embedded device to be challenging; however efforts currently underway look favorable for solutions in the relatively near term. While we may expect speech interfaces to permeate society steadily, we anticipate that successful traditional interfaces, such as, mouse and touch screen, will continue to be in operation for a very long time. Particularly, for such high power applications as selecting events on detailed graphical representations. Certainly, it is not a difficult problem for a handheld device (such as a cell phone) to perform limited speech recognition activities (such as voice activated dialing). But since the demands for speech functionality increase with the greater complexity of the speech recognition tasks, it becomes more and more difficult to provide these capabilities on a small mobile wireless device with limited capabilities. Therefore, the problem becomes one of distributing the capability for speech recognition and understanding between the local wireless device and remote processing resources to which it is connected. This problem is being currently addressed in far-reaching research at several places, but most notably at the MIT AI Laboratory and at Microsoft Research. The Microsoft effort is directed at technology projects supporting and leading to the vision of a fully speech enabled computer. The Microsoft concept Dr. Who, uses continuous speech recognition and spoken language understanding. Dr. Who is designed to power a voice-based pocket PC with a web browser, email, and cellular telephone capabilities. The highly promising initiative know as, Project Oxygen, is ongoing at MIT’s AI Laboratory. This visionary effort is developing a comprehensive system to achieve the objective of anytime anywhere computing. In this concept, a user carries a wireless interface device that is continuously connected to a network of computing devices in a manner similar to the way cell phone communications maintain continuous connection to a communications network. The local device is speech enabled, and much of the speech recognition capability is embedded in the remote system of high-capability computers. Systems for conversational interface are also being developed that are capable of communicating in several languages. These systems can answer queries in real-time with a distributed architecture that can retrieve data from several different domains of knowledge to answer a query. Such systems have five main functions: speech recognition, language understanding, information retrieval, language generation and speech synthesis. Speech recognition may be an ideal interface for the handheld devices being developed as part of the Oxygen project, but the Oxygen project will need far more advanced speech-recognition systems than are currently available to achieve its ultimate objective of enabling interactive conversation with full understanding. Figure 10-2 identifies the main requirements for an effective speech-based user interface and identifies the current status of each. To meet the needs of the Intelligent Wireless Web, the ultimate desired result is that speech recognition, understanding, translation and synthesis become practical for routine use on handheld, wearable and embedded devices. USER INTERFACE – from click to speech REQUIREMENTS STATUS Speech Recognition Speech Understanding Text to Speech Translation Speech Synthesis Speech Synthesis Markup Language Advanced Continuing Advanced Continuing Continuing Lagging Speech recognition, understanding, translation and synthesis become practical for use on handheld, wearable and embedded devices. RESULTS FIGURE 10-2 Building the User Interface Personal Space – from Wired to Wireless We imagined living our life within the confines of our own Personal Space - without wires, but with devices to “connect” us wherever we travel. Implementation of a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), composed of the personal devices around us as well as our immediate environment is one solution. In the office, devices improve work productivity by enabling access to data, text, and images relating to performing our jobs and by providing for analysis, access to software applications and communications as needed. Creating a WPAN of our immediately available devices will enable a future where a lifetime of knowledge may be accessed through gateways worn on the body or placed within the immediate environment (including our home, auto, office, school, library, ect). WPAN will also allow devices to work together and share each other's information and services. For example, a web page can be called up on a small screen, and can then be wirelessly sent to a printer for full size printing. A mobile WPAN can even be created in a vehicle via interface devices such as wireless headsets, microphones and speakers for communications. As envisioned, WPAN will allow the user to customize his or her communications capabilities permitting everyday devices to become smart, tetherless devices that spontaneously communicate whenever they are in close proximity. Figure 10-3 summarizes the requirements and their status for this element of the Intelligent Wireless Web; the objective is the achieve the ability for handheld, wearable, and embedded devices to connect easily without wires and share software applications, as needed, producing office, home and mobile Wireless Personal Area Networks. PERSONAL SPACE – from wired to wireless REQUIREMENTS STATUS Advanced Continuing Lagging Lagging Adaptable wireless devices Wireless protocol Wireless small screen applications “Nomadic” or mobile software for devices Handheld, wearable, and embedded devices connect easily without wires and share software applications, as needed, producing office, home and mobile Wireless Personal Area Networks. RESULTS FIGURE 10 - 3 Building the Your Personal Space Networks – from Wired to Integrated Wired/Wireless The earliest computers were stand-alone, unconnected machines. During the 1980’s, mergers, takeovers and downsizing have led to a need to consolidate company data in fast, seamless, integrated database have for all corporate information. With these driving forces, Intranets and local networks began to increase in size, and this required ways to interface with each other. Over the past decade, enterprise models and architectures, as well as, their corresponding implementation in actual business practices have changed to take advantage of new technologies. The big lure to wireless is the potential for big money in implementing wireless architectures that can send information packets from people with small personal devices, such as cell phones, to the a company’s Web site and there to conduct transactions. The number of wireless subscribers is expected to grow globally from the current few million to more than 400 million by 2005. The vast system of interconnecting networks that comprise the Internet is composed of several different types of transmission media, dominated by wired media but including: < >WiredFiber opticTwisted pairs (copper)Coaxial cable < >WirelessMicrowaveInfraredLaser NETWORKS – from wired to integrated wired/wireless REQUIREMENTS STATUS Wireless LAN Wireless WAN Satellites Wired Interface Advanced Advanced Continuing Continuing Networks continue migration to optical fiber for long haul while last mile is met by both fiber, mobile wireless, and fixed wireless (LMDS & MDDS) RESULTS FIGURE 10-4 Building Integrated Networks Protocols – from IP to Mobile IP To achieve the mobility requirements of the Intelligent Wireless Web, the Wireless Appliance Protocol, WAP, provides a global standard for data-oriented services to mobile devices thereby enabling anywhere and anytime access. In so doing, access will be provided to far more end-users than can be reached by using the personal computer as a fixed end point. Figure 10-5 provides an overview of the needed changes to support the Intelligent Wireless Web. The anticipated result is to provide intelligent networking software for routing and tracking that leads to general changes in IP networking protocols toward mobile IP. Sitting on top of the entire layer infrastructure will be a new control-plan for applications that smooth routing. PROTOCOLS - from IP to Mobile IP Continuing Continuing IPv6 Mobile IP standard REQUIREMENTS STATUS Intelligent networking software for routing and tracking that leads to general changes in IP networking protocols toward mobile IP. Sitting on top of the entire layer infrastructure will be a new control-plan for applications that smooth routing. RESULTS FIGURE 10 - 5 Building the Mobile Internet Protocols Web Architecture - Dumb & Static to Intelligent & Dynamic Ideally, the wireless communication process should start with the user talking to a personal, or embedded, device that recognizes his identity, words and commands. It will connect seamlessly to the correct transmission device, drawing on whatever resources are required from around the Web. In one case, only database search sorting and retrieval might be required. Or in another case, a specialized Web Service application program might be required. In any case, the information will be evaluated, and the content of the message will be augmented with the appropriate supporting data to fill in the ‘blanks’. If there is appropriate supplementary audio, or video, it will be included for reference. Finally, the results will be delivered to the appropriate parties in their own language through their own different and varied connection devices. For the Web to learn how to conduct this type of intelligent processing requires a mechanism for the adapting and self-organizing on a hypertext network. In addition, it needs to develop Learning Algorithms that would allow it to autonomously change its structure and organize the knowledge it contains, by "learning" the ideas and preferences of its users. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) suggests the use of better semantic information as part of web documents, and of the use of next generation Web languages Figure 10-6 provides a summary of the semantic web architecture needed to support the Intelligent Wireless Web. Intelligent applications running directly over the Web, as well as, AI Web Services served from AI service providers will progressively increase the tasking performed with adaptive, dynamic intelligent products. In addition, a Web performance Index will provide some useful measures of Web progress. WEB ARCHITECTURE – from dumb and static to intelligent and dynamic REQUIREMENTS STATUS XMLschema RDF schema & Topic Maps Logic Layer Dynamic Languages Adaptive Applications Distributed AI AI Web Sevices Registration and Validation of Information Intelligent applications running directly over the Web, as well as, AI Web Services supported from AI service providers progressively increasing the percent of applications performed with adaptive, dynamic intelligent products. An overall increase can be expected in the total percentage of learning algorithms operating on the Web. RESULTS FIGURE 10- 6 Building AI Servers with the Semantic Strategic Planning Guidelines Strategic planning is the determination of the course of action and allocation of resources necessary to achieve selected long-term goals. But charting strategic direction for wireless communications networks in a diverse and competitive landscape is complicated by an economy that has introduced dynamic rules for success. Both the rate of technology change and the speed at which new technologies become available have increased. The shorter product life cycles resulting from this rapid diffusion of new technologies places a competitive premium on being able to quickly introduce new goods and services into the marketplace. In order to develop guidelines for strategic planning, we must consider enterprise goals. Traditionally driven by technology, network planning has evolved and now faces new challenges. But the network planning process itself includes two "discordant" requirements: first, to optimize of the network’s long-term investment while second, optimizing of the time to market for each new product. Finding the right balance is not easy. However, opportunities for developers and service providers will exist if they can reach all mobile users by developing infrastructure to support: < >any wireless carrierany wireless network (TDMA, CDMA, etc.)any wireless device (pager, digital cell phone, PDA)any wireless applicationsany Web format (XML, HTML, etc.)any wireless technology (WAP, SMS, pager, etc.)any medium (text, audio, text-to-speech, voice recognition or video)balancing innovations in software (e.g. adaptive software, nomadic software) against innovations in hardware (e.g. chip designs), balancing proprietary standards (motivating competition) against open standards (offering universal access), and balancing local(centralized) Web innovations (e.g. Web Services) against global(distributed) Web architectural evolution (e.g. the Semantic Web).A vendor dominates a market and sets a de facto standard (for example; POTS telephony from AT&T, or PC operating systems from Microsoft).Standards organizations establish standards (for example; HTML).Vendor and market collaboration that is not clearly attributable to any one organization (for example; TCP/IP or VCR formats). FIGURE 10-7 Possible Technology Timeline Conclusion In this chapter, we presented the components developed in earlier chapters and outlined a feasible framework for building the Intelligent Wireless Web, including our evaluation of the compatibility, integration and synergy issues facing the five merging technology areas: User Interface, Personal Space, Networks, Protocols, and Web Architecture. Ten conclusions you could reach from this book about building the Intelligent Wireless Web include: - User Interface - < >Speech recognition and speech synthesis offer attractive solutions to overcome the input and output limitations of small mobile devices, if they can overcome their own limitation of memory and processing power through the right balance for the client-server relationship between the small device and nearby embedded resources. The essential components for achieving this balance are new chip designs coupled with open adaptive nomadic software. The new chips may provide hardware for small devices that is small, light weight, and consumes little power while having the ability to perform applications by downloading adaptive software as needed.- Personal Space - < >Handheld, wearable and embedded devices are upgrading many existing office and home locations making computing access more universal through Wireless Personal Area Networks.Competition between the wireless networking standards Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b, as well as general networking software, Jini and UpnP, will continue for several years as each finds strong points to exploit before a final winner emerges. MIT’s Project OXYGEN may introduce some innovative protocol alternatives within several years. - Networks - < >Wired and wireless networks will continue to merge and improve backbone performance to greater than the 10 Tera-bps range as well as produce improved interoperability. < >Over time, there will be a migration of core networks to optical fiber simply because photons carry a lot more information more efficiently and at less expense than electrons. By 2003, ultra-long haul (> 4000 km) high bandwidth optical transport will be deployed in the US. The quest for the last mile will be met with a combination of fiber and wireless. In dense metropolitan areas free-space optical networks will provide 622Mbps of bandwidth to buildings without digging the streets. Second generation LMDS and MDDS fixed wireless will be deployed to buildings requiring less bandwidth.- Internet Protocols - < >Intelligent networking software for routing and tracking will lead to general changes in IP networking protocols to include IPv6 and mobile IP. Sitting on top of the entire layer infrastructure may be a number of new control-plane software applications that may add intelligence to the network for smooth integration of routing (layer 3) and wavelength switching. - Web Architecture - < >Intelligent agents, intelligent software application and Artificial Intelligence applications from AI Servers Providers may make their way onto the Web in greater numbers as adaptive software, dynamic programming languages and Learning Algorithms are introduced into Web Services (including both .NET and J2EE architectures).The evolution of Web Architecture may allow intelligent applications to run directly on the Web by introducing XML, RDF/Topic Maps and a Logic Layer.A Web performance Index, or measure, may be developed to evaluate the progress of Internet progress in performing intelligent tasks utilizing learning algorithms.The Intelligent Wireless Web’s significant potential for rapidly completing information transactions may become an important contribution to global worker productivity. 1 [1] Bogdanowicz, K.D., Scapolo, F., Leijten, J., and Burgelman, J-C., “Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010,” ISTAG Report, European Commission, Feb. 2001.

