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Latest news from Next Generation Internet planet! Some thoughts and notes.

  • Monique Calisti profile
    Monique Calisti
    1 December 2016 - updated 4 years ago
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Yesterday I attended the Next Generation Internet #NGI workshop that was held at the #EuropeanCommission premises in Brussels.

About 70-80 participants (I believe) were invited by the EC representing academic, SME, startup, industrial and media organisations actively engaged in innovating the Internet.

Discussions and debates centered around identifying the core issues and topics the European Internet Innovators shall be focusing on to build the Internet of 2030.

Core aspects that emerged out of the intense day were shortly summarised by the various rapporteurs designated during the breakdown workshops the participants were involved in.

As rapporteur for the SMEs and Industrial representatives, I was invited to summarise the outcomes of the session I was involved in. I'd like to share this with the broader audience that could not be with us in Brussels yesterday.

  • NGI will have to encompass Research and Policy and provide an open cooperative platform (intended as a network of networks embracing infrastructure and services) ensuring non-discriminatory access at low cost to all citizens
  • NGI shall become a mean to break monopolies (breaking down top-down players data ownership and search engines monopoly in particular) and allow open innovation to be effectively implemented by all scientists and innovators for the whole Digital Society
  • NGI shall address and solve the weak privacy and security concerns of today's vulnerable Internet
  • In the Internet of the Future, Quality of Experience should be pull-based taking into account individual needs, but also embodied social networks requirements - the Internet will convey mood and emotions
  • Ethics and regulation will be crucial: the more the Internet will transparently pervade our everyday life, the more we will need to understand implications of delegating to machines and devices our decision making, whether partly of fully
  • Education and Healthcare shall be core verticals indicating and driving efforts for the creation of an Internet for Humans

What about Artificial Intelligence!? Well my soul and brain were amused and inspired (and sometimes a bit annoyed I must admit), by the fact so many times it clearly came up AI will play a central role in grounding the evolution of the Internet. No big surprise really! But a lot of concerns of course in understanding what will be the proper balance in the degree of autonomy that will be given to devices, machines and whatever software agents will be acting on our behalf.

This, which is my very personal view on one of the core aspects NGI will have to address, will keep many scientists and Internet innovators busy in the years to come. And for me time to go back to my AI work and colleagues, which I'm very happy about.

To conclude these few notes, at the end of the day, maybe even more questions than at the beginning, but for sure a lot of food for thought. So lots of ongoing work and brainstorm for the weeks to come! Stay tuned!

@MoniqueCalisti

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John Grant's picture
John Grant,
02/12/2016 11:51

"the Internet will convey mood and emotions": I have a horrible feeling that means more emoticons and emojis, and maybe avatars. There was a time when telecommunication between humans meant having a phone conversation, in which you can tell a lot about how someone is feeling if it's a clear line, even without being able to see them. Now, delays and dropped packets mean it gets more and more difficult to have that kind of conversation, and "phones" are mostly used for exchanging text messages and photos, and viewing recorded content.

Partly that is because Internet Protocol is not very good at getting the packets to the other end in a timely manner. Over the last decade there have been many studies that have shown that many of today's problems are difficult or impossible to fix if IP is used, but there has been much less effort put into finding something that meets all the requirements (including the low latency needed for new areas such as tactile Internet and autonomous vehicles) and has a good migration path from IP.

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