About the session
The speaker steps back from the day-to-day challenges associated with information technology and looks at the entire landscape more broadly, something one must do regularly to avoid technical and intellectual dead-ends. He takes a broad view of coming discontinuities, associated challenges and opportunities for progress on different trajectories. For many decades, information technology has thrived, following a remarkable and reliable path of consistent and dramatic improvements in computational capabilities, costs and pervasiveness. This exceptional trajectory has been underpinned by the equally steady march of progress in silicon technology, often referred to as Moore's Law. Today, however, the material constituents of silicon technology have shrunk to the point that quantum phenomena render them useless, and on-going scaling of technology ceases.Consequently, the notion of everlasting generations of smaller, faster and less costly technology has run squarely into the immutable laws of physics. Put succinctly, atoms don't scale. Losing much of this core driver has forced a rebirth of innovation. Future progress in IT performance is being realised through new system architectures and materials, and emerging new fields such as cognitive computing and its application to big data. The speaker addresses the challenges that IT faces going forward, and the promise of new applications emerging from increasingly innovative approaches to future systems.