excerpt from computer science technology book Connections. Connections AMAZON Chapter 1 Connecting Information “The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” said Larry Page[1]. We live in the information age. As society has progressed into the post-indu strial era, access to knowledge and information has become the cornerstone of modern living. With the advent of the World Wide Web, vast amounts of information have suddenly become available to people throughout the world. And searching the Web has become an essential capability whether you are sitting at your desktop PC or wandering the corporate halls with your wireless PDA. As a result, there is no better place to start our discussion of connecting information than with the world’s greatest search engine ─ Google. Google has become a global household name ─ millions use it daily in a hundred languages to conduct over half of all online searches. As a result, Google connects people to relevant information. By providing free access to information, Google offers a seductive gratification to whoever seeks it. To power its searches Google, uses patented, custom-designed programs and hundreds of thousands of computers to provide the greatest computing power of any enterprise. Searching for information is now called ‘googling’ which men, women, and children can perform over computers and cell phones. And thanks to small targeted advertisements that searchers can click for information, Google has become a financial success. In this chapter, we follow the hero’s journey of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they invent their Googleware technology for efficient connection to information, then go on to become masters in pursuit of their holy grail ─ ‘perfect search.’ The Google Story Google was founded by two Ph.D. computer science students at Stanford University in California ─ Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Page and Brin began their hero’s journey, they didn’t know exactly where they were headed. It is widely known that, at first, Page and Brin didn’t hit it off. When they met in 1995, 24 year-old Page was a new graduate of the University of Michigan visiting Stanford University to consider entering graduate school; Brin, at age 23, was a Stanford graduate student who was assigned to host Page’s visit. At first, the two seemed to differ on just about every subject they discussed. They each had strong opinions and divergent viewpoints, and their relationship seemed destined to be contentious. Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing, Michigan. Both of his parents were computer scientists. His father was a university professor and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, while his mother was a teacher of computer programming. As a result of his upbringing in this talented and technology-oriented family, Page seemed destined for success in the computer industry in one way or another. After graduating from high school, Page studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree. Following his undergraduate studies, he decided to pursue graduate work in computer engineering at Stanford University. He intended to build a career in academia or the computer science profession, building on a Ph.D. degree. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist. His entire family fled the Soviet Union in 1979 under the threat of growing anti-Semitism, and began their new life as immigrants in the United States. Brin displayed a great interest in computers from an early age. As a youth, he was influenced by the rapid popularization of personal computers, and was very much a child of the microprocessor age. He too was brought up to be familiar with mathematics and computer technology, and as a young child, in the first grade he turned in a computer printout for a school project. Later, at the age of nine, he was given a Commodore 64 computer as a birthday gift from his father. Brin entered the University of Maryland at College Park where he studied mathematics and computer science. He completed his studies at the University of Maryland in 1993 having completed his Bachelor of Science degree. Following his undergraduate studies, he was given a National Science Foundation fellowship to pursue graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University. Not only did he exhibit early talent and interest in mathematics and computer science, he also became acutely interested in data management and networking as the Internet was becoming an increasing force in American society. While at Stanford, he pursued research and prepared publications in the areas of data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to convert scientific papers written in TeX, a cross-platform text processing language, into HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the multimedia language of the World Wide Web. Brin successfully completed his Masters degree at Stanford. Like Page, Brin’s intent was to continue in his graduate studies to earn a Ph.D. which he also viewed as a great opportunity to establish an outstanding academic or professional career in computer science. The hero’s journey for Page and Brin began as they heard the call ─ to develop a unique approach for retrieving relevant information from the voluminous data on the World Wide Web. Page remembered, “When we first met each other, we each thought the other was obnoxious. Then we hit it off and became really good friends.... I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire Web onto my computer. I told my advisor it would only take a week... So I started to download the Web, and Sergey started helping me because he was interested in data mining and making sense of the information.”[2] Although Page initially thought the downloading of the Web would be a short term project, taking a week or so to accomplish, he quickly found that the scope of what he wanted to do was much greater than his original estimate. Once he started his downloading project, he enlisted Brin to join the effort. While working together the two became inspired and wrote the seminal paper entitled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine[3]. It explained their efficient ranking algorithm, ‘PageRank.’ Brin said about the experience, “The research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, we had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.”[4] This prototype listed the results of a Web search according to a quantitative measure of the popularity of the pages. By January 1996, the system was able to analyze the ‘back links’ pointing to a given website and from this quantify the popularity of the site. Within the next few years, the prototype system had been converted into progressively improved versions, and these were substantially more effective than any other search engine then available. As the buzz about their project spread, more and more people began to use it. Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at Stanford using their system. With this growing use and popularity of their search system, they began to realize that they were maxing out their search ability due to the limited number of computers they had at their disposal. They would need more hardware to continue their remarkable expansion and enable more search activity. As Page said, “This is about how many searches we can do, and we need more computers. Our whole history has been like that. We always need more computers.”[5] In many ways, the research project at Stanford was a low budget operation. Because of a chronic shortage of cash, the pair are said to have monitored the Stanford computer science department’s loading docks for newly arrived computers to ‘borrow.’ In spite of this, within a short span of time, the reputation of the BackRub system had grown dramatically and their new search technology began to be broadly noticed. They named their successor search engine ‘Google,’ in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term ‘Googol,’ which is the immensely large number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The transition from the earlier Backrub technology to the much more sophisticated Google was slow. But the Google system began with an index of 25 million pages and the capability to handle 10,000 search queries every day, even when it was in its initial stage of introduction. The Google search engine grew quickly as it was continuously improved. The effectiveness and relevance of the Google searches, its scope of coverage, speed and reliability, and its clean user interface all contributed to a rapid increase in the popularity of the search engine. At this time, Google was still a student research project, and both Page and Brin were still intent on completing their respective doctoral programs at Stanford. As a result, they initially refused to ‘answer the call’ and continued to devote themselves their academic pursuit of the technology of search. Through all this, Brin maintained an eclectic collection of interests and activities. He continued with his graduate research interests at Stanford and he collaborated with his fellow Ph.D. students and professors on other projects such as automatic detection. At the same time, he also pursued a variety of outside interests, including sailing and trapeze. Brin’s father had stressed the importance for him to complete his Ph.D. He said, “I expected him to get his Ph.D. and to become somebody, maybe a professor.” In response to his father’s question as to whether he was taking any advanced courses one semester, Brin replied, “Yes, advanced swimming.”[6] While Brin and Page continued on as graduate students, they began to realize the importance of what they had succeeded in developing. The two aspiring entrepreneurs decided to try and license the Google technology to existing Internet companies. But they found themselves unsuccessful in stimulating the interest of the major enterprises. They were forced to face the crucial decision of continuing on at Stanford or striking out on their own. With their realization that they were onto something that was important and perhaps even groundbreaking, they decided to make the move. Thus our two heroes had reached their point of departure and they crossed over from the academic into the business world. As they committed to this new direction, they realized they would need to postpone their educational aspirations, prepare plans for their business concept, develop a working demo of their commercial search product, and seek funding sponsorship from outside investors. Having made this decision, they managed to interest Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim in their idea. As Brin recalls, "We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, 'Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?' It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000."[7] The check remained in Page's desk un-cashed for several weeks while he and Brin set up a corporation and sought additional money from family and friends ─ almost $1 million in total. Having started the new company, lined up investor funding, and possessing a superb product, they realized ultimate success would require a good balance of perspiration as well as inspiration. Nevertheless, at this point Google appeared to be well on the road to success. Page and Brin have been on a roll every since, armed with the great confidence that they had both a superior product and an excellent vision for global information collection, storage, and retrieval. In addition, they believed that coordination and optimization of the entire hardware/software system was important, and so they developed their own Googleware technology by combining their custom software with appropriately integrated custom hardware, thereby fully leveraging their ingenious concept. Google Inc. opened its doors as a business entity in September 1998, operating out of modest facilities in a Menlo Park, California garage. As Page and Brin initiated their journey, they faced many challenges and along the way. They matured in their understanding with the help of mentors they encountered such as Yahoo!’s Dave Filo. Filo not only encouraged the two in the development of their search technology, but also made business suggestions for their project. Following the company startup, interest in Google grew rapidly. Red Hat, a Linux company, signed on as their first commercial customer. They were particularly interested in Google because they realized the importance of search technology and its ability to run on open source systems such as Linux. In addition, the press began to take notice of this new commercial venture and articles began to appear in the media highlighting the Google product that offered relevant search results. The late 1990s saw a spectacular growth in development of the technology industry, and Silicon Valley was awash with investor funding. The timing was right for Google, and in 1999, they sought and received a second round of funding, obtaining $25 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firms. The additional funding enabled them to expand their operations and move into new facilities they called the ‘Googleplex,’ Google's current headquarters in Mountain View, California. Although at the time they occupied only a small portion of the new two-story building, they had clearly come a long way from a university research project to a full-fledged technology company with a rapid growth trajectory and a product that was in high demand. Google was also in the process of developing a unique company culture. They operated in an informal atmosphere that facilitated both collegiality and an easy exchange of ideas. Google staffers enjoyed this rewarding atmosphere while they continued to make many incremental improvements to their search engine technology. For example, in an effort to expand the utility of their keyword-targeted advertising to small businesses, they rolled out the ‘AdWords’ system, a software package that represents a self-service advertisement development capability. Google took a major step forward when, in 2000, it was selected by Yahoo to replace Inktomi as their provider of supplementary search results. Because of the superiority of Google over other search engine capabilities, licenses were obtained by many other companies, including the Internet services powerhouse America Online (AOL), Netscape, Freeserve, and eventually Microsoft Network (MSN). In fact, although Microsoft has pursued its own search technology, Bill Gates once commented on search-engine technology development by saying that “Google kicked our butts.”[8] By the end of 2000, Google was handling more than 100 million searches each day. Shortly thereafter Google began to deliver new innovations and establish new partnerships to enter the burgeoning field of mobile wireless computing. By expanding into this field, Google continued to pursue its strategy of putting search into the hands of as many users as possible. As the global use of Google grew, the patterns contained within the records of search queries provided new information about what was on the minds of the global community of Internet users. Google was able to analyze the global traffic in Internet searching and identify patterns, trends, and surprises – a process they called ‘Google Zeitgeist.’ In 2004, Yahoo decided to compete directly with Google and discontinued its reliance on the Google search technology. Nevertheless, Google continued to expand, increasing its market share and dominance of the Web search market through the deployment of regional versions of its software, incorporating language capabilities beyond English. As a result, Google continued to expand as a global Internet force. Also in 2004, Google offered its stock to investors through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). This entrance to public trading of Google stock created not only a big stir in the financial markets, but also great wealth for the two founding entrepreneurs. Page and Brin immediately joined the billionaire’s club as they entered the exclusive ranks of the wealthiest people in the world. Following the IPO, Google began to challenge Microsoft in its role as the leading provider of computer services. They issued a series of new products, including the email service Gmail, the impressive map and satellite image product Google Earth, Google Talk to compete in the growing Voice of the Internet (VoIP) market, and products aimed at leveraging their ambitious project to make the content of thousands of books searchable online, Google Base and Google Book Search. In addition to these new ventures, they have continued to innovate in their core field of search by introducing new features for searching images, news articles, shopping services (Froogle), and other local search options. It is clear that Google has become an essential tool for connecting people and information in support of the developing Information Revolution. Having established itself at the epicenter of the Web, Google is widely regarded as the ‘place to be’ for the best and brightest programming talent in the industry. It is fair to say that, since the introduction of the printing press, no other entity or event has had more impact on public access to information than Google. In fact, Google has endeavored to accumulate a good part of all human knowledge from the vast amount of information stored on the Web. The effective transformation of Google into an engine for what Page calls a ‘perfect search’ would basically give people everywhere the right answers to their questions and the ability to understand everything in the world. Page and Brin could not have achieved their technological success without having a clear vision of the future of the Internet. Page recently commented in an interview that he believes that in the future "information access and communications will become truly ubiquitous,” meaning that “anyone in the world will have access to any kind of information they want or be able to communicate with anyone else instantly and for very little cost.” In fact, this vision of the future is not far from where we are now.[9] Page also noted that the real power of the Internet is the ability to serve people all over the globe with access to information that represents empowerment of individuals. The ability to facilitate the improved lives and productivity of billions of human beings throughout the world is an awesome potential outcome. And the ability to support the information needs of people from different cultures and languages is an unusual challenge. Page stated in an interview that “even language is becoming less of a barrier. There's pretty good automatic translation out there. I've been using it quite a bit as Google becomes more globalized. It doesn't translate documents exactly, but it does a pretty good job and it's getting better every day.”[10] Even with translation and global reach, however, there remain significant challenges to connecting the people of the world through advanced information technology. One of the challenges is the potential for governmental restrictions on the access to information. Encryption technology, for example, inhibits the power of governments to monitor or control such information access. However, a 1998 survey of encryption policy found that several countries, including Belarus, China, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and Singapore, maintained strong domestic controls while several other countries were considering the adoption of such controls.[11] The phrase ‘Don't be evil’ has been attributed to Google as its catch phrase or motto. Google's present CEO Eric Schmidt commented, in response to questions about the meaning of this motto, that "evil is whatever Sergey says is evil." Brin, on the other hand, said in an interview with Playboy Magazine, “As for ‘Don’t be evil,’ we have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good — always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately ‘Don’t be evil’ seems the easiest way to express it.” And Page also commented on the phrase, saying “Apparently people like it better than ‘Be good.’”[12] Page and Brin maintain lofty ambitions for the future of information technology, and they communicated those ambitions in an unprecedented seven-page letter to Wall Street entitled An Owner's Manual' for Google's Shareholders, written to detail Google's intentions as a public company. They explained their vision that “Searching and organizing all the world’s information is an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.”[13] In response to questions about how Google will be used in the future, Brin said “Your mind is tremendously efficient at weighing an enormous amount of information. We want to make smarter search engines that do a lot of the work for us. The smarter we can make the search engine, the better. Where will it lead? Who knows? But it’s credible to imagine a leap as great as that from hunting through library stacks to a Google session, when we leap from today’s search engines to having the entirety of the world’s information as just one of our thoughts.”[14] At this junction, Page and Brin find themselves in a state of great personal wealth and great accomplishment, having created a technology and company that is profoundly affecting human culture and society. The two computer scientists have traveled far in their hero’s journey to carry out their vision of global search, having developed skills and capabilities for themselves as well as for Google and the Googleware technology. As they succeeded, their search technology became a key milestone in the development of the Information Revolution. Their journey is not over, however. Before continuing their story, let’s digress into the historical context. The Information Revolution Over past millennia, the world has witnessed two global revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. During the Agricultural Revolution, a hunter-gather could acquire the resources from an area of 100 acres to produce an adequate food supply, whereas a single farmer needed only one acre of land to produce the equivalent amount of food. It was this 100-fold improvement in land management that fueled the agricultural revolution. It not only enabled far more efficient food production, but also provided food resources well above the needs of subsistence, resulting in a new era built on trade. Where a single farmer and his horse had worked a farm, during the Industrial Revolution workers were able to use a single steam engine that produced 100 times the horsepower of this farmer-horse team. As a result, the Industrial Revolution placed a 100-fold increase of mechanical power into the hands of the laborer. It resulted in the falling cost of labor and this fueled the unprecedented acceleration in economic growth that ensued. Over the millennia, man has accumulated great knowledge, produced a treasury of cultural literature and developed a wealth of technology advances, much of which has been recorded in written form. By the mid-twentieth century, the quantity of accessible useful information had grown explosively, requiring new methods of information management; and this can be said to have triggered the Information Revolution. As computer technology offered great improvements in information management technology, it also provided substantial reductions in the cost of information access. It did more than allow people to receive information. Individuals could buy, sell and even create their own information. Cheap, plentiful, easily accessible information has become as powerful an economic dynamic as land and energy had for the two prior revolutions. The falling cost of information has, in part, reflected the dramatic improvement in price-performance of microprocessors, which appears to be on a pattern of doubling every eighteen months. While the computer has been contributing to information productivity since the 1950’s, the resulting global economic productivity gains were initially slow to be realized. Until the late 1990’s, networks were rigid and closed, and time to implement changes in the telecommunication industry were measured in decades. Since then, the Web has become the ‘grim reaper’ of information inefficiency. For the first time, ordinary people had real power over information production and dissemination. As the cost of information dropped, the microprocessor in effect gave ordinary people control over information about consumer products. Today, we are beginning to see dramatic change as service workers experience the productivity gains from rapid communications and automated business and knowledge transactions. A service worker can now complete knowledge transactions 100 times faster using intelligent software and near ubiquitous computing in comparison to a clerk using written records. As a result, the Information Revolution is placing a 100-fold increase in transaction speed into the hands of the service worker. Therefore, the Information Revolution is based on the falling cost of information-based transactions which in turn fuels economic growth. In considering these three major revolutions in human society, a defining feature of