[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 9/18

Mon Sep 17 15:47:39 UTC 2007

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:36:13 -0400
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement 9/18
X-Mailer: MessagingEngine.com Webmail Interface
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>

Meeting notice: The 070918 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Synthetic Awareness and Cassandra's Law

Moore's Law is globally famous and deservedly so.  However it has a
mirror opposite that is just as powerful yet is generally unknown,
perhaps because no one likes bad news.  We might call it Cassandra's
Law: over time technological complexity of all kinds increases
exponentially.

In other words, solutions in a given domain become progressively more
subtle, time- consuming, and technically demanding. (Consider the road
from DOS through Windows to Vista.)  Eventually, or so Cassandra's law
seems to predict, solutions will become so expensive, so intractable,
that technological progress will everywhere grind to halt and society
fall into stagnation (technologically). Call this point the anti-
Singularity.

A perfect example of the Law in action -- though of course there are
hundreds -- might be the rising tide of complexity associated with the
spread of wireless technology.  When wireless was first invented every
community had its population of amateur radio operators or "hams,"
citizens who had been able to learn the technology from scratch.  A
century later any manager who counts a wireless network among his or her
responsibilities is dealing every day with immensely hairy problems
rising from some mix of spectrum sharing glitches, user mobility
complexities, device authentication, coverage patchiness, security
issues, problems integrating with wired networks, delays, and layer upon
layer of device or application incompatibilities.  Typically such
problems emerge from the interaction of several domains at once.
Wireless is no longer for amateurs.

A corollary of the Law is that over time realtime surveillance of a
system has to increase (since there is no other way to disentangle
subtle problems).  A contemporary high-end wireless LAN might have
dozens of sensors or "instruments" scattered though its architecture,
often using their own private network to report a range of conditions
(like queue length or handoff delay) to the backend, which then
processes and passes this data on to the manager's "dashboard".  An R&D
network in a lab might use hundreds of sensors. Eventually, Cassanda's
Law says, it will be impossible for real people to monitor wireless
networks in real time, no matter how skilled the humans might be. There
will just be too many balls in the air.

We seem to be pretty close to that point today. If so, over the next
several years most companies are going to have to move to systems that
can monitor themselves, recognize deviations from expected performance,
develop theories about the causes of that deviation, test the theories
experimentally, and then either report the solution(s) in actionable
form or take care of them autonomously.  IBM calls this science
"autonomics," others use the name "synthetic awareness".

Synthetic awareness is not a small change architecturally.  A system
will need access to full- scale, realistic, models of itself so that it
can compare on an ongoing basis what is happening with what should be
happening down to the level of component behavoir.  If something goes
wrong and there is no pre-existing rule for that particular outcome,
models will be essential to diagnose the problem, perhaps by varying the
states of the components until the unacceptable behavior is replicated.
(Hopefully the model will be smart enough not to require an exhaustive
exploration of the entire state space.)

Recently a team at UCSD, in collaboration with a lab in Budapest, put
down its head and took a serious run at this problem.  They built a
model of the interactions of the physical and transport layers in the IP
stack of an 802.11 network.  They then distributed almost 200 monitoring
points throughout a large UCSD network and ran the model in parallel
with the network.  The good news was that the program did in fact
diagnose subtle, transient, performance problems, including one problem
whose solution had eluded USCD technical support for more than a year.
The bad news is that these problems were limited as to type, came from a
wide range of interacting sources, and, at least so far, the program
does not do self-repair.

If Casandra's Law is right, and of course it is, the day is approaching
when all of our systems will have to be self-monitoring, self-
diagnosing, and self- repairing.  Endowing our technologies with
synthetic awareness may be prove to one of the defining engineering
challenges of this century and an important route to AI.

Bibliography:

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=686
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~voelker/pubs/jigsaw-models-sigcomm07.pdf

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
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www.pobox.com/~fhapgood
www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com

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