This document consists of a combined travelogue and report on the meetings. This may appear an unusual mix, but the usual split between personal holiday snaps and dry official reports appears to me uninteresting and artificial. One conclusion from my trip is that the personal aspect is important to IT and possibly lacking from the general approach in Australia.
This was my second visit to the UK. The first visit was a holiday with some computer business as incidental and unplanned. This time there was more business. I tried to plan the business in advance and blend it with some holidays.
Last time I scanned in my holiday snaps on return and used them to build my first web page. This was largely unplanned. While I had a palm-top PC with me, I didn't really have it well set up and had to talk my way into computer centres to check the mail. This time I went armed with a laptop computer, guest Internet account (arranged through ACSlink), a digital camera, digital mobile phone, phone data interface and meetings with IT people.
What was particularly important was prior contact with people in the UK, via the BCS and from writing to them directly by e-mail. Searching through the University of Cambridge web home page was very useful. What was even a more effective communications means was Angela Leeke, Secretary to Head of the Computer Lab, who contacted relevant people for me. This all happened by e-mail and generally worked well.
The Phone
The first problem was to get the GSM mobile phone to work. I paid Telstra $500 for roaming in the UK.
As soon as I turned the phone on, it located the local carrier, registered and was useable. However if
anyone called me I had to pay the international rate to have the call forwarded from Australia to the UK
(even if the caller was in the UK).
Also UK callers would get confused about ringing Australia to talk to
someone in the UK and might resent paying international rates to do it.
British Airways rent phones by the day from their holiday desk at Heathrow, but they don't rent just SIM cards to go in phones (and I didn't want to carry around two phones). Hertz rent SIM cards but were all out (book your SIM card in advance).
To avoid large phone bills I set the phone to send all incoming calls to the answering service, which would then forward them by SMS (the GSM text message service). Telstra told me that their SMS system was incompatible with the UK system, but it worked fine..
Note: Photos are provided in three sizes: small (as displayed here), medium (click on the small ones) and some large (click on the * after the caption).
While an historic place, Windsor is part of the twentieth century. Across the road from the hotel was a phone shop. I had a demo of the new Nokia phone with built in pocket organiser. Also I was asked if Network Computers would become commodity items subsidised like mobile phones by service providers (an extremely insightful comment). I rented a UK SIM card (local telephone number) for my GSM phone. The SIM card (the size of a postage stamp) arrived by courier the next day, in a shoe-box sized box. I used the box as a illustration for the need for changes in procedures to the first meeting...
Each national body gave an overview of its organisation and view of the issues. It became very clear very quickly how much we had in common (I jokingly suggested we could have one standard presentation for all societies) and that the ACS was in relatively good shape compared to its peers.
The main issue for the meeting was how computer societies could work together in using the Internet. It quickly emerged that the "hidden agenda" was that some societies were having considerable difficulty coping with the challenge, particularly those with large paper publishing activities. The ACS wasn't in such a bad position as we have been using the Internet so some time, have confronted the issues and don't rely on paper publishing for a significant proportion of our revenue.
In the end I got volunteered to write a "white paper" on how to build an on-line catalogue of all publications of all participating societies to all members. Members would then be able to find out how to get a publication. For this I have in mind using the same approach as being developed by the National Library of Australia for Government information. Some outer outcomes were that we volunteered our CEOs to look at the possibility of installing mirror sites for each other's materials, the ACM volunteered to look at legal issues and the BCS at Professional Licensing and Certification issues. I haven't included the details here as this is a travelogue.
However one issue which started to emerge for me was the problem of adapting the Internet to language and cultural differences. The German and Japanese delegates kept reminding the US, British and Australians that everyone in the world doesn't speak English as their native language. At one point I had to even have something from the ACM President translated from US English to Australian (he asked if the white paper could be completed by "fall 1997").
As a person from a "multi-cultural" society I appeared to be more attuned to this issue than my fellow English speakers. The issue of cultural differences is one I raised following my last visit to the UK in 1994. It also came up later in Cambridge. There may be an opportunity for Australia to contribute in this area, thereby improving the usability of global networks, improving the world and perhaps making some money as well.
After the meeting I jumped on a train, then across London on two tube lines and to Cambridge from Liverpool Street Station. Soon we were out of the city and picture postcard countryside...
Cambridge
The train arrived on time in Cambridge and I was met by a friend, who is a fellow of Kings College. The center of Cambridge is a university town, like Oxford. Businesses are
interspersed with the imposing walls of colleges. There are students on bicycles everywhere
and winding streets. Here are some photos:
I went to a performance of Handel's Messiah in King's College Chapel by the Cambridge University Chamber Choir. Not being a musical expert this didn't sound any better than one in the Canberra School of Music, but the building was imposing. Also I went to a performance of Beethoven Symphony No. 7 by the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra at the West Road Concert Hall. This is the location for the music faculty and is a small, modern, less imposing building that the old stone colleges.
The only things I knew about the place in advance was the active badges. These are now being integrated with the network, so that the nearest workstation is your workstation.
Also they have an experimental pen based tablet, it looks like a laptop computer with the keyboard removed. Unlike units on the market this one isn't designed for stand-alone processing. It depends on an ATM network to deliver one or more data streams from servers elsewhere on the network.