each has been the requirement for more knowledgeable and more highly skilled workers. The Information Revolution signals that this will be a major priority for its continued growth. Clearly, the Web will play a central role in the efficient performance of the Information Revolution because it offers a powerful communication medium that is itself becoming ever more useful through intelligent applications. Over the past 50 years, the Internet/World Wide Web has grown into the global Information Superhighway. And just as roads connected the traders of the Agricultural Revolution and railroads connected the producers and consumers of the Industrial Revolution, the Web is now connecting information to people in the Information Revolution. The Information Revolutions enables service workers today to complete knowledge transactions many times faster through intelligent software using photons over the Internet, in comparison to clerks using electrons over wired circuits just a few decades ago. But perhaps the most essential ingredient in the Web’s continued success has been search technology such as Google, which has provided real efficiency in connecting to relevant information and completing vital transactions. Now Google transforms data and information into useful knowledge energizing the Information Revolution. Defining Information Google started with Page’s and Brin’s quest to mine data and make sense of the voluminous information on the Web. But what differentiates information from knowledge and how do companies like Google manipulate it on the Web to nourish the Information Revolution? First let’s be clear about what we mean by the fundamental terms ‘data,’ ‘information,’ ‘knowledge,’ and ‘understanding.’ An item of data is a fundamental element of information, the processed data that has some independent usefulness. And right now data is the main thing you can find directly on the Web in its current state. Data can be considered the raw material of information. Symbols and numbers are forms of data. Data can be organized within a database to form structured information. While spreadsheets are ‘number crunchers,’ databases are the ‘information crunchers.’ Databases are highly effective in managing and manipulating structured data.[15] Consider, for example, a directory or phone book which contains elements of information (i.e., names, addresses and phone numbers) about telephone customers in a particular area. In such a directory, each customer’s information is laid out in the same pattern. The phone book is basically a table which contains a record for each customer. Each customer’s record includes his name, address, and phone number. But you can’t directly search such a database on the Web. This is because there is no ‘schema’ defining the structure of data on the Web. Thus, what looks like information to the human being who is looking at the directory (taking with him his background knowledge and experience as a context) in reality is data because it lacks this schema. On the other hand, information explicitly associates one set of things to another. A telephone book full of data becomes information when we associate the data to persons we know or wish to communicate with. For example, suppose we found data entries in a telephone book for four different persons named Jones, but all of them were living within one block of each other. The fact that there are four bits of data about persons with the same name in approximately the same location is interesting information. Knowledge, on the other hand, can be considered to be a meaningful collection of useful information. We can construct information from data. And we can construct knowledge from information. Finally, we can achieve understanding from the knowledge we have gathered. Understanding lies at the highest level. It is the process by which we can take existing knowledge and synthesize new knowledge. Once we have understanding, we can pursue useful actions because we can synthesize new knowledge or information from what is previously known. Again, knowledge and understanding are currently elusive on the Web. Future Semantic Web architectures seek to redress this limit. To continue our telephone example, suppose we developed a genealogy tree for the Jones and found the four Jones who lived near each other were actually brothers. This would give us additional knowledge about the Jones in addition to information about their addresses. If we then interviewed the brothers and found that their father had bought each brother a house in his neighborhood when they married, we would finally understand quite a bit about them. We could continue the interviews to find out about their future plans for their off-spring – thus producing more new knowledge. If we could manipulate data, information, knowledge, and understanding by combining a search engine, such as Google, with a reasoning engine, we could create a logic machine. Such an effort would be central to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the Web. AI systems seek to create understanding through their ability to integrate information and synthesize new knowledge from previously stored information and knowledge. An important element of AI is the principle that intelligent behavior can be achieved through processing of symbolic structures representing increments of knowledge. This has produced knowledge-representation languages that allow the representation and manipulation of knowledge to deduce new facts from the existing knowledge. The World Wide Web has become the greatest repository of information on virtually every topic. Its biggest problem, however, is the classic problem of finding a needle in a haystack. Given the vast stores of information on the Web, finding exactly what you’re looking for can be a major challenge. This is where search engines, like Google, come in ─ and where we can look for the greatest future innovations to come when we combine AI and search. Larry Page and Sergey Brin found that the existing search technology looked at information on the Web in simple ways. They decided that to deliver better results, they would have to go beyond simply looking, to looking good. Looking Good Commercial search engines are based upon one of two forms of Web search technologies: human directed search and automated search. Human directed search is search in which the human performs an integral part of the process. In this form of search engine technology, a database is prepared of keywords, concepts, and references that can be useful to the human operator. Searches that are keyword based are easy to conduct but they have the disadvantage of providing large volumes of irrelevant or meaningless results. The basic idea in its simplest form is to count the number of words in the search query that match words in the keyword index, and rank the Web page accordingly. Although more sophisticated approaches also take into account the location of the keywords, the improved performance may not be substantial. As an example, it is known that keywords used in the title tags of Web pages tend to be more significant than words that occur in the web page, but not in the title tag; however, the level of improvement may be modest. Another approach is to use hierarchies of topics to assist in human-directed search. The disadvantage of this approach is that the topic hierarchies must be independently created and are therefore expensive to create and maintain. The alternative approach is automated search; this approach is the path taken by Google. It uses software agents, called Web crawlers (also called spiders, robots, bots, or agents) to automatically follow hypertext links from one site to another on the Web until they accumulate vast amounts of information about the Web pages and their interconnections. From this, a complex index can be prepared to store the relevant information. Such automated search methods accumulate information automatically and allow for continuing updates. However, even though these processes may be highly sophisticated and automatic, the information they produce is represented as links to words, and not as meaningful concepts. Current automated search engines must maintain huge databases of Web page references. There are two implementations of such search engines: individual search engines and meta-searchers. Individual search engines (such as Google) accumulate their own databases of information about Web pages and their interconnections and store