Paul's Interactions: The extreme Challenge of Moore's Law and what Stormy Petrels have to do with it

How is the chemical soup in the nests of Stormy Petrels helping in the development of futuristic computer technologies at Intel?

Derek McAuley, Director of Intel Research in Cambridge touched on this during a recent seminar at Queen Mary. He was discussing the future implications of Moore's Law: the observation that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit doubles every couple of years. Computers get ever more powerful and ever smaller. In the 40 or so years since Moore's original paper it has remained an amazingly accurate prediction. Can it possibly continue to hold or are we reaching a fundamental limit? If it does continue what are the implications?

McAuley believes that for the foreseeable future Moore's Law can be relied on. The challenge will be met by the Material Scientists, the Physicists and the Chemists. Usability specialists must also be ready for the challenge of Moore's Law: delivering the software and interface advances so that these trends are translated into improvements in our everyday lives. What trends is it driving? Trends that will affect everyone. It will lead to ever more complex systems on a single chip and so ever smaller computers that will truly start to disappear into the environment.

Motes are one technology under development on the back of this trend. They are dust sized computers that can be scattered around the environment forming unobservable webs of intelligent sensors. Scatter them on a battlefield to detect troop movements or on a road network to help monitor traffic flow. Mix them in concrete and monitor the state of a bridge. Embed them around the home to support the elderly or in smart toys to interact with the kids.

What are the barriers in current systems that must be overcome to make motes a ubiquitous reality? Much of the area of a computer is taken up by its connections to the outside world - all those pins allowing things to be plugged into it. They will disappear to be replaced by wireless communications. At the moment computers contain multiple chips each housing separate processors. It is not the transistors that are the problem but the packaging - the chip casings are both bulky and expensive. The future is for multicore chips: large numbers of processors on a single small chip courtesy of Moore's Law.

Battery technology is the only significant problem that remains. Motes will soon be with us, as will single chips capable of containing all the processors currently being embedded in different gadgets appearing around the home whether PCs, washing machines or set-top boxes. This will lead to significant challenges for the HCI community. The challenge is not only in devising worthwhile futuristic uses for such devices and providing usable interfaces to control and interact with the resulting systems. The software for such chips will be extremely complex to develop, so the creation of usable development tools for them will also be a challenge.

There is also the challenge of how you test devices such as Motes. Enter the Stormy Petrels. Intel's approach is not to test futuristic technology on average users but to look for extreme ones who believe a technology will deliver them massive benefits. In the case of Motes, the extreme users are field biologists. They wish to keep tabs on birds in extremely harsh field conditions. Not only is it physically difficult for humans to observe sea birds' nests on inhospitable cliffs but human presence disturbs the birds. The solution: scatter motes in the nests to detect heat, humidity and the like from which the state and behaviour of the birds can be deduced. However, a nest is an extremely harsh environment for a computer, both physically and chemically. Many significant problems, overlooked by normal lab testing, must be faced and overcome. The challenge of deploying Motes in such a harsh environment has led to major improvements in that technology.

A similar approach could be of great use more generally when evaluating the usability of futuristic technologies. Seek out extreme use situations. For example, rather than seeing the severely disabled as a niche market for specialist companies, they are the ones for whom computer technology could deliver massive benefits. The usability problems that must be overcome can also be extreme. If such user communities were routinely sought to help in the early development stages of new technologies then not only would there be great social benefit but the resulting technologies would be improved too. Usability issues would become central from a much earlier stage.

Moore's Law is with us for a while yet, and as a result of the combined efforts of material scientists, physicists, chemists, computer scientists, the HCI community and even field biologists and their North Atlantic Stormy Petrels then it will continue to revolutionise the way we live.

Paul Curzon
Interaction, Media and Communications Group
Queen Mary, University of London

Further reading: http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm

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