MIT’s Communications Futures Program – Impressions

I’m sitting in the plenary session of the Communications Futures Program of MIT (actually taking place in Venice, hosted by Telecom Italia). It’s always a pleasure to be at this meeting. CFP started to invite a growing number of external speakers so that it’s always a good mix of internal and external opinions.

One observation is that the sponsor faces are changing. That is an obvious side effect of the way CFP works. Although not focussed on the working groups per se, the plenary attracts a current audience from the sponsors who see a value in participation. That makes presentation of the working groups somewhat harder but it is an interesting challenge to bring the work within these groups to a new (and changing) audience.

As for the talks themselves:

• Ian Brown (from Oxford Internet Institute) presented some interesting thoughts on privacy in social networking. It is surprising, although not new, how much information is revealed (mostly voluntarily) by individuals in today’s electronic forms of communication. This does relate to issues being addressed in the Privacy & Security WG (which I’m co-chairing) on policy and governance.
• Dave Clark (MIT CSAIL) presented policy implications of cyber warfare. Interesting to think about and increasingly important. How shall we (the jurisdiction) judge attacks on critical infrastructure? How much does, e.g., the Geneva Conventions, apply to these attacks? An interesting topic, to be thought about further…
• Hossein Moiin (BT) returned to a former work item of CFP, namely Personal Broadband. He investigated how much of this vision has become reality since being formulated back in 2003/2004. I don’t share much of his optimism. For me, much of Personal Broadband has not advanced at all, on the contrary. Many propositions from 2003/2004 that had the potential to push the vision forward, such as FON or municipal broadband, have not lived up to the promise. WLAN, as an alternative technology to provide almost ubiquituous connectivity in urban areas, is highly fragmented, difficult to login (there are FAR more authentication schemes for WLAN than for cellular, for instance), and billed by the minute (WHY??). Hossein’s challenges to be solved, however, was a list I support, e.g., full service portability, access network competition, …
• Rainer Zimmermann (EC) represented an unusual visitor. It was the first time (as I can remember) that a member of a funding agency presented, in this case even one from the other side of the Atlantic. Rainer presented ongoing efforts in the EU space in the area of Future Internet. While some of us know these efforts quite well (Rainer’s unit funds two of my EU projects), it was a good exposure of the EU efforts to an audience that does not know these that well.

Unfortunately, the presentation material is not publicly available. But it’s definitely worth being here. If your organization (corporate) is interesting in joining CFP, contacting the consortium’s representatives will certainly help you in this.