More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Barroso, Luiz André

Cerf, Vinton G.

Chandy, K. Mani

Clark, David

Elliott, Chip

Estrin, Deborah

Hooke, Adrian

Hölzle, Urs

Ishida, Toru

Mulligan, Geoff

Odlyzko, Andrew

Reding, Viviane

Sharma, Sharad

Smarr, Larry

Young, R. Michael

English

Caltech Authors - Main

web extra
Unless otherwise stated, bylined articles, as well as product and service descriptions, re
 ect the author’s or  rm’s opinion. 
Inclusion does not necessarily constitute endorsement by the IEEE or the IEEE Computer Society.
J A N UA RY / F E B RUA RY  2 0 1 0  © 2 010  I E E E  I E E E  I N T E R N E T  COMPU T I NG  W EB  E X T R A  i
Internet Predictions
Article Summaries
Participatory Sensing: 
Applications and Architecture
Deborah Estrin
In participatory sensing, individuals and communities use 
mobile phones and cloud services to collect and analyze sys-
tematic data for use in discovery. The stage is set for this 
technology to dramatically impact many aspects of our 
daily lives.
The Impact of Sense and Respond Systems
K. Mani Chandy
All living things sense what is going on in their environ-
ments, detect signi cant events such as threats and oppor-
tunities, (implicitly) predict probable futures, and respond. 
Information technology enables enterprises to sense and re-
spond more effectively than ever before. This paper intro-
duces sense and respond systems, discusses the forces that 
are driving their use, and identi es hurdles faced in their 
widespread deployment.
The Play’s the Thing
R. Michael Young
The interactive entertainment industry has undergone sig-
ni cant changes in its 50-year history, but is poised to un-
dergo much more signi cant changes with the advent of In-
ternet-based game services and the ubiquity of smartphones 
and GPS. The ability to create games where computation is 
shared across game clients and a range of game services will 
bring access to high-end graphics and other game features to a 
much broader class of computer user. Furthermore, it will en-
able new types of gameplay where the content of each game is 
dynamically adapted to the player’s preferences, location, and 
social context.
The Growing Interdependence 
of the Internet and Climate Change
Larry Smarr
The paradox of the rapidly expanding use of Internet com-
puting is that it’s becoming a signi cant contributor to global 
greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time its increased 
use could help decrease emissions from the building, transpor-
tation, and electrical grid sectors. University and college cam-
puses are ideal “living laboratories” for system-level experi-
mentation on how the innovative use of Internet computing 
technologies can lead to a greener future.
The Internet and Past and Future 
Andrew Odlyzko
Precