Throughout history, humankind has distinguished itself by its application of intelligence to solve critical problems and overcome innate limitations. Though one often thinks of intelligence as an individual trait such as high IQ or education level, the story of intelligence is equally about the development of collective cognitive capabilities and enhancers that enable the advancement of society. These capabilities, such as verbal and written language, calendars, physics and the internet, provide a distinct evolutionary advantage leading to disruptive step changes in both individual and societal intelligence. This article articulates the evolution of capabilities like these throughout human history and shows how historical patterns foretell future trends that serve to direct current research aimed at augmenting human intelligence.
Widespread deployment of centralized clouds has changed the way internet services are developed, deployed and operated. Centralized clouds have substantially extended the market opportunities for online services, enabled new entities to create and operate internet-scale services, and changed the way traditional companies run their operations. However, there are types of services that are unsuitable for today's centralized clouds such as highly interactive virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) applications, high-resolution gaming, virtualized RAN, mass loT data processing and industrial robot control. They can be broadly categorized as either latency-sensitive network functions, latency-sensitive applications, and/or high-bandwidth services. What these basic functions have in common is the need for a more distributed cloud infrastructure an infrastructure we call edge clouds. In this paper, we examine the evolution of clouds, and edge clouds especially, and look at the developing market for edge clouds and what developments are required in networking, hardware and software to support them.
Widespread deployment of centralized clouds has changed the way internet services are developed, deployed and operated. Centralized clouds have substantially extended the market opportunities for online services, enabled new entities to create and operate internet-scale services, and changed the way traditional companies run their operations. However, there are types of services that are unsuitabl...
Driven by the growth of cloud and virtualization technologies, telecom services are under pressure to become increasingly dynamic. Cloud services can be instantiated in a matter of minutes on computing platforms, which can rapidly schedule and allocate virtualized physical resources. A similar flexibility to adapt to dynamic service requests remains a challenge with network resources. Recently, centralized controllers have been deployed in data center networks to adapt network connectivity to computational needs. However, due to the complexity and variety of carrier networking technologies, carrier networks have been slow to move towards centralized control. More recently, carriers are evolving to address network complexity by pushing for the disaggregation of network elements and the introduction of equipment with more control flexibility. Carriers require a new control paradigm to benefit from this new flexibility, which extends far beyond today's OpenFlow network controllers. The lack of a global network controller with a consistent network view slows down the development and deployment of the more dynamic network services required by extensive cloud technologies. To address the scaling requirements of the carrier environment, the envisioned network controller would be implemented as a distributed system. In this article, we describe a global network controller designed to function as a network operating system with multi-domain, multi-layer capabilities that will transform carrier-grade telecom services. We define the requirements for a carrier-grade network operating system (OS) and describe a prototype system (NetUNIX) that can control heterogeneous networks at large scale and ensure high service reliability. We highlight the advantages of the NetUNIX platform in the context of other open source platforms and illustrate the use of the NetUNIX platform with two use cases: a metro-distributed data center and 5G next-generation fronthaul.
This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein are those of the author and can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither do they necessarily reflect the views of the OECD, its Member countries or of the beneficiaries participating in the activity. ATTRACTIVENESS OF CIVIL SERVICE IN THE WESTERN BALKANS
Imagine that in a few years from now a full-scale, practical quantum computer hits the headlines. In this apocalyptic scenario, the world of cryptography would be in a state of shock, since almost everything that forms the foundations of current security would collapse. Indeed, the presence of a quantum computer would render state-of-the-art, public-key cryptography useless. All the underlying assumptions about the intractability of mathematical problems that offer confident levels of security today would no longer apply in the presence of a quantum computer. But are we really doomed? Is cryptography dead? Well, luckily no. This paper examines the technologies that will enable crypto to survive the post-apocalyptic world of quantum computing. There are many things yet to be done to offer an environment as safe as current crypto does, but the tools are there. It is now a game of engineering, pro-active standardization and ingenious mathematics, while following a careful development approach to pave a safe way through the qubits inferno
Imagine that in a few years from now a full-scale, practical quantum computer hits the headlines. In this apocalyptic scenario, the world of cryptography would be in a state of shock, since almost everything that forms the foundations of current security would collapse. Indeed, the presence of a quantum computer would render state-of-the-art, public-key cryptography useless. All the underlying assumptions about the intractability of mathematical problems that offer confident levels of security today would no longer apply in the presence of a quantum computer. But are we really doomed? Is cryptography dead? Well, luckily no. This paper examines the technologies that will enable crypto to survive the post-apocalyptic world of quantum computing. There are many things yet to be done to offer an environment as safe as current crypto does, but the tools are there. It is now a game of engineering, pro-active standardization and ingenious mathematics, while following a careful development approach to pave a safe way through the qubits inferno.