This might be described as the minimalist approach to the network computer (or the x-terminal taken to extremes). It differs from what Sun and Oracle have been promoting, in that no user processing is done in the unit. As a result it needs a faster connection, but requires less configuration.
This is an interesting research idea, but doesn't look like a marketable product, at least not for some time. Its sort of the TV set of the Internet, give a nice picture but is useless if no one is broadcasting.
To connect the tablets ORL are working on wireless ATM. This would be used first in offices to replace LAN cabling and then outside as a super cellular network. Getting ATM to work wireless is a heroic task. ATM was designed to take advantage of low error rate optical fibre cables. Wireless can have a high error rate. It appears that they are building essentially an enthernet type layer underneath (remember ethernet was derived from a radio data network).
What I found most impressive about ORL wasn't the gadgets, but the people. They have an enthusiasm for the work. Over a sandwich at the coffee shop near by I complained that while ORL had active tracking of people it didn't have a decent doorbell. Why not bolt one of the tablets next to the door and make high-tech doorbell? I could almost see the cogs starting to turn.
ORL isn't there as part of the University, its there to produce research which its owners can make money from. The problem of getting an established company, such as Olivetti or Oracle to take the new ideas to market is solved by spinning off new companies to develop the ideas. The researchers may go with the work and have a profit share.
Heather is looking at electronic documents and I tried to talk her into helping solve some of the problems we have for government documents.
In the afternoon I attended the first of three seminars by the Lab's Security Group, on THE GABIDULIN CRYPTOSYSTEM, by Keith Gibson, Birkbeck College, London. It wasn't a good start as this one was mostly mathematics which I didn't understand.
ARM Ltd
On Wednesday I visited ARM Ltd., 90 Fulbourn Road, Cherry Hinton, (about 3 miles south of the city
centre, just on the city boundary). ARM design the processors for the Apple Newton and other
gadgets such as mobile phones. They describe themselves as an Intellectual Property company.
They don't make chips, but licence the designs to silicon foundries.
As well as designing the usual tools for writing software to run on the processors, ARM are producing software tools to help people use their processor designs as part of a larger chip. They are also producing software equivalents of devices such MPEG decoders and modems to run on the processors.
They gave me an interesting overview of the process and also of the way Economic Community research projects (which they are involved in) work.
The most interesting comment was about working in partnership with another company successfully because, "they were our sort of people". Again there was a spirit of enthusiasm, which was more impressive for me than the hi-tech toys.
Lunch this time was at a local pub which serves traditional ale and Thai curry. Some ORL people were at the next table (this is a small town and for the rest of the visit I kept running into people I met somewhere else).
Wednesday's seminar was Dr Ted Briscoe University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory on Computational Simulation of the Co-evolution of Language and the Human Language Faculty. This meshed with my thoughts on handling multiple languages on the Internet.
My talk on Encryption & Electronic Commerce in Australia, Friday to the Security Group wasn't a great success. This might be because it is usually there general discussion time I was gate crashing or because they were busy cracking the security on bank credit cards. Anyway the ale in the Eagle public house in Bene't Street afterwards was okay.
The last seminar I attended was a bit of a "busman's holiday" back at the Computer Security Group on INFORMATION WARFARE AND INFOSEC - FUTURE CHALLENGES, by David Ferbrache, Defence Research Agency, UK Ministry of Defence, Malvern. This covered many of the same issues of interest to the Australian Department of Defence.
Tom Worthington; Marghanita da Cruz, IT Consultant & Andy Macdonald, Chief Government Information Officer at the ACS Cocktail Party...and that's the message I gave them at the Information Systems Driving Radical Change conference the next week. This was followed by a Cocktail Party and dinner for the ACS's 30th anniversary. It was quite a contrast to the UK to be standing outdoors at 7pm looking at the Sydney skyline from the National Maritime Museum.
Postscript: The Phone: part 2
In practice the GSM phone didn't turn out to be that useful. I only got
about six calls (two were wrong numbers about insurance on a car).
Vodaphone reception in Cambridge was not reliable and I couldn't get data
calls to work at all on that network. Cellnet was more reliable and the
data service worked well (even from a bus).
What is needed to make international roaming useful is a system which takes into account the human factors of long distance communication and doesn't just transmit calls over longer distances. When overseas I would like to have calls from Australia answered in Australia and SMS message sent, but calls from the country I am in sent through. This could be built into the phone system or implemented more crudely by allowing SMS messages to be forwarded to a temporary number in the other country.
Telecom Italia Mobile advertise what appears to be a workable way to get a temporary number: the "TIM Card". This is a 100,000 lire (about $A80) GSM SIM card, which comes with 50,000 lire of call credit and a pre-set telephone number. The idea is you purchase one of these at the airport and just start using it. When the pre-paid amount runs out you can "recharge" the card through a credit card payment by telephone. The card can still be used to receive calls when it runs out of credit.
This arrangement removes the problem for the traveller of having to wait for credit checks and number registration. For the telephone company it removes the problem of having trained staff at the point of sale and the problem of bad debts.