The future of communications
Lightweight, viral systems that grow with use will define how we keep in touch in the years to come Late last week I spoke with Andy Lippman about the future of communications. Co-director of MIT's Communications Futures Program and associate director of the MIT Media Lab from 1983 to 2001, Lippman is a deep thinker. And for the past 30 years, Lippman has been thinking deeply about personal communications and co
Follow @infoworldLightweight, viral systems that grow with use will define how we keep in touch in the years to come
Late last week I spoke with Andy Lippman about the future of communications.
Co-director of MIT's Communications Futures Program and associate director of the MIT Media Lab from 1983 to 2001, Lippman is a deep thinker. And for the past 30 years, Lippman has been thinking deeply about personal communications and computing. As you might expect, Lippman took the conversation to some heady places:
"A lot of people are thinking about telepresence: feeling what is happening remotely...almost like being there."
"When things are connected, all things become opportunities for services."
"We will see real-world mashups between people, between people and machines, and machines talking to machines."
But you would be wrong to think that Lippman has his head in the clouds. Holding 11 patents, mainly related to TV and radio signals, Lippman is currently on a year-long sabbatical, working with Nortel's R&D group as a visiting fellow. Moreover, he was deeply involved in creating Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network Solution through MIT.
So what I enjoyed most about our conversation is Lippman's ability to switch between the highly practical, applied science, to the way-out stuff such as telepresence and hyperconnectivity.
"Hyperconnectivity is where the person is fully in the loop," Lippman says. "It will allow you to control stuff on Mars or do surgery from 3,000 miles away."
Funded by commercial companies, the MIT Media Lab came up with the novel idea of creating a consortium. That way, it does not have to apply for funding from each company individually.
"We owe our soul to none of them or all of them collectively," Lippman says, adding that this has allowed the lab to choose research topics that its members feel passionate about.
Of late, Lippman and his students have been working on "viral" communications -- systems that are agile, light on infrastructure, and optimized for invention. He calls such systems viral because, similar to other viral systems, they are built to "catch on person-to-person."
Traditional communications systems are anti-scalable, Lippman says, in that the more people you have tapping them, the more interference you get, and the smaller the bandwidth allocation becomes. Instead, Lippman asks, what if communications systems could grow as the number of users of the system grows?