It is increasingly acknowledged that we are on the verge of the next technological revolution and the fourth industrial revolution, driven by the digitization and interconnection of all physical elements and infrastructure under the control of advanced intelligent systems. Therefore, there will be a new era of automation that should result in enhanced productivity. However, such productivity enhancements have been anticipated before, particularly during the third industrial revolution commonly known as the `information age', and have failed to materialize. Were the productivity increases observed following the first and second industrial revolutions a one-time aberration that will not be repeated in the new digital age? In this paper, we attempt to address this question by a semi-quantitative analysis of the prior productivity jumps and their physical technological origins, and extend this analysis to the latent set of analogous digital technologies. Using this approach, we project that there will indeed be a second productivity jump in the United States that will occur in the 2028-2033 timeframe when the aggregate of the constituent technologies reaches the tipping point at 51 percent penetration.
In this paper we summarize recent research regarding a novel characterization of large-scale real-life informational networks which can be leveraged to speed computations for network analytics purposes by orders of magnitude. First, using publicly available data, we show that informational networks not only satisfy well-known principles such as the small-world property and variants of the power law degree distribution, but that they also exhibit the geometric property of large-scale negative curvature, also referred to as hyperbolicity. We then provide examples of large-scale physical networks that universally lack this property, thus showing that hyperbolicity is not an ever-present feature of real-life networks in general. We document how hyperbolicity leads to unusually high centrality in informational networks. We then describe an approximation of hyperbolic networks that leverages the observed property of high centrality. We provide evidence that the fidelity of the proposed approximation is not only high for applications such as distance approximation, but that it can speed computation by a factor of 1000X or more. Finally, we discuss two applications of our proposed linear-time distance approximation for informational networks: one for personalized ranking and the other for clustering. These and many more algorithms yet to be developed take full advantage of our proposed tree-approximation of hyperbolic networks and further demonstrate its power and utility.
Digital Subscriber Line technology has democratized broadband access, and over the past several decades, telecommunications providers have evolved from providing plain old telephone service (POTS) over a copper loop plant to providing broadband access and high-definition video over hybrid fiber-copper networks. This article focuses on three revolutionary copper technologies in different stages of development that will enable hybrid networks to continue to increase data rates over orders of magnitude for many years to come. The first of the three, vectoring, is a mature technology with massive ongoing rollout that provides end user speeds above 100 Mb/s across typical distances of 500m. The second, G.fast, is the first ultrabroadband technology offering 1 Gb/s speeds, across typical distances of 100m. It has recently gained approval in the standards bodies and is currently undergoing trials both in research labs and in the field by numerous telecom operators. Finally, we discuss Bell Labs' XG-FAST technology, now in proof of concept, which can deliver 10 Gb/s across a 30 meter copper drop cable. XG-FAST paves the way for a homes-passed fiber network, leveraging high speed copper to the premises to increase its homes-connected.
Demand for wireless throughput, both mobile and fixed, will always increase. One can anticipate that, in five or ten years, millions of augmented reality users in a large city will want to transmit and receive 3D personal high-definition video more or less continuously, say 100 megabits per second per user in each direction. Massive MIMO-also called Large-Scale Antenna Systems-is a promising candidate technology for meeting this demand. Fifty-fold or greater spectral efficiency improvements over fourth generation (4G) technology are frequently mentioned. A multiplicity of physically small, individually controlled antennas performs aggressive multiplexing/demultiplexing for all active users, utilizing directly measured channel characteristics. Unlike today's Point-to-Point MIMO, by leveraging time-division duplexing (TDD), Massive MIMO is scalable to any desired degree with respect to the number of service antennas. Adding more antennas is always beneficial for increased throughput, reduced radiated power, uniformly great service everywhere in the cell, and greater simplicity in signal processing. Massive MIMO is a brand new technology that has yet to be reduced to practice. Notwithstanding, its principles of operation are well understood, and surprisingly simple to elucidate.
