EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

WEEK 5

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology works with materials, devices, and other structures with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nano metres. It is very diverse, ranging from extensions of conventional device physics to completely new approaches based upon molecular self-assembly, from developing new materials with dimensions on the nanoscale to direct control of matter on the atomic scale. Nanotechnology entails the application of fields of science as diverse as surface science, organic chemistry, molecular biology, semiconductor physics, microfabrication, energy production and many others.



Some things that become will become practical with mature Nanotechology in the future are:

• Allow tennis balls to last longer, golf balls to fly straighter, and even bowling balls to become more durable and have a harder surface. 
• Trousers and socks have been infused with nanotechnology so that they will last longer and keep people cool in the summer. 
• Bandages are being infused with silver nano particles to heal cuts faster.
• Cars are being manufactured with nano materials so they may need fewer metals and less fuel to operate in the future.
• Video game consoles and personal computers may become cheaper, faster, and contain more memory thanks to nanotechnology.
• Nanotechnology may have the ability to make existing medical applications cheaper and easier to use in places like the general practitioner's office and at home
• Nearly free consumer products
• Safe and affordable space travel
• Reintroduction of many extinct plants and animals
• No more pollution and automatic cleanup of existing pollution
• Virtual end to illness, aging, death

On the other hand, nanotechnology raises many of the same issues as any new technology, including concerns about the toxicity and environmental impact of nanomaterials and their potential effects on global economics, as well as speculation about various doomsday scenarios. Therefore there is a need for governments n companies to protect the environment and make sure pollution is not in place to make the environment better and avoid such effects as global warming.

GRID COMPUTING

Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time. Usually it's applied to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data. A well-known example of grid computing in the public domain is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Home project in which thousands of people are sharing the unused processor cycles of their PCs in the vast search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space. According to John Patrick, IBM's vice-president for Internet strategies, "the next big thing will be grid computing."

Grid computing requires the use of software that can divide and farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. Grid computing can be thought of as distributed and large-scale cluster computing and as a form of network-distributed parallel processing. It can be confined to the network of computer workstations within a corporation.

A number of corporations, professional groups, university consortium, and other groups are developing frameworks and software for managing grid computing projects. The European Community (EU) is sponsoring a project for a grid for high-energy physics, earth observation, and biology applications. In the United States, the National Technology Grid is prototyping a computational grid for infrastructure and an access grid for people. Described as a distributed resource management (DRM) tool, Grid Engine allows engineers at companies like Sony and Synopsys to pool the computer cycles on up to 80 workstations at a time. (At this scale, grid computing can be seen as a more extreme case of load balancing.)

Grid computing appears to be a promising trend in that: 

Its ability to make more cost-effective use of a given amount of computer resources, as a way to solve problems that can't be approached without an enormous amount of computing power. 

It also shows that the resources of many computers can be cooperatively and perhaps synergistically harnessed and managed as a collaboration toward a common objective. In some grid computing systems, the computers may collaborate rather than being directed by one managing computer.

 Application of Grid Computing 

Likely areas for the use of grid computing will be pervasive computing applications, for instance those in which computers pervade our environment without our necessary awareness. Some application areas are:

• Government
• In Health Maintenance Organizations
• Computational Market Economy
• Electric Power Grids
• Research application
• Academic organisations

QUANTUM COMPUTING

A quantum computer is a computation device that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. First proposed in the 1970s, quantum computing relies on quantum physics by taking certain quantum physics properties of atoms or nuclei that allow them to work together as quantum bits, or qubits, to be the computer's processor and memory. By interacting with each other while being isolated from the external environment, qubits can perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers.

Qubits do not rely on the traditional binary nature of computing. While traditional computers encode information into bits using binary numbers, either a 0 or 1, and can only do calculations on one set of numbers at once, quantum computers encode information as a series of quantum-mechanical states such as spin directions of electrons or polarization orientations of a photon that might represent a 1 or a 0, might represent a combination of the two or might represent a number expressing that the state of the qubit is somewhere between 1 and 0, or a superposition of many different numbers at once. A quantum computer can do an arbitrary reversible classical computation on all the numbers simultaneously, which a binary system cannot do, and also has some ability to produce interference between various different numbers. By doing a computation on many different numbers at once, then interfering the results to get a single answer, a quantum computer has the potential to be much more powerful than a classical computer of the same size. In using only a single processing unit, a quantum computer can naturally perform myriad operations in parallel.

Quantum computing is not well suited for tasks such as word processing and email, but it is ideal for tasks such as cryptography and modeling and indexing very large databases.

SEMANTIC WEB

The Semantic Web is the extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. It has been described in rather different ways: as a utopic vision, as a web of data, or merely as a natural paradigm shift in our daily use of the Web. Most of all, the Semantic Web has inspired and engaged many people to create innovative semantic technologies and applications. semanticweb.org is the common platform for this community.

Semantic Web aims at converting the current web dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a "web of data." It provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. 

The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share, and combine information more easily. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Estonian translation for "twelve months", reserving a library book, and searching for the lowest price for a DVD. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that can be readily interpreted by machines, so machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web. The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems. It has applications in publishing, blogging, and many other areas.

However, semantic web has some limitations such as:

1. Vastness: The World Wide Web contains many billions of pages therefore any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs.
2. Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers.
3. Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability.
4. Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies.
5. Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information.

References:

http://crnano.org/whatis.htm

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/grid-computing

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/Q/quantum_computing.html

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page