Intelligent Information Systems
10. Educational Challenges.
Projecting the Future.
Gio Wiederhold
EPFL,
April-June 2000, at 14:15 - 15:15, room INJ 218
Schedule
Presentations in English -- but I'll try to manage discussions in French and/or
German.
• I plan to cover the material in an integrating fashion, drawing from concepts in
databases, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and business
principles.
1. 13/4 Historical background, enabling technology:ARPA, Internet, DB, OO, AI., IR
2. 27/4 Search engines and methods (recall, precision, overload, semantic problems).
3. 4/5 Digital libraries, information resources. Value of services, copyright.
4. 11/5 E-commerce. Client-servers. Portals. Payment mechanisms, dynamic pricing.
5. 19/5 Mediated systems. Functions, interfaces, and standards. Intelligence in processing. Role of humans
and automation, maintenance.
6. 26/5 Software composition. Distribution of functions. Parallelism. [ww D.Beringer]
7. 31/5 Application to Bioinformatics.
8. 15/6 Semantic Interoperation
9. 22/6 Privacy protection and security. Security mediation.
10.29/6 Educational challenges. Expected changes in teaching and learning.
Summary and projection for the future.
• Feedback and comments are appreciated.
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Topics for discussion
• Education
• Libraries
• New services -- decision support
• Consumer usage (B2C)
• Business-to-Business usage (B2B)
• Technology Transfer
in each case
– Potential
– Hindrances
– Solutions?
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Future
observed
initial expectation
rational base
Risky
• Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
• Radio has no future.
•
X-rays will prove to be hoax.
[Willliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907].
• Nothing is harder to predict than the future
[Yogi Berra]
The shape of the future is easier to predict than the
time of its arrival
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Education vs Training
Web enables remote education and training:
Will both be affected the same way?
• Training is best scheduled as needed
– often low student/teacher ratio
– life-time need
• Education is prescheduled
– often high student/teacher ratio
– initial, becoming a life-time need
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Stonebraker Remarks 21jun2000
Research Crisis
• PhD students (and current profs) are going to dot.coms.
– University Texas has now only one PhD student/faculty.
• Every University has its head in the sand wrt. distance
learning.
• Second-level University profs will become second-level
TAs. Good, Ivy-league Profs. will create content,
professionals, as Dan Rathers of teaching.
• Center of research funding is now on
SandHillRoad, Menlo Park (VCs), not Arlington VA
(NSF).
– Best paper at SIGMOD dealt with XML encoding.
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Stanford Model
• Based on TV courses offered to industry
– in operation since 1975, analyzed & updated
• Part of normal curriculum
– TV operator in special classroom
shows notes (must be legible), blackboard, teacher
– tutor at remote site (has taken class earlier)
– voice reverse link for questions (if live TV)
• Can be replayed on web in students rooms, …
– morning classes getting to be empty
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Threat to smaller schools
Alternatives
• Overloaded professor with older material
• Inaccessible professor with up-to-date
material
– technology from the entertainment industry
• Education / Training when and where wanted
• Role for Tutors at remote sites
– old British university model: Tutors, Readers
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Modes
• Major E-schools increase enrollment
– remote sites - CMU-Silicon Valley
• Major E-schools engage existing schools
as subsidiaries
• Major E-schools sell material to other
schools: videos + guides
• Major E-schools sell material to new
education vendors
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E-libraries
• When books were rare, libraries were created by the
monks who copied books
• Today available material exceeds storage
capabilities of the largest libraries
• Readership / book is declining
• Hence: electronic distribution from holding sites
– Bibliotheque de France: 100 000 canonical works
– British National Libraries: current collections
– Library of Congress: remote model, index
– Switzerland?
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Added Value of a Library
Virtually everything we have is in the public domain.
Our value added is not communications.
It is not hardware. It is not even the data.
Our Value added is the categorization, the storage, and
the archiving of data, which gives the tools to search
the data, to project it, compare it, chart it, and so on.
Our strategy is to be a high-margin, low-volume
producer for a specialized market.
[Michael R. Blomberg, in Wired April 1998]
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E-libraries
www.TeleRead.org
• Public libraries (funded in the U.S. by Dale Carnegie)
have been of major benefit to children and older
people who wanted to improve themselves
• Libraries and librarians are under budget pressures
– Older voters do not support education
• In an E-world at least augment paper libraries
• Proposal [Rothman@clark.net] free E-libraries using
– Internet and e-books
• Contents
– Books in public domain
– Popular books; suggestion that their copyrights be donated
by their authors after initial sales reduce -- ~1-2 years
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Move to Multimedia
•
•
•
•
New generation is becomIng more visual
now 3M US MMemail users, by 2005 60M
Linkage of entertainment and education
> hinteractive textbooks
– simulations with formulas
– live observation in geography
– ...
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E-Commerce Trends
1998/1999/ ...
• Users of the Internet 40%  52% of U.S. population
• Growth of Net Sites (now 2.2M public sites with 288M pages)
• Expected growth in E-commerce by Internet users [BW, 6 Sep.1999]

1999
7.2%  16.0%
6.3%  16.4% Centroid, in 1999
3.1% 10.3% ~1% of total market
2.6%  4.0%
1.4%  4.2%
8.0%  33.0% = $9.5Billion
%
–
–
–
–
–
–
segment 1998
books
music & video
toys
travel
tickets
Overall
• Will change all retail businesses, when?
An unstainable trend cannot be sustained [Herbert Stein]
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
E-penetration
Toys
0
98 99 00 01 02 03 04
0.3 1 3 9 27 81 **
Year / % 
new services
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New Services
• Integration with better precision
– Semantics, contexts, specialization
• Added-value services
– maintained mediators
– accessed initially via portals
– balance portals / specialists?
• B2B market is 3 x B2C market
– requires more precision
– can afford to miss inconsistent suppliers
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Government use
• Better communication with customers
• Fewer problems with bureaucrats
– authentication of public?
• Justifies Library access
• Encourages public Internet use
• [www.economist.com … survey]
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New Role for Consultants
Old
• Used at Design Time
and
• To Explain Failures
Future
• Available as a Service
• Responsible for
Knowledge Maintenance
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B2B Services
Tactical
• Customers
• Inventory
• Suppliers
Strategic
• Planning
• Capabilities
• Opportunities
Information Leverage
requires a sharable format
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XML replaces EDI ?
Machine processable and readable !
• return to origin?
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
ARPAnet -- share heterogeneous machines
Email -- people-to-people
Digital Library -- people-to-machines
E-commerce (E2B)-- people-to-machines
• client-server
Internet -- share heterogeneous data
Mediated -- people-to-services-to-machines
Business (B2B)-- machine-to-machine(s)
Business services -- machine-to-services-to-machines
Ubiquitous -- gadget-to-gadget
• (embedded)
Future
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DBMSs will serve XML
• XML will help in use of DBs on the web.
• HTML is wild and wooly, oriented towards
flexible human processing
• For B2B applications interpretation
will be by processing programs.
• Programs cannot exploit flexibility.
• Data requirements remain regular
Freeware will be available
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Relevant Examples?
 Browsing for papers and authors
 human searching
 flexible contents
 recursive, cyclic, linked structures
 Supplier catalog
+ some number of required entries
+ some predefined optional entries
+ further, arbitrary entries are ignored.
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Needed features from DBMSs
• Rapid retrieval  indexing
– indexes best derived from regular structures
• Optimization  quantity estimates
– best attached to schemas,
• Business integrity Tx integrity
– fine-grained, routinely provided by DBMSs.
• Access control  constraint rules
– attached to schema attributes and keys
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Will RDBMs adapt to XML?
Changes will be needed for XML correctness
– Ordering, - cross refs., - document snippets, ...






Pressure from customers
Experience from OO-developments
Inadequate rethinking
Rigid internal structure
Staff with performance-oriented experience
XML-specialists mis-focusing on output forms
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Planning requires the Future
past
now
future
time
Databases,
accessed via SQL or
CORBA compliant
wrappers
Simulations,
accessed via SimQL and
compliant wrappers
Msg
systems,
sensors
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Point for
Decision-Making
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Current state of DM Support
organized support
past
now
Data integration
Databases
distributed, heterogeneous
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disjointed support
time
x17 @qbfera
ffga 67 .78 jjkl,a
nsnd nn 23.5a
future
Intuition +
Spreadsheets
• Spreadsheets
• Planning of allocations
• Other simulations
various point assessments
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DM support does not interoperate
Planning Science
Distribution
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extensions to move
to networked support
are also disjoint
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Language Sketch
SQL
• What was the
weather in Chicago
yesterday?
• SELECT
temperature, …,
WHERE place =
`CHICAGO’ AND
date = 8Sep1998
= Temperature = 71
SimQL
• What will the
weather be in Chicago
tomorow?
• ESTIMATE
temperature, …,
WHERE place =
`CHICAGO’ AND
date = 10Sep1998
= Temperature = 71, p=.8
SimQL: Stanford experiment
Logistics
Application
Manufacturing
Application
SimQL access
SimQL access
SimQL access
SQL access
wrapper
Spreadsheets
wrapper
wrapper
wrapper
Weather
(short-, long-term)
Test
Data
Engineering
SimQL Prototype implementation
Interface developer
Query
Development
Interaction
Help
Schema
Manager
Interface customer
Parser
Schema
Commands
Metadata
Manager
Filing of
Access
Specs Metadata
Use of
Access
Specs
Help
Production
Interaction
Schema
Commands
Query
manager
Initiation and
Results of
Simulations
Error
reports
Wrapped ..
Simulations
Planning Science
Use of Simulation Results
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Simulation results can be composed for
alternative Courses-of-actions (CoAs)
Composition should be seamless, elegant,
with computation and recomputation of
likelihoods, values (derived from endpoints)
Results change as now moves forwards and
eliminates earlier alternatives.
Pruning needed of low-probability CoAs
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Moving to a Service Paradigm
• Server is an independent contractor, defines
service
• Client selects service, and specifies parameters
• Server’s success depends on value provided
•
Some form of payment received for services
x,y
Databases are a current example.
Simulations have the same potential.
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Outsourcing
Communication, web simplifies outsourcing
of information support functions
-- if functions are critical high risk for Co.
+ if functions are support, helps focus of Co.
> Internal IS departments are viewed with
disdain by upper management (75%)
– incapable of dealing with E-commerce
– cant attract good people
– only tactical, no strategic views
.
[CIO Magzine 15June 2000]
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Technology Transition
.
• Economic drivers have to be considered.
• Three party model
• Industry: need-based invention
• academia: formalization
• innovators: new technology
a
I
i
• New Service models provide new Opportunities
• supply innovative tools to industry
• supply specialized information to industry
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Research economy transfer paths
Product suppliers (PS)
people
results
Customers
Taxes
high
volume
high-value
modest volume
Products
Tool suppliers (TS) versus
Research
Government
Teaching
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Understanding the other parties
Motivation is profit and loss-avoidance in:
• Industry: investment -– payoff to stockholders / retain value / stable
• Academia: prestige -- (leads to continuing funding)
– visibility, not stability or reliability
• Innovative businesses: leverage -- not sustainable
– low downside cost, high upside risk,
– change expected and needed
• Government research:
– technology dissemination & shelving service ?
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Notes from Stanford OTL
Stanford University has right to Intellectual property
for most contracts, employees, faculty.
• Inventions are reported to Office of Technology Licensing
– Evaluated for originality
– Evaluated for economic potential
• If rejected returned to inventor
• If accepted, protected (patent, trademark , …) &
marketed
• Proceeds go 1/3 to Stanford, 1/3 department, 1/3 inventor
– 31 % licensed / 29% waiting, 40%dropped
– Large companies poor adopters, best are exclusive to startups
– Option: overall license, pay once + small annual
• SOE gets base, some fro depts. Inventor gets license fees.
• objective is better relationships.to large companies
• not suitable for startups, small companies
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Expect continuing Internet growth
• Hardware technology will continue to lead
and encourage broader usage
• Communication technology will continue to
lead and become more economical
• User interfaces will improve and not be a
barrier to the acceptance of technology
• Government policies will not hinder open
interaction - or not be able to
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Integration Science
Databases
access
storage
algebras
Systems
Engineering
analysis
documentation
costing
Artificial
Intelligence
knowledge mgmt
models
uncertainty
Integration
Science
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Fin
Comments?
• what was new / what was old or
boring?
• future emphasis
– more technological detail?
– more situational detail?
– more extrapolation to the future
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Operating Systems
Less choice, less heterogeneity
• Microsoft Windows, personal computer and WS.
proprietary product, no obligations to hardware,
rapidly adapted to new requirements
• UNIX, an open systems, consensus, takes time.
• SUN servers, other proprietary induce inconsistency
• LINUX clients and servers, free, low entry cost
• new business models
• Mainframe operating systems, little growth expected
• VMS (COMPAQ) surviving = reliable 24 hour / 7 day !
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Projects at Stanford DB group
Data Mining.
Mediator, Wrapper Generation.
Semantic Matching.
Warehousing.
Security Mediators.
Megaprogramming.
Simulation Access.
Changes, Consistency,
and Configurations.
Digital Libraries
MIDAS
SKC
TIHI-TID
TSIMMIS
C3 CHAIMS
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WHIPS
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SimQL
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