The increasing popularity of smartphones and other data-enabled cellular devices has led to a rapid expansion of cellular data networks worldwide. These networks are constantly being improved to provide new functionality, improved capacity, and better reliability. Optimization, testing, and troubleshooting of these systems are all important areas of concern within the cellular network industry. Large amounts of engineering resources are devoted to these topics, with the result that analysis techniques and best practices are constantly being improved. This paper details recent work regarding the analysis of cellular data device behavior in a live system, and the design of a high performance load generator to simulate this behavior for use in system testing and debugging. Internet Protocol (IP) packet capture data is analyzed using a simple graph-based analysis technique that provides a detailed characterization of device behavior. This characterization is then used in the design of a second generation high performance load generator. ® 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.
In recent years, enterprise social networking (ESN) has gained a foothold in many companies. While there are numerous similarities between enterprise and public online social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, there are also important differences, many of which are driven by the inherent organizational structure of an enterprise, that make ESNs an important area to study in their own right. This paper describes the ESN applications that have been used within Alcatel-Lucent over the past several years, focusing on the most recent. We discuss the tools and methodologies utilized to gain access to Alcatel-Lucent's ESN usage data and to perform various types of analyses and visualizations of that data. We provide some statistics about ESN usage within the company and give insights into some of the questions that ESN tools can help to answer, such as the degree to which ESN applications break down geographic and/or organizational boundaries. Our analyses show that employees in the middle levels of the company hierarchy tend to use ESN the most, and that there is a considerable amount of inter-country communication occurring. © 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.
We propose a method for analysis of surveillance video by using low rank and sparse decomposition (LRSD) with low latency combined with compressive sensing to segment the background and extract moving objects in a surveillance video. Video is acquired by compressive measurements, and the measurements are used to analyze the video by a low rank and sparse decomposition of a matrix. The low rank component represents the background, and the sparse component, which is obtained in a tight wavelet frame domain, is used to identify moving objects in the surveillance video. An important feature of the proposed low latency method is that the decomposition can be performed with a small number of video frames, which reduces latency in the reconstruction and makes it possible for real time processing of surveillance video. The low latency method is both justified theoretically and validated experimentally. © 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.
Data analytics in smart grids can be leveraged to channel the data downpour from individual meters into knowledge valuable to electric power utilities and end-consumers. Short-term load forecasting (STLF) can address issues vital to a utility but it has traditionally been done mostly at system (city or country) level. In this case study, we exploit rich, multi-year, and high-frequency annotated data collected via a metering infrastructure to perform STLF on aggregates of power meters in a mid-sized city. For smart meter aggregates complemented with geo-specific weather data, we benchmark several state-of-the-art forecasting algorithms, including kernel methods for nonlinear regression, seasonal and temperature-adjusted auto-regressive models, exponential smoothing and state-space models. We show how STLF accuracy improves at larger meter aggregation (at feeder, substation, and system-wide level). We provide an overview of our algorithms for load prediction and discuss system performance issues that impact real time STLF. © 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.
The “privacy versus personalization” dilemma refers to the situation in which it is necessary for users to disclose their sensitive personal data in order to benefit from collaborative personalized services. Solving this dilemma is a challenge because generating collaborative filtering recommendations requires access to the set of all user profiles in order to identify similar ones, and to compute the top-rated items. The privacy-preserving personalization (P3) paradigm builds on the idea of using locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to find groups of similar users, while keeping their profiles local. In this work, we analyze the behavior of the adapted LSH algorithm from the perspective of the quality of final recommendations and the distribution of cluster sizes. We investigate the impact of different LSH parameter configurations on the basis of the MovieLens dataset, and empirically show a small, non-prohibitive cost of privacy protection on the recommendations' quality..
Today, data collected by service providers can track an individual user's experience in detail, at flow or packet level in real time. However, we still lack analytics methods that can translate this information into a comprehensive and ever-evolving representation of the user experience. In this paper, we provide a layered dynamic model that addresses the problem of how to relate low-level network performance metrics to a user's perception of network service and their subsequent actions. Using time-stamped observations from networks, devices, and customer care, we build probabilistic models to link network performance to an inferred state of customer satisfaction, and then to explicit and implicit customer disengagement events. We provide inference algorithms for the model parameters, and report test results on synthesized datasets based on real, but incomplete, observations. We discuss how popular anonymization techniques such as data masking, encryption, k-anonymization, and differential privacy can be used to protect sensitive and private user data without impacting the user experience inference. (c) 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.
