Tech conference offers predictions of bold innovations
By Mike Langberg
Knight Ridder News Service
Computer chips that mimic the human brain. Disease-fighting drugs designed by engineers instead of stumbled on during trial-and-error testing. Wireless devices that understand our voices and keep us constantly connected to vital information. Huge networks of inexpensive electronic sensors monitoring the weather.
Silicon Valley has no shortage of ideas for what will be the next technology to transform society. A sell-out crowd of 400 gathered recently at the new Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., for a marathon 10-hour conference titled Silicon Valley 4.0.
Among the conference's boldest predictions:
Wireless everywhere. There's no shortage of prognosticators proclaiming wireless as the next big thing, but several speakers said even wireless boosters are thinking too small.
Curt Carlson, president of the SRI International think tank in Menlo Park, Calif., said simultaneous developments in longer-life batteries, speech recognition and seamless networking will create mobile devices so important in connecting us to "information, work and friends" that we would no more leave the house without them than we would forget our wallets.
Speech recognition, in particular, is important because most people will never be happy typing out commands and messages on the tiny key pads now crammed into mobile phones and personal digital assistants.
Gerry Purdy, a wireless analyst who writes the MobileTrax newsletter, said future devices will be smart enough to work with any wireless network that's available, and to automatically fetch the information you want.
Biological engineering. Geoffrey Moore, a partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park and author of the best-selling business book "Crossing the Chasm," said today's ambitious college students should study the intersection of biology and computing.
Mohr Davidow is actively investing in companies looking at ways to tap expanding knowledge of the human genome to create drugs from scratch for fighting targeted diseases, as well as companies designing medical monitoring chips.
John Freund of Skyline Ventures in Palo Alto, Calif., noted small biotech companies are introducing more new drugs every year than giant pharmaceutical conglomerates.
Embedded networks. Computing power is becoming so inexpensive that tiny computers will soon be cheap enough to stick inside almost every manufactured object. Judy Estrin, a serial entrepreneur who has founded or run three successful computing networking companies, said embedded computers will unleash a "phenomenal cycle" in about five years.
Embedded computers will also be tied to sensors, Estrin predicted, creating vast networks that will keep an eye on everything from the environment to rush-hour traffic. The challenge for Silicon Valley will be learning how to design computing devices that are very small and consume very little power, reversing a long history of building chips that are ever more powerful and power-hungry.
Estrin, chairwoman of computer-networking start-up Packet Design in Palo Alto, has a family connection to keep her informed: Her younger sister, Deborah Estrin, is director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Neuroscience research. Jeff Hawkins, acclaimed for designing the original Palm electronic organizer and now with Handspring of Mountain View, gave a teasing glimpse into his other life: neuroscience research. Long fascinated with how the human brain works, Hawkins has financed the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park. The institute brings together computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians to study "biologically accurate mathematical models of memory and cognition."
Hawkins said the institute and other researchers are close to understanding the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for making and understanding human speech. The techniques will be reproducible in silicon chips, he declared, unleashing a "totally unexpected" revolution in computing.