them in such a way as to be searchable. Meta-searchers, on the other hand, access multiple individual engines simultaneously, searching their databases. In the use of key words in search engines, there are two language-based phenomena that can significantly impact effectiveness and therefore must be taken into account. The first of these is polysemy, the fact that single words frequently have multiple meanings; and the second is synonymy, the fact that multiple words can have the same meaning or refer to the same concept. In addition, there are several characteristics required to improve a search engine’s performance. It is important to consider useful searches as distinct from fruitless ones. To be useful, there are three necessary criteria: (1) maximize the relevant information, (2) minimize irrelevant information, and (3) make the ranking meaningful, with the most highly relevant results first. The first criterion is called recall. The desire to obtain relevant results is very important, and the fact is that, without effective recall, we may be swamped with less relevant information and may, in fact, leave out the most important and relevant results. It is essential to reduce the rate of false negatives ─ important and relevant results that are not displayed ─ to a level that is as low as possible. The second criterion, minimizing irrelevant information, is also very important to ensure that relevant results are not swamped; this criterion is called precision. If the level of precision is too low, the useful results will be highly diluted by the uninteresting results, and the user will be burdened by the task of sifting through all of the results to find the needle in the haystack. High precision means a very low rate of false positives, irrelevant results that are highly ranked and displayed at the top of our search result. Since there is always a tradeoff between reducing the risk of missing relevant results and reducing the level of irrelevant results, the third criterion, ranking, is very important. Ranking is most effective when it matches our information needs in terms of our perception of what is most relevant in our results. The challenge for a software system is to be able to accurately match the expectations of a human user since the degree of relevance of a search contains several subjective factors such as the immediate needs of the user and the context of the search. Many of the desired characteristics for advanced search, therefore, match well with the research directions in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. By obtaining an awareness of individual preferences, for example, a search engine could more effectively take them into account in improving the effectiveness of search. Recognizing ranking algorithms were the weak point in competing search technology Page and Brin introduced their own new ranking algorithm ─ PageRanking. Google Connects Information Just as the name Google is derived from the esoteric mathematical term ‘googol,’ in the future, the direction of Google will focus on developing the esoteric ‘perfect search engine,’ defined by Page as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." In the past, Google has applied great innovation to try and overcome the limitations of prior search approaches; PageRank was conceived by Google to overcome some of the key limitations.[16] Page and Brin recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate search results would require a new approach to server systems. While most search engines used a small number of large servers that often slowed down under peak use, Google went the other direction by using large numbers of linked PCs to find search results in response to queries. The approach turned out to be effective in that it produced much faster response times and greater scalability while minimizing costs. Others have followed Google’s lead in this innovation while Google has continued its efforts to make their systems more efficient. Google takes a parallel processing approach to its search technology by conducting a series of calculations on multiple processors. This has provided Google with critical timing advantage, permitting their search algorithms to be very fast. While other search engines rely heavily on the simple approach of counting the occurrences of keywords, Google’s PageRank approach considers the entire link structure of the Web to help in the determination of Web page importance. By then performing a hypertext matching assessment to narrow the search results for the particular search being conducted, Google achieves superior performance. In a sense, they combine insight into Web page importance with query-specific attributes to rank pages and deliver the most relevant results at the top of the search results. The PageRank algorithm analyzes the importance of the Web pages it considers by solving an exceptionally complex set of equations with a huge number of variables and terms. By considering links between Web pages as ‘votes’ from one page to another, PageRank can assign a measure of a page’s importance by counting its votes. It also takes into account the importance of each page that supplies a vote, and by appropriately weighting these votes, further improves the quality of the search. In addition, PageRank considers the Web page content, but unlike other search engines that restrict such consideration to the text content, Google consider the full contents of the page. In a sense, Google attempts to use the collective intelligence of the Web, a topic for further discussion later in this book, in its effort to improve the relevance of its search results. Finally, because the search algorithms used by Google are automated, Google has earned a reputation for objectivity and lack of bias in its results. Throughout their exciting years establishing and growing Google as a company, Page and Brin realized that continued innovation was essential. They undertook to find new innovative services that would enhance access to Web information with added thought and not a little perspiration. Page said that he respected the idea of having “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”[17] In February 2002, the Google Search Appliance, a plug-and-play application for search, was introduced. In short order, this product was dispersed throughout the world populating company networks, university systems, and the entire Web. The popular Google Search Appliance is referred to as ‘Google in a box.’ In another initiative, Google News was introduced in September of 2002. This free news service, which allows automatic selection and arrangement of news headlines and pictures, features real time updating and tailoring allowing users to browse the news with scan and search capabilities. Continuing Google's emphasis on innovation, the Google search service for products, Froogle, was launched in December of 2002. Froogle allows users to Search millions of commercial websites to find product and pricing information. It enables users to identify and link to a variety of sources for specific products, providing images, specifications and pricing information for the items being sought. Google's innovations have also impacted the publishing business with both search and advertising features. Google purchased Pyra Labs in 2003, and thus became the host of Blogger, a leading service for the sharing of thoughts and opinions through online journals, or blogs (weblogs). Finally, Google Maps became a dynamic online mapping feature, and Google Earth a highly popular mapping and satellite imagery resource. Using these innovative applications, users can find information about particular locations, get directions, and display both maps as well as satellite images of a desired address. With each new capability, Google expands our access to more information and moves us closer to Page’s Holy Grail: ‘perfect search.’ At this junction, Page and Brin have finally completed their hero’s journey. They have become the Masters of Search; committed to improving access to information and lifting the bonds of ignorance from millions around the world. Pattern of Discovery Larry Page and Sergey Brin were trying to solve the problem of easy, quick access to all Web information, and ultimately to all human knowledge. In order to index existing Web information and provide rapid relevant search results, their challenge was to sort through billions of pages of material efficiently and explicitly find the right responses. They were confident that their vision for developing a global information collection, storage, and retrieval system would succeed if they could base it on a unique and efficient ranking algorithm. The process of inspiration for Page and Brin became fulfilled when they completed their seminal paper entitled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine which explained their efficient ranking algorithm, PageRank. In developing a breakthrough ranking algorithm based upon the ideas of publication ranking, Page and Brin experienced a moment of inspiration. But they didn’t stop there. They also believed that optimization was vitally important and so they developed their own Googleware technology consisting of combining custom software with custom hardware thereby reflecting the founder’s genius. They built the world’s most powerful computational enterprise, and they have been on a roll every since. Page stressed that inspiration still required perspiration and that Google appeared destined for rapid growth and expansion. In building the customized computer Googleware infrastructure for PageRank, they were demonstrating the 1% Inspiration and 99% Perspiration pattern. The result was Google, the dominant search engine connecting people to all of the World Wide Web’s information. Forecasts for Connecting Information For many of us it seems that an uncertain future looms ahead like a massive opaque block of granite. But just as Michelangelo suggested that he took a block of stone and chip away the non-essential pieces to produce David, we can chip away the improbable to uncover the possible. By examining inventors and their process of discovery, we are able to visualize the tapestry of our past to help unveil patterns that can serve as our guide posts on our path forward. Page and Brin invented an essential search technology, but their contributions to information processing were evolutionary in nature – built on inspiration and perspiration. One forecast for connecting information is that we can expect a continued pattern of inspired innovation as we go forward in the expansion of search and related technology. Discoveries requiring inspiration and perspiration: In considering the future for connecting information, we expect that improved ranking algorithms will ensure Google’s continued dominance for some time to come. Extrapolating from Google’s success, we can expect a series of inspired innovations building upon its enterprise computer system, such as offering additional knowledge related services. Future Google services could include: expanding into multimedia areas such as television, movies, and music using Google TV and Google Mobile. Viewers would have all the history of TV to choose from. And Google would offer advertisers targeted search. Google Mobile could deliver the same service and products to cell phone technology. By 2020, Google could digitize and indexed every book, movie, TV show, and song ever produced; making it available conveniently. In addition, Google could dominate the Internet as a hub site. The ubiquitous GoogleNet, would dominate wireless access and cell-phone. As for Google browser, Gbrowser, it could replace operating systems. However, our vision also concludes connecting information through developing more intelligent search capabilities. A new Web architecture such as Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web, would add knowledge representation and logic to the markup languages of the Web. Semantics on the Web would offer extraordinary leaps in Web search capabilities. Since Google has cornered online advertising, they have made it progressively more precision-targeted and inexpensive. But Google also has 150,000 servers with nearly unlimited storage space and massive processing power. Beyond simply inspired discoveries, Google or other search engine powers could find innovations based upon new principles yet to be proven, as suggested in the following. Discoveries requiring new proof of principle: Technology futurists such as Ray Kurzweil have suggested that Strong AI (software programs that exhibit true intelligence) could emerge from developing web-based systems such as that of Google. Strong AI could perform data mining at a whole new level. This type of innovation would require a Proof of Principle. Some have suggested that Google’s purpose in converting books into electronic form is not to provide for humans to read them, but rather to provide a form that could be accessible by software, with AI as the consumer. One of the great areas of innovation resulting from Google’s initiatives is its ability to search the Human Genome. Such technology could lead to a personal DNA search capability within the next decade. This could result in the identification of medical prescriptions that are specific to you; and you would know exactly what kinds of side-effects to expect from a given drug. And consider what might happen if we had ‘perfect search?’ Think about the capability to ask any question and get the perfect answer – an answer with real context. The answer could incorporate all of the world’s knowledge using text, video, or audio. And it would reflect every nuance of meaning. Most importantly, it would be tailored to your own particular context. That’s the stated goal of IBM, Microsoft, Google and others. Such a capability would offer its greatest benefits when knowledge is easily gathered. Soon search will move away from the PC-centric operations to the Web connected to many small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. The most insignificant object with a chip and the ability to connect will be network-aware and searchable. And search needs to solve access to deep databases of knowledge, such as the University of California’s library system. While there are several hundred thousand books online, there are 100 million more that are not. ‘Perfect search’ will find all this information and connect us to the world’s knowledge, but this is the beginning of decision making, not the end. Search and artificial intelligence seem destined to get together. In the coming chapters, we will be exploring all the different technologies involved in connecting information and we will be exploring how the prospects for ‘perfect search’ could turn into ‘ubiquitous intelligence.’ First, ubiquitous computing populates the world with devices using microchips everywhere. Then the ubiquitous Web connects and controls these devices on a global scale. The ubiquitous Web is a pervasive Web infrastructure allows all physical objects access by URIs, providing information and services that enrich users’ experiences in their physical context just as the Web does in cyberspace. The final step comes when artificial intelligence reaches the capability of managing and regulating devices seamlessly and invisibly within the environment – achieving ubiquitous intelligence. Ubiquitous intelligence is the final step of Larry Page’s ‘perfect search’ and the future of the Information Revolution. References: [1] Prather, M., “Ga-Ga for Google,” Entrepreneur Magazine , April 2002 . [2] Vise, D. A., and Malseed, M., The Google Story, Delacourt Press, New York, NY, 2005 [3] Brin, S., and Page, L., The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, 1996 [4] Brin S., and Page, L., “The Future of the Internet,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, March 21, 2001, [5] Vise, D. A., and Malseed, M., The Google Story, Delacourt Press, New York, NY, 2005 [6] Vise, D. A., and Malseed, M., The Google Story, Delacourt Press, New York, NY, 2005 [7] Technology Review, interview entitled “Search Us, Says Google,” 1/11/2002 [8] Kevin Kelleher, “Google vs. Gates,” Wired, Issue 12.03, March 2004. [9] Brin S., and Page, L., “The Future of the Internet,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, March 21, 2001, [10] Ibid [11] Cryptography and Liberty 1998, An International Survey of Encryption Policy, February 1998, from http://www.gilc.org/crypto/crypto-survey.html [12] Playboy Magazine Interview, “Google Guys,” Playboy Magazine, September 2004 [13] From Google's Letter to Prospective Shareholders http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/markets/marketfeatures/10157519_6.htm l [14] Playboy Magazine Interview, “Google Guys,” Playboy Magazine, September 2004 [16] Quotes from http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html [17] Vise, D. A., and Malseed, M., The Google Story, Delacourt Press, New York, NY, 2005