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By Natasha Lomas, 8 April 2009 13:28

COMMENT

Â…and that's called feature creep. This means there's sort of the minimal features that a system needs to have in order to be useful. But there's always piled on lots and lots of other things that it would be nice to have. It's very very difficult when you're in a commercial environment to stand up against this kind of pressure. The more stuff you throw in to the system, the more complicated it gets and the more likely it isn't going to work properly.

What are your current areas of research?
I work in what's calledÂ… distributed computing which has to do with applications which have parts that run on many different machines. This is the norm in many of the big systems that you see today - so for example Google runs on hundreds of thousands of machines, Amazon is going to be similar.

My particular focus recently has been on storage on the internet. I really do believe that in the not too far distant future more and more of our storage is going to be moved off of our personal devices and on to storage provided thorough internet providers. You can see Amazon is already offering something like this, Google's offering something like this. [Some] corporations are outsourcing the storage of their data to third party providers.

I'm also very interested in how… I could take advantage of this as a private person. For instance I would really like to get my data off of my personal device because I'd like to be able to access it from many devices like my cell phone or if I happen to be in an internet café. I also would like to not have to worry about making back-ups. I'd like to not have to worry about what happens if my computer crashes and I lose all of my important information so I've been looking at what is the underlying technology that… needs to be developed in order to make that vision a reality.

[However] the problem is with cloud computing, as it's defined today, it doesn't actually solve all the problems - for example there are huge confidentiality problems. You know you don't want to put your tax information out in cloud computing unless you have very strong guarantees that it's not going to be visible. There also are very important guarantees needed about preservation of data, reliability.

You need to be guaranteed that whenever you want to see it it's there. You'd like to be able to share it with some people but not others so there are a lot of things that aren't yet in place that need to be in place before this really becomes a commodity that everybody's going to feel comfortable usingÂ… I believe actually that when it comes to issues like confidentiality [it's going to require] a combination of technical work and laws [to solve it].

Can code ever become hack-proof?
I don't knowÂ… Right at this moment in time what you see going on is like a game. People who don't want to let the hackers in develop new techniques that the hackers at that point in time can't circumvent. But then before very long the hackers have figured out a way round it. I'd like to think there will be a time when a lot of our basic software will be hack-proof but there's a lot of... criminal activity out there. That's going to go on and you know what they're going to come up with is going to be hard to predict.

Is the internet fundamentally insecure?
It is actually. The internet was designed in an era when people didn't think about this kind of stuffÂ… I mean 'hacker' used to not be a bad word - hacker used to be somebody who was interested in building programs. But it's migrated into this other meaning, which is somebody that's doing bad stuff on the internet.

How might data breaches best be prevented?
First of all the data ought to be encrypted whenever it's put on any sort of removable media - that's sort of obvious - but that won't solve the problem entirely. That's really the kind of thing I'm working on - that's what I meant when I talked about confidentiality. What can we do to make it much less likely that the data gets released?

It's something that the research community is very interested in right now. What's going on is thinking about, 'how do we conceptualise the problem? What can different techniques accomplish?' Security is not only about data it's also about tracking what you're doing so everything you do on the internet can be collected and people can mine that information so there's another kind of breach of confidentiality that's lurking there. And so there's immense problems lurking - coming up in the future.

We're talking about things like identity theft which is already happening... We're talking about government eavesdropping - which as you know is already happening alsoÂ… These are problems that are clearly ahead of us that need to be dealt with.

Does Google know too much/have too much data?
Well you know if Google ever decided to misbehave I think there'd be big trouble. I mean people put a lot of trust in Google and actually all the other online providers.

How might computing languages and software engineering change over the next few years?
There isÂ… a potential looming crisis which is that computer manufacturers are starting to come up with machines that have many processing units inside them - these are things called cores. And the machine on your desk has maybe two cores or four cores but people are talking now about machines with maybe hundreds of cores, thousands of cores - but people don't really know how to program these machines. So perhaps there will be some interesting advances in programming languages because of the need to figure out how to get programs to run on those machines.

You did your thesis in artificial intelligence. What excites you about the potential of AI? And what concerns do you have, if any?
One thing that we might see coming at some point is a much better search engine. Right now when you search on Google, if you happen to put the right keywords in you'll get what you want but we've all had the experience where you get lots of hits but they aren't really what you're looking for.

With artificial intelligence techniques it may be [possible] to come up with a much better way of finding what you're looking for. That's something I think we can expect from artificial intelligence in the future. Unfortunately those very same techniques will allow very efficient data mining of the patterns of your use on the internet and so forth - so there's the good side and the bad side.

Will machines have emotions? Will they be able to interact with people the way that people do? Do we want that? I think there are ethical issues too [around artificial intelligence]. One thing that's looming in the near future, I don't know how close this is, is the possibility ofÂ…

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