John Oxley, the Microsoft genius and disruptive innovating executive in all things, founded this blog in 2004 and I was invited in as a founder in 2005 to bring an external industry perspective when it was rebranded eventually as Canadian IT Manager Connection. I brought in CIPS as a partner in 2006 which continued until 2013. I have been writing for IT Manager since 2005. From 2005 to 2009, my posts were credited to the Microsoft managers on the blog and in 2009, I got the ability to post directly. Thus 617 blogs since 2009 though I estimate over 1000 since 2005. There are more than 300 interviews, each taking 70 hours of production from my own team that I resource and maintain. There is over 21,000 hours of donated time between interviews and writing. During my time here, we got in the top 10% of all TechNet blogs in the first year, subsequently a top 7 globally that was recognized at the Microsoft Global MVP Summit, and I got a top blogger rating from traditional media—who I am now writing for. Also concurrently I was asked by Microsoft to be the founding chairman (2007/8) of a global IT association (GITCA) where our team very successfully created a federated community of more than 1200 user groups and associations representing over 6 million professionals to provide them with free services and the ability to share best practices. Outside of GITCA working as a non-profit with volunteers only and free services, the estimated value now annually to Microsoft is more than 6 billion USD. What is noteworthy, is that this work was all done by volunteers which included creating regional boards in NA, SA, EMEA, and Asia. Microsoft offered the community members to join them directly in 2013 where Microsoft would deliver services directly. With GITCA’s role successfully completed, the GITCA web presence will disappear soon after 10 years of operation and providing free services to more than 100 countries all driven by volunteers!

Fore more information: https://www.imaginecup.com/worldchampionship

Thousands of coding hours all come down to this. Who will win it all and be crowned the next Imagine Cup World Champion by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? Tune in to the live webcast and watch as the three first-place teams battle it out onstage before a panel of judges that includes Thomas Middleditch, star of the hit HBO show “Silicon Valley.”

Who: The first place teams in Games, Innovation and World Citizenship
What: World Championship webcast
When: 12:00N PT, July 31
Where: www.imaginecup.com
Why: To meet the next student tech genius!

The majority of the devices will be in the industrial and public sector due to the strong business case with examples such as Michelin and John Deere transitioned to services using IoT.

The consumer market represents a high average revenue per user market segment and the industrial sector provides high ROI.

2. Do personal things with Cortana on Windows 10

3. Do unexpected things with Microsoft Edge

4. Game Epically on Windows 10

5. Do multiple things at once with Windows 10

6. Security in Windows 10

7. Say “Hello” to Windows Hello on Windows 10

8. A look at the great built-in apps in Windows 10

9. Continuum on Windows 10

10. Windows 10 Launch: Celebrating with our Fans and Announcing #UpgradeYourWorld  -- On July 29, we will make Windows 10 available, across 190 countries, as a free upgrade or with new PCs and tablets.

George V. Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches courses on various subjects related to programming. His areas of interest are code spelunking, operating systems, networking and time protocols. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System".

For over ten years he has been the columnist better known as Kode Vicious. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and is a member of the ACM, the Usenix Association and IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who currently lives in New York City.

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

PARTIAL EXTRACTS AND QUOTES FROM THE EXTENSIVE DISCUSSIONS:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:29:
From your early years up to the present, can you share a few notable events leading to your current roles?
"....I'd say a lot of experiences in my educational background are mixed academic and hands-on. I went to Northeastern University which is well-known for having a co-op program, so I spent a good deal of time working in industry as well as taking classes. That set the tone for my career, because I spent half my time working at the academic side of things (in particular my work at ACM), but also in developing courseware and teaching both in industry and working with universities, as well as working in corporate environments and developing software as a practitioner...."

:02:00:
I’m always amazed at your eclectic background. I understand you speak a few languages; can you talk a little bit about that?
"....I, like many American high school students, went through the languages program at my high school which was pretty appalling, but upon travelling I discovered that I really enjoyed languages and they were relatively easy to pick up. I spent nearly a year in Holland and wound up speaking Dutch by the time I left, and I spent 4 years living in Japan and still speak Japanese quite a bit. Even the little bits of French that I picked up in high school, when I went to France, actually made some sense. So I wind up picking up languages everywhere I go so it's just sort of a hobby of mine...."

:03:02:
You are the chair of the Practitioner Board of the ACM. Can you tell us a little bit about the ACM and then about the Board's key projects and wins, including for 2015 and 2016? What is the value to computing professionals?
"....The Association for Computing Machinery is the largest professional society for people working in computer science. It has a long history starting in the mid twentieth century, shortly after computers became something that people used for actual work and research....The Practitioner Board is a group of people both from academia and industry who try to figure out what are the best things we can do to help to educate practitioners about interesting research they might use to build products and build and improve systems....In 2015 we had our first Applicative conference. We had 300 attendees at our conference in New York City where we had the 2 track 2 day conference that delved into the systems side and software, as well as the applications side of software.....We have a couple of other efforts going on. We're going to have Queue magazine coming out as an app on iOS and Android in the fall of 2015. We produced a series of video portraits of up-and-coming practitioners in the art in computer science (that was done in 2014). This year we are starting a new video series that will probably debut at the same time that the app does in the fall. We are also looking at creating a new ACM Journal; not a submission-type journal but a journal that looks into academic publications and tries to formulate them for the practitioner...."

:07:00:
What are the noteworthy outcomes from Applicative 2015 and what are your goals for 2016?
"....The Practitioner Board had never tried to put on a conference before so putting on a 2 track, 2 day conference is a non-trivial effort and I think that was an amazing thing that we did. And if you look to content in Queue in the fall you'll see that almost every one of the people who gave a presentation at the conference also signed up to turn that presentation into an article, so that those people who were not able to make the conference will still be able to get the content via Queue magazine....Right now Queue exists through the website and that's one way to reach people, but we find that having a publishing event every other month that shows up on your device is a really good way to reach people. Our other goal in 2016 is to try and get more practitioners who are not currently members of ACM to see the value of being members of ACM and actually join. So the content we are generating isn't just for members, it's basically for the entire community and trying to get that community to see that there is value in ACM membership and value in interacting with the broader community...."

:08:58:
Do you have an estimated timeframe for the 2016 conference?
"....Spring of 2016....We don't yet have our call for submissions - we'll have them soon, but information about the 2016 conference will be on the website...."

:09:25:
You were a speaker at the 2015 Applicative conference; can you summarize some of the key points from your talk?
"....One of the areas that I've been working in for the last seven or eight years is highly accurate datacenter base time. What I discovered in working with distributed systems and time for that period is that most practitioners, programmers and software developers really don't have any ideas of how time is kept on computers and the challenge is getting really accurate time when creating applications. So what I did was to create a presentation which was an introduction to working with time for software engineer practitioners that covered the very basics of how do computer clocks keep time, why they are accurate or inaccurate and what are the ways in which you can actually get good distributed time....That was the general gist of the talk...."

:11:20:
Do you have something upcoming where people could find out more?
"....I also volunteered to turn my talk into a complete article for Queue....there will be a Queue article this fall, which covers all the material I covered in the talk...."

:12:05:
Is there any webcast coming out as well?
"....I believe there is a video of me giving the talk....I believe that it's online....In the end of July there is a webinar on this topic as well...."

:12:35:
You have a very popular column in Communications of the ACM magazine. Can you share some key tips from your column?
"....I wouldn't say there are key tips. There are certain key themes that you find in Kode Vicious, one of the ones that they keep coming back to is testing...."

:14:15:
Are practitioners able to interact with you in some way?
"....Sure, the columns are written from letters that are written to Kode Vicious. So we'll look at the CACM online or Queue online (kv@acmqueue.com)....They are always welcome to send in questions...."

:14:57:
You've been doing this popular column for some time now, has there ever been a particularly interesting letter that comes to mind?
"....I'd say there isn't a particular letter that really stands out. The letters that I always find really refreshing are the ones that are reacting to another letter. Someone will write in, I'll write a response and then someone will write a response to my response...."

:16:06:
Have you ever considered converting some of those columns into a podcast or a book?
"....The idea of a book actually has occurred to me and one of the reasons to do a book is to do a longer form. Kode Vicious columns tend to be two letters, two responses, about 1500 words; that's about as long a column (generally) at most I use and that's a fine form for me....In 500 or 600 words in a response you're not going to be digging really deeply into your topic. You can make it a short single point and that's a really enjoyable form of writing for me and something I've been able to do for a decade, but I do a lot of other long form writing (I've written other books) so something that's medium form would be interesting before I publish a book...."

