Technology tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.
Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism.
Michael R. Stonebraker, a pioneer in database research, is one of the optimists. Software used by companies and government agencies - in products sold by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others - descends from research done in the 1970s by Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a team of scientists at IBM.
Today, Stonebraker sees an opportunity for new kinds of ultrafast databases. The new software, he explains, takes advantage of rapid advances in computer hardware to help businesses and researchers find insights in the rising flood of data coming from so many sources. "Now is the time," says Stonebraker, adding, "The economics and the technology are ripe."
The case for optimism is by no means unqualified. The march of these technologies raises social issues, including privacy concerns, and the timing is uncertain. All of the bold predictions in the 1990s that the internet would disrupt traditional industries like media, advertising and retailing did come true - a decade later.
But a series of related technologies, scientists and entrepreneurs say, has reached a critical mass - come to a digital boiling point, so to speak - so that new products and capabilities become possible. The technical ingredients, they note, include powerful, low-cost computing and storage spread across thousands of computers.
Another fast-improving technology involves inexpensive and intelligent sensors, which are crucial to a new breed of automated machines like experimental driverless cars and battlefield drones. Clever software - notably machine-learning algorithms - animates much of the current wave of smarter technology. Two well-known examples are found in Watson, the "Jeopardy"-winning computer from IBM, and the movie recommendations on Netflix.
Advances in such underlying technologies are fuelling the current excitement in fields like artificial intelligence, robotics and data analysis and prediction. "All parts of the technology pipeline are gearing up at the same time, and that's how you get this explosion of new applications and uses," says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.
Behind the seeming explosion, experts say, is a process of technology evolution. Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster, compares the process to the evolutionary biology concept known as "punctuated equilibria". The idea is that species often evolve in periodic spurts.
Yet, they say, there are typically years of progress before a commercial breakthrough in the technological realm.
"Even in Silicon Valley, it takes most technologies 20 years to become overnight successes," says Saffo, a consulting professor at Stanford's school of engineering.
The internet provides a case study of both technology's evolutionary progress and its exponential growth.
In 1969, there were only four computers connected to the nascent Internet, compared with roughly a billion computing devices today, from laptops to cellphones, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.
The early increases in connected computers drew scant attention. "But at some point in the late 1990s," Lazowska says, "you were going from 4 million to 8 million to 16 million to 32 million to 64 million, and people started to notice that something revolutionary was going on."
Rocket Fuel is a 4-year-old Silicon Valley startup that uses artificial-intelligence software to place display advertisements for marketers on the Web. The company can not only tailor ads by demographic slices of viewers' ages, gender and interests, but can also use its predictive algorithms to produce campaigns based on results, says George H. John, the company's chief executive.
For example, a luxury carmaker might tell Rocket Fuel that it wants to place 100 million ads in the next month, and it will pay the company, say, $80 for generating a sales lead.
So far in 2012, Rocket Fuel has handled campaigns for more than 500 advertisers, including BMW, Duncan Hines, Allstate, Pizza Hut and Ace Hardware. Its thousands of computers handle 19 billion bid requests a day on ad exchanges.
Rocket Fuel, John says, is using some of the ideas he worked on in the 1990s as a doctoral student focusing on artificial intelligence at Stanford. In the last few years, building a business around those ideas has become achievable and affordable. "And a lot of it has to do with the underlying technology," John says.
For Stonebraker, the hardware advance that opens the door to his startups is the striking improvement of solid-state memory, as performance climbs and prices plunge. Solid-state, or flash, memory is most widely known as the lightweight storage technology used in consumer devices like small music players and smartphones.
But increasingly, solid-state memory can be used in big computers, holding a hefty database in memory instead of sending data off to be stored on disk drives. According to Stonebraker, some data-handling tasks can now be completed 50 times faster than with conventional systems. "Memory is the new disk," he says. "The obvious thing to do is to exploit that technology."
Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism.
Michael R. Stonebraker, a pioneer in database research, is one of the optimists. Software used by companies and government agencies - in products sold by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others - descends from research done in the 1970s by Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a team of scientists at IBM.
Today, Stonebraker sees an opportunity for new kinds of ultrafast databases. The new software, he explains, takes advantage of rapid advances in computer hardware to help businesses and researchers find insights in the rising flood of data coming from so many sources. "Now is the time," says Stonebraker, adding, "The economics and the technology are ripe."
The case for optimism is by no means unqualified. The march of these technologies raises social issues, including privacy concerns, and the timing is uncertain. All of the bold predictions in the 1990s that the internet would disrupt traditional industries like media, advertising and retailing did come true - a decade later.
But a series of related technologies, scientists and entrepreneurs say, has reached a critical mass - come to a digital boiling point, so to speak - so that new products and capabilities become possible. The technical ingredients, they note, include powerful, low-cost computing and storage spread across thousands of computers.
Another fast-improving technology involves inexpensive and intelligent sensors, which are crucial to a new breed of automated machines like experimental driverless cars and battlefield drones. Clever software - notably machine-learning algorithms - animates much of the current wave of smarter technology. Two well-known examples are found in Watson, the "Jeopardy"-winning computer from IBM, and the movie recommendations on Netflix.
Advances in such underlying technologies are fuelling the current excitement in fields like artificial intelligence, robotics and data analysis and prediction. "All parts of the technology pipeline are gearing up at the same time, and that's how you get this explosion of new applications and uses," says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.
Behind the seeming explosion, experts say, is a process of technology evolution. Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster, compares the process to the evolutionary biology concept known as "punctuated equilibria". The idea is that species often evolve in periodic spurts.
Yet, they say, there are typically years of progress before a commercial breakthrough in the technological realm.
"Even in Silicon Valley, it takes most technologies 20 years to become overnight successes," says Saffo, a consulting professor at Stanford's school of engineering.
The internet provides a case study of both technology's evolutionary progress and its exponential growth.
In 1969, there were only four computers connected to the nascent Internet, compared with roughly a billion computing devices today, from laptops to cellphones, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.
The early increases in connected computers drew scant attention. "But at some point in the late 1990s," Lazowska says, "you were going from 4 million to 8 million to 16 million to 32 million to 64 million, and people started to notice that something revolutionary was going on."
Rocket Fuel is a 4-year-old Silicon Valley startup that uses artificial-intelligence software to place display advertisements for marketers on the Web. The company can not only tailor ads by demographic slices of viewers' ages, gender and interests, but can also use its predictive algorithms to produce campaigns based on results, says George H. John, the company's chief executive.
For example, a luxury carmaker might tell Rocket Fuel that it wants to place 100 million ads in the next month, and it will pay the company, say, $80 for generating a sales lead.
So far in 2012, Rocket Fuel has handled campaigns for more than 500 advertisers, including BMW, Duncan Hines, Allstate, Pizza Hut and Ace Hardware. Its thousands of computers handle 19 billion bid requests a day on ad exchanges.
Rocket Fuel, John says, is using some of the ideas he worked on in the 1990s as a doctoral student focusing on artificial intelligence at Stanford. In the last few years, building a business around those ideas has become achievable and affordable. "And a lot of it has to do with the underlying technology," John says.
For Stonebraker, the hardware advance that opens the door to his startups is the striking improvement of solid-state memory, as performance climbs and prices plunge. Solid-state, or flash, memory is most widely known as the lightweight storage technology used in consumer devices like small music players and smartphones.
But increasingly, solid-state memory can be used in big computers, holding a hefty database in memory instead of sending data off to be stored on disk drives. According to Stonebraker, some data-handling tasks can now be completed 50 times faster than with conventional systems. "Memory is the new disk," he says. "The obvious thing to do is to exploit that technology."