Emerging Technologies

A wide array of emerging technologies have the potential to effect changes on the role of IT professionals. Social networks are becoming increasingly important in everyday life and work, although their closed nature restricts their effectiveness; fortunately, opportunities for linking multiple social networks are increasing thanks to innovations such as the OpenSocial platform and the OpenID digital identity standard. Advanced Web-based applications that function in a similar manner to desktop applications, enabled through technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and JavaScript Object Notation, are another emerging technology with a lot of potential. Next-generation smart phones equipped with Web and Internet capabilities hold substantial promise for bringing us nearer to a PC-like phone, as does constant, low-power Web connections. Practical applications of the semantic Web began to arrive in 2007, as many vendors started offering products to help businesses implement semantic Web technologies that facilitated the construction of actual sites and solutions. Applications and sites that comprehend and connect to data across the Internet are already possible through the semantic Web, which is expected to radically transform the linkage of businesses, applications, and people across the Web. The delivery and consumption of hardware and software are finally starting to be shaped by green technologies, which represent attempts to make the entire IT infrastructure more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient. Looking ahead, businesses and users will expect future laptops to consume less power while also delivering wireless connectivity and other capabilities found in the small and cheap machines developed for the One Laptop Per Child project.

Nonsilicon Transistor

Intel has developed a new nonsilicon transistor that could potentially be faster and use less electricity than current chips. The new transistors are more economical and could be manufactured using existing facilities because they can be built directly on top of standard silicon wafers. Although the nonsilicon chips are still at least a decade away from widescale manufacturing, experts say they are one of the more promising options for replacing silicon in the coming years. Chipmakers are scrambling to find an alternative to silicon, and one option is using carbon nanotubes and another carbon material called graphine to replace silicon, while another option are compound semiconductors made from a combination of elements from the third and fifth columns of the periodic table. Compound semiconductors are an attractive alternative to silicon because electrons move through the compound material far more efficiently than through silicon, meaning compound transistors can work just as fast, or even faster, without requiring a larger voltage, critical to shrinking the size of transistors. However, compound semiconductors are difficult to grow on silicon, and are often incompatible with silicon because the atoms are spaced and do not layer well, which can lead to cracked crystals and defective transistors. Intel recently proposed a solution that creates compound semiconductors with indium gallium arsenide and indium aluminum arsenide. Some of the obstacles compound transistors face including shrinking transistor size, which is currently about 80 nanometers, to get a high transistor density.

OpenCourseWare Completed

MIT recently announced the completion of its OpenCourseWare project, a pioneering effort launched in 2002 to digitize classroom material for all of MIT's 1,800 academic courses. The course material is available for free online for anyone to use. At the completion celebration on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass., university President Susan Hockfield announced a new portal for OCW, one specifically designed for high school teachers and students, called "Highlights for High School." The portal's home page provides MIT's introductory science, engineering, technology, and math courses, with lecturer's notes, reading lists, exams, and other classroom information. The OCW resources, including video-taped labs, simulations, assignments, and hands-on material, have been specifically tailored to match the requirements of high school Advanced Placement studies. Since its launch five years ago, the data on usage has been impressive. On a 50-course pilot site, an estimated 35 million users logged in, with about 15 percent being educators, 30 percent students, and the rest being what MIT calls "self learners" with no education affiliation, says OCW's Steve Carson. The recently formed OCW Consortium has 160 member institutions creating and sharing their own course materials sites based on MIT's model. One of the most surprising findings is that two of MIT's course videos, "classical mechanics" and "differential equations," ranked in iTunes top 10 videos, at number three and number seven, respectively. "This expresses, to me, the hunger in this world for learning, and for good learning materials," says Hockfield.

Carbon Nanotubes

Since its debut six decades ago, transistor technology has advanced to the point where 820 million transistors can be housed on Intel's new Penryn processor. However, the shrinkage of transistors to accelerate processing speed and manage power efficiency has Intel co-founder Gordon Moore convinced that a physical barrier will be reached within the next 10 or 15 years. Not everyone agrees with Moore's assessment. "What's happened again and again when you come upon the physical limits is we've been able to advance around them, and I think that will continue for at least the next several generations," says director of IBM's Australia Development Laboratory Glenn Wightwick. Intel CTO Justin Rattner forecasts that within 10 years electronics will shift from reliance on an electron's electrostatic charge to its "spin," and perhaps usher in molecular devices. Wightwick says many research labs are investigating potential replacements for transistors, such as molecular cascades or carbon nanotubes. The trade-off with a switch to new electronic components is the cost and effort of facilitating such a transition, but users would benefit enormously because their interaction with technology would be easier thanks to single-system chips, Rattner says. He says these advances could lead to innovations such as practical machine translation, continuous speech recognition, and personal robots.