:17:45:
We will leverage your expertise; what are your top recommended resources for developers?
"....For me finding good publishers of good books has always been useful....I'm not much for following blogs or for following new sites. I look for things that are well reasoned, longer than a blog entry....You look at Pearson when you want high end stuff....Amazingly one of my favorite books is Raj Jain's, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis" was written in 1991 and I've been recommending it to this day. That's going to be updated and published in 2015 according to the publisher's website and I have pre-ordered my copy....One of my other recommendations, ACM has a bunch of books and they also have an arrangement with Safari so you get a bunch of Safari books and recently I've come across The Pragmatic Bookshelf and they to me are the equivalent of the O'Reilly® of 1990s. They are the ones who are doing books on specific technologies that are well-written, to the point. No publisher is universally good, but they come through these cycles and so Pragmatic programmer stuff is actually pretty good...."

:23:43:
You've been focusing specifically in the coding area or things that are related to coding, let's broaden that. Are there any trends on the broader basis in the computing area that you think are interesting and that people have to start paying attention to?
"....You've got machine learning stuff but I don't work a lot in that area. I'd say, since I'm more of a systems person, the thing that I find amazing is everyone has spent the last five, seven years saying how important understanding multi-core and multi-processing is because of the way that hardware is now built, and that's one of those trends that people have been banging their drum about for a long time....If you look at the way that we teach about computer systems, we often teach about computers systems as if they are a VAX from 1980. The big single processor complex instruction set....but that particular trend has moved to multicore multiprocessing which really has fundamental changes for the way that one should write software or build systems or size systems....I don't see that being taken up very well by the academy or by industry....I'd say the other area to look at is computer virtualization, but people have not really addressed a lot of the issues about virtualization. Everybody is just going to move all their stuff to the cloud. They get more security, often more billing, performance, a whole bunch of things. They pretend that every single virtual instance that's residing in the cloud is exactly like a machine that they need to run it on, and I think that is detrimental to good software and good engineering so that's another big trend....The big analytics area I think is quite interesting but I think that's more interesting, from an interfacing with other people kind of idea. So in Big data what you really want to be able to do is do all your number crunching, but the interesting problem is how do you relate that to the social scientists who actually have the question? How do we ask the right kind of questions of Big data? There's a whole bunch of issues there. People who really understand that interface between engineer and the people who wish to use the results of that engineering. I think that's real interesting for the big data science folks...."

:27:41:
If you were conducting this interview, what questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers?
"...."If I were an undergraduate, what area of computer science should I study now?....I think the people who are doing undergraduate work should get a good solid grounding in statistics because all the data science stuff is all stats...."As a mid-career person, what should I be looking at next?"....You've always got to be looking for what change is coming and what's new....."

:30:21:
Do you have any additional advice for those who are mid-career?
"....You should try to attend a conference once a year, no matter what that conference is, something that's of interest to you that's related to an area you are interested in or an area you are currently working in to keep track...."

:30:49:
George, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

http://www.stephenibaraki.com/audio/George%20Neville-Neil.mp3

Disruptive innovation is much more than new products and services where innovation is defined as: the implementation of a new or significantly improved—product; service; production process; organizational model (examples: marketing method, organizational method in business practices, workplace organization, external relations); new business model broken down into the 9 areas of the business model canvas; social-mediated (including sharing, caring economy); machine learning/deep-learning integration.

The development phases including: brainstorming the concept; doing research and development of the concept providing proof of concept; transfer to a minimum viable example (steps to toward wider usage or commercialization); production and deployment so early stage customer/client validation and end-market fit; scalable usage. Lean start-up (Eric Rise), agile (example DevOps), customer development (Steve Blank), … is used throughout. 

This matrix provides a framework to measure the amount of disruption of the innovation. I compiled it to evaluate and do due diligence on a specific $6B investment proposal involving a spectrum of science domains and technologies and assessing its impact – thus does it justify the investment risk. The more cells in the matrix filled and higher the number weighting then the lower the risk and higher the investment dollar justified.

In the matrix, the Internet is assigned a weighting of 8 on a 10-point scale, impacts or is a foundation for every cell in the matrix. The singularity (Kurzweil) would be ranked 10 and fill every cell. Many upgrades would fill only a few cells.

You are more than welcome to Join and participate in the Windows Insider Program – http://insider.windows.com for feedback around Windows 10 (from now and when it’s released).

Ian Hamilton (ianh@signiant.com) has been an innovator and entrepreneur in Internetworking infrastructure and applications for more than 25 years. As a founding member of Signiant, he led the development of innovative software solutions to address the challenges of fast, secure content distribution over the public Internet and private intranets for many of the media and entertainment industry's largest companies. In 2015 Signiant was awarded a technology and engineering Emmy by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for pioneering work on "Secure Accelerated File Transfer over IP Networks Including the Internet."

Prior to Signiant, Ian was Chairman and Vice President of Product Development at ISOTRO Network Management. He was responsible for launching ISOTRO's software business unit and created the NetID product suite that led to the company's successful acquisition by Bay Networks. Ian held senior management positions at Bay Networks and subsequently Nortel Networks, from which Signiant emerged. Previously Ian was a Member of Scientific Staff at Bell Northern Research, performing applied research and development in the areas of Internetworking and security.

Ian is a well-respected subject matter expert who has been published in industry journals and spoken at industry events around the globe including most recently: Storage Visions 2015, on transporting big data; NAB 2014, on managing content in the cloud; SMPTE 2014, on moving media to the cloud; DG Digital Entertainment World 2014, on security and protection strategies for media; MESA Content Protection Summit in 2014 and 2013, on cloud security and emerging vulnerabilities; SMPTE National Convention 2013, Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS); and Broadcast Asia 2012, on moving global content exchange to the cloud.

DISCUSSION:

Q:
Ian, your outstanding contributions in technical innovation and executive leadership have significant global impact. Thank you for sharing your considerable expertise, deep accumulated insights, and wisdom with our audience.
A:  "Thanks for having me."

Q:
Ian, can you profile your education and research background from Dalhousie University to Bell Northern Research where you worked on internet protocols and security? How is your work still impacting today?
A:  "As you mentioned, I graduated from Dalhousie University with a degree in Computer Science. I've always been interested in networking and technologies that connect systems and people. Even going back to my thesis the topic was networking related (Performance and Efficiency Comparison of LAN Media Access Control Protocols Utilizing Mathematical Models and Simulation). Out of university I was recruited by Bell Northern Research (BNR) and moved to Ottawa, where I have lived for the past 28 years. At BNR I was doing work with Internet Protocol networks, primarily in the areas of routing and security. This was at a time when most people at our parent company Nortel believed that X.25 was the future of data transfer. Working at BNR was a great experience through which I developed a detailed understanding of internetworking technology and security mechanisms that are still applicable to what we're doing over 25 years later."

Q:
You have a very successful career as a serial entrepreneur. Can you discuss your technical innovations and journey with each of your start-ups, including your founding of Signiant with three pivots?
A:  "I'll have to look up the definition of serial entrepreneur, but Signiant is only my second startup, so I might be one startup short of serial entrepreneur.
Regardless, after Nortel I was fortunate to build a company with two of the smartest people I've ever worked with (Rod Anderson and Tony Farrow). ISOTRO was started as a consulting company that helped organizations deploy and manage Internet Protocol networks. We recognized there wasn't a lot of leverage in the consulting business model, but that we could use the cash flow from the consulting business to bootstrap a software business. I saw an unaddressed opportunity for software that managed addressing and naming on IP networks and started our software business and created our NetID product. NetID included policy based management capabilities along with Domain Name Service (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers. We eventually transitioned ISOTRO to a completely product focused company and were acquired by Bay Networks in the late 90s. Bay Networks was of course acquired by Nortel, so I found myself full circle back at the company I started out with.
A good friend of mine from my early days at BNR (Robert Browne) was working to spin a company out of Nortel based on technology that had been developed for managed file transfer in support of distributed software development. We created a business plan for operating a managed file transfer service over the public Internet, started the company with seed VC financing in September 2000, and Signiant was born. Unfortunately our Software as a Service (SaaS) business model was a decade ahead of its time and 2000 wasn't a great year for startups, so due to limited capital, we began working with Storage OEMs bringing products to market based on our core technology. We signed OEM deals with EMC, Adaptec (now Overland) and Pillar Data Systems (a Larry Ellison funded storage startup).
We used the cash from these OEM deals to fund product development and direct go to market activities and in 2005 started working with NBC Universal and Disney on moving file-based Media. Our initial focus was on managing data movement, but through this work we recognized a big opportunity for improving the performance of Internet protocols like the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This work fit squarely in the wheelhouse of our engineering team given their Internet Protocol background and we created the Signiant Acceleration Protocol, which replaced the Flow Control, Congestion Control and Reliability mechanisms of TCP and eliminated a lot of the overhead of FTP when dealing with large numbers of small files. With our central management and acceleration capabilities, we quickly became the de-facto standard for large media enterprises, but our products weren't ideal for efficiently addressing the Small and Medium Business (SMB) Market. This ultimately led to the creation of Media Shuttle SaaS product.
We recognized that to address a broader market we needed products that were super simple to deploy and use and saw companies like Dropbox and WeTransfer starting to enter the periphery of the media file transfer market. These products weren't fit for purpose for professional media because they didn't handle large files or offer appropriate security, but the user experience with these products was great. We created our Media Shuttle product with its patented hybrid SaaS architecture, to simplify deployment and provide ease of use for professional media transfer on par with consumer file transfer services. We've seen tremendous global uptake of this product for person-to-person file transfer across both the SMB and Enterprise Markets.
In this process we also developed our "Direct to Cloud Object Storage" transfer technology, including our patented transfer server load-balancing and scaling mechanism. Our Flight product allows customers to accelerate uploads to and download from cloud object storage through a payload based subscription offering. There is no software for them to manage and we currently support both AWS S3 and Microsoft Azure cloud storage with one subscription and we'll be introducing Google Cloud Storage shortly."

Q:
You received an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering at the international CES for your software inventions. Who was there, what was the whole Emmy experience?
A:  "The Emmy experience was incredible. It was a huge honor to accept the award on behalf of Signiant and to be recognized for the technology we developed and the impact it has had on television. Alex Trebek hosted and Kazuo Hirai (President and CEO of Sony) received a lifetime achievement award. Many of our customers and partners attended, and it was a great to have the opportunity to thank our customers for their support and use of our products, because they make what we do matter."

Q:
Can you talk more about your pioneering work with secure accelerated file movement over IP including internet where you can move huge files 200 times faster than FTP? How does the technology work?
A:  "I touched on this earlier, but the transmission control protocol (TCP) is a key part of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack that makes transmission of a stream of data over the Internet reliable. The challenge is that TCP is challenged when used on high bandwidth wide area networks and doesn't perform to the potential of the network. Content Distribution Networks address this problem in part by caching content closer to the user (network distance wise), but this only works when identical content is being delivered to every user. When the content is unique and traveling point-to-point over the Internet, a different approach is required and this is where Signiant comes in. We replace the TCP and FTP protocols, and in particular the flow control, congestion control and reliability mechanisms of TCP with new mechanisms that work better over high bandwidth high latency networks.
I can't give away too many details because they're trade secrets, but by using more measured parameters than TCP and some history we can better isolate sources of packet loss and react more effectively making better use of the available bandwidth while still playing nicely with other traffic on the network. Playing nicely with other traffic on the network is key. It's easy to go fast by just blasting the network using an unsophisticated fixed rate transmission mechanism, but this has a disastrous effect on other traffic on the network."

Q:
You are in many parts of the world. What are the pros and cons of each region including Asia?
A:  "Our business has traditionally been strongest in Europe and North America, but our SaaS products are further enabling global expansion. The low touch model for both deployment and use allows our SaaS products to be deployed and used in areas like Asia, Latin America, and even Africa. There's a lot of potential in these emerging markets, and we're looking forward to continued strong growth by leveraging our SaaS products."

Q:
As an expert in cloud, please provide your top 5 predictions for the next five years.
A:  "Well, the three most important things in real estate are location, location and location, so I'm going to say my top five cloud predictions are adoption, adoption, adoption, adoption and adoption. I think the benefits of cloud realized from simplification and economies of scale are really creating waves in the core IT community - not just with early adopters. The growth in attendance of shows like Amazon re:Invent is truly astounding. As people become more educated on how to address performance, reliability and security concerns associated with multi-tenant environments, we'll see an even more dramatic acceleration in the pace of movement to cloud. Within 10 years, private datacenters will only be used by the people that are still running COBOL."

Q:
You are an authority in media, please provide your top 5 predictions.
A:  "It's my belief that no one ever gets past their top three priorities, so I'm going to cheat on this question and only give three (that could be pulled apart into five). First, the quest for a higher quality viewing experience will continue to drive file sizes and bandwidth requirements. Although static resolution is the focus of many TV set manufacturers - UHD and 4K are easy to market - I think factors like wider colour gamut, higher dynamic range and higher frame rates are equally important. Second, Internet-based over the top streaming will continue to challenge broadcast television and put pressure on traditional advertising-based business models. Consumer preference for paying for content versus watching commercials along with highly fragmented audiences will lead to much more focused targeting and intelligent embedded delivery of advertising. The main challenge left for over the top delivery is live events, so I think we'll continue to see great progress made on that front. Third, and this combines cloud and media, I think that ubiquitous internet connectivity will squeeze the market for purchasing and downloading media and media will increasingly be consumed through subscription-based online services."

Q:
With your background in internet and security, what are your top 5 predictions?
A:  "Five predictions again. First, Edge bandwidth will continue to increase and core Internet and peering bandwidth won't keep pace. This will place challenges on point-to-point Internet-based applications that companies like Signiant will continue to address. Second, the edge of the Internet will increasingly be dominated by wireless. I can't remember the last time I've plugged my laptop, tablet or phone into anything other than a power supply. Third, people will become increasingly aware of security vulnerabilities in wireless technology and other existing solutions, and hopefully the industry will take action to address these issues. Fourth, information security will continue to evolve as an agile practice that reacts and adapts at the same pace as cyber criminals. Fifth, and this is really cloud, but in the simplest sense cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. Smaller Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers will really struggle as the IaaS titans continue to benefit from simplification driven by standardization of interfaces, economies of scale and operational maturity."

Q:
How can executives act on your predictions?
A:  "The era of huge capital purchases of hardware and software is coming to an end. Executives need to be on top of the benefits of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and understand what portions of their business make sense to move first. The transition to cloud is inevitable and it's going to be swift and conclusive."

Q:
As a successful senior technology executive, what are your best leadership lessons that can be used by executives?
A:  "One of the biggest lessons I've learned over the past 10 years comes from Signiant's transition to agile software development, and that is that it's not all about the technology. Although the benefits of technology in our daily lives are undeniable, technology can sometimes get in the way of meaningful communication. Small empowered collocated teams taking advantage of continuous communication and continuous improvement can accomplish amazing things. Principles like breaking large goals into smaller activities that can be completed in their entirety in short sprints (minimizing work in progress), and continuously looking at what's working and what's not (so that when you fail, you fail quickly and adapt), are broadly applicable to business. I'd encourage executives at all levels, whether you're in the software or the suitcase business, to look at agile software development principles and how they might be applied in their business."

Q:
Do you feel computing should be a recognized profession on par with accounting, medicine and law with demonstrated professional development, adherence to a code of ethics, personal responsibility, public accountability, quality assurance and recognized credentials? [See www.ipthree.org and the Global Industry Council, http://www.ipthree.org/about-ip3/global-advisory-council]
A:  "This is a tough question, especially because it includes a reference to lawyers. I will set aside the broader IT industry for a moment and focus on the software industry, and hopefully I won't offend any lawyers. I see lawyers as a community of individuals making things so complex and obtuse that only lawyers can understand them, whereas software professionals try to harness complex technology to produce something so simple that anyone can understand it. I also like to think that there is as much art as there is science in creating an elegant - beautiful through its simplicity - software solution to a complex problem, but at the same time I believe that the core duty of a software developer is to behave as a professional."

Q:
From your extensive speaking, travels, and work, please share up to three stories (amusing, surprising, unexpected, amazing).
A:  "I've become increasingly fascinated by behavioral science as I grow older. Understanding why people behave the way they do and in particular how this can lead to paradoxical outcomes fascinate me both from the perspective of understanding myself and understanding others.
Information security is very interesting from a human behavior point of view. A friend who works for a utility company once told me "no one thinks about electricity until it isn't there," and I think the same is true for security. People almost instinctively work around mechanisms put in place to protect them whenever these mechanisms present any impediment to their ability to get things done, until something goes wrong. There is a secure design principle known as "psychological acceptability", which at its most basic level states that a system needs to be easy to use in a secure state as it is in an insecure state, because of this exact behavioral phenomenon.
I've witnessed numerous ethical hacking demos where people's behavior immediately changes based on the demo, whether it's a phishing attack used to take over a computer's camera or a demonstration of what can be learned by passively listening to information broadcast by WiFi devices. People's behavior changes in the short term and then they lose focus and go back to their old habits. One of the funniest bumper stickers I've seen said "My other computer is your computer," and this is ultimately the sort of problem that this behavior results in. I think it behooves each and every technology professional to think about how they can make information security better and easier for the average person, especially in the context of ubiquitous Internet connectivity.
As a result of my travel I routinely find myself in locations with many casinos and observing the behavior of gamblers is something I've come to enjoy. I myself have become an avid Blackjack player and enjoy reading books by Arnold Snyder, Stanford Wong and others. I don't expect to win in the long term, but I love playing and observing other people's behavior while playing. When you play perfectly, Blackjack is the closest you can get to even odds playing against a casino. Odds aside, this is where another one of my favorite phrases applies: "I'd rather be lucky than smart". I've seen people win big by doing totally the wrong thing (based on odds) at the right time. I once convinced a group of Norwegian colleagues (who thought gambling was idiotic), to play Blackjack with me. Half the group doubled their initial buy in and half of them lost it. When I asked them how they enjoyed playing, not surprisingly, the half that won loved it and the half that lost still thought it was idiotic.
Geographic behavioral differences are also fascinating. Singapore is an amazing city that is more similar to many western cities than Asian cities in a lot of respects, but there are some very stark differences especially when it comes to their view on crime and punishment. I went for dinner at a collegue's home in Singapore once and when I left his condominium later that evening there was a sea of police and crime tape outside the building. My immediate assumption was that there was some sort of violent crime, but I later learned that a bicycle had gone missing."

Q:
You choose the topic area. What do you see as the three top challenges facing us today and how do you propose they be solved?
A:  "I'll go back to information security. I think the top three challenges are education, simplicity and policing. On the topic of education, I'm actually talking about education of software professionals and not end users. Every software professional needs to be familiar with secure design principles and specific security concerns related to their area of focus (e.g. OWASP for web application developers). This is part of what I meant by "behaving as a professional" earlier in our discussion. This is the primary way we can get simpler more secure solutions in the hands of users. Although progress is being made with policing cyber criminals, the global reach of the Internet definitely presents a challenge. There are lots of places for criminals to hide and execute their guerrilla tactics from. However, as long as the majority of resources rest with law abiding people, rather than the cyber criminals, I'm confident we'll continue to make progress on this front."

Q:
If you were conducting this interview, what 3 questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers?
A:  "I like that we're focused on the number three now. Sticking with the more philosophical theme of the last few questions, how about:

1. What's the most important lesson you've learned in your career?
2. What's the most important lesson you've learned at Signiant?
3. What's the most important lesson you've learned in the last year?

Q:
Ian, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.
A:  "You are very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity."

The Internet of Things (IoT)

Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2015 confirms that future network traffic will increasingly be driven by machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic generated by billions of connected devices, products and sensors, with M2M communications over mobile cellular networks already emerging as the fastest-growing ICT service in terms of traffic.

In total, one billion different kinds of wireless IoT devices are expected to be shipped in 2015, up 60 per cent from 2014 figures to reach a predicted installed base of 2.8 billion connected devices by end 2015. Wearable devices are estimated to have reached 109 million by the beginning of 2015.   

As many as 25 billion networked devices are predicted to be connected by 2020, driven largely by consumer-connected entities (including businesses, hospitals, local authorities and other organizations and institutions) and followed by manufacturing, utilities and transportation. In terms of revenues, the market for IoT is expected to grow to USD 1.7 trillion by 2019 to become the largest device market worldwide.

At the device level, demand for tablets is expected to reach 234.5 million units in 2015. And while global shipments of PCs and laptops is forecast to go into chronic global decline, analysts predict worldwide sales of up to 1.4 billion smartphones in 2015, exceeding the sales of the PC, television, tablet and game console sectors combined, in terms of both units and revenues.

For many consumers in developing markets, the Internet will be intrinsically linked to a smartphone – particularly with strong growth predicted in the low-cost smartphone segment. Strong growth in IoT deployment will also put new pressure on network infrastructure development, which is already facing funding challenges in many markets.

“This Trends report analyses how the changes that are taking place in the digital ecosystem are impacting both individual consumers and businesses and society at large,” said Brahima Sanou, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, which produces the annual study. “The report addresses issues that span the full range of ICT policy-making, and delves into some important, but challenging, questions.”

The world goes social

The report finds that a proliferation of apps is turning consumers into digital social consumers, digital communicators and prime agents of change in a digital transformation that is sweeping the ICT sector.

In January 2015, the number of global active social media accounts reached over 2.07 billion, with active mobile social accounts representing 81 per cent of that total. With active social media users spending an average of nearly two hours 25 minutes per day on social platforms, the economic impact of the time spent on social media has not been lost on marketers and advertisers.

But while the blurring of lines between the physical and digital world is creating new economic opportunities, it is also raising a host of new social questions and challenges for regulators. Consumers are presented with new opportunities brought about by the greater choice of devices, online services and applications – but are also more at risk of losing control of their privacy and personal information. Identifying proactive policy and regulatory measures in addition to co-regulatory and self-regulatory solutions and initiatives geared towards educating and empowering consumers is essential to providing frameworks that will stimulate investment and innovation while at the same time protecting the rights of all users in an open, transparent and inclusive digital world.

Data deluge

Every hour of every day, over one hundred million photos are uploaded to Facebook: every second, one hour’s worth of video footage is uploaded onto YouTube. Google is estimated to process well over a petabyte of data every single day – equivalent to 100 times the data stored in the largest library in the world, the US Library of Congress.

With the cost of computing (both processing and storage) falling and the speed and ease with which data can be transferred rising with ever-faster processor speeds, applications that draw on Big Data are proliferating.

Data that cost USD 150,000 to store in 1970 now cost as little as one cent. Advanced software to aid fast data retrieval, new-breed databases capable of storing very diverse and unstructured data, and fast-improving sensor technology are together making it possible to capture ever more aspects of human existence in digital form – precisely and at low cost.

The report outlines eight principles of Big Data implementation, and recognizes Big Data’s power as a driver of innovation. But it also warns of the potential downside to the dramatic increase in the collection and storage of data, including personal data, and notes that regulators will need to come to grips fast with both the positive and negative applications in order to maintain consumer trust.

Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2015 is available in paper, PDF, e-book and ‘PDF-accessible’ formats. It is the first publication available from the ITU Bookshop in PDF-accessible format.

Presenter: Lionel C. Briand, University of Luxembourg
Lionel C. Briand is professor and FNR PEARL chair in software verification and validation at the SnT Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg, and serves as Vice-Director of the Centre. Lionel has conducted applied research in collaboration with industry for more than 20 years. In the past, he headed up the Certus Center for Software Verification and Validation at Simula Research Laboratory. Before that, he was on the faculty of the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, as well as the Software Quality Engineering Department Head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Germany, and worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland.
Lionel is an IEEE Fellow for his work on the testing of object-oriented systems. He was recently granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills Award and the IEEE Reliability Society Engineer-of-the-Year Award for his work on model-based verification and testing. His research interests include software testing and verification, model-driven software development, search-based software engineering, and empirical software engineering. Lionel has been involved in organizing and producing many international IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) and serves on the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (Wiley).

Moderator: Robert Dyer, Bowling Green State University; ACM SIGSOFT
Robert Dyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bowling Green State University. He received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 2013. His research areas are in software engineering, big data applications, and programming languages. Currently his research focuses on the Boa project, that provides a domain-specific language and infrastructure to allow researchers to easily mine a very large number of software repositories. Robert has served on the program committee for Modularity and OOPSLA Artifacts and reviewed for journals such as Empirical Software Engineering. He is currently a member of ACM SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN, and the ACM SIGSOFT Webinar Coordinator.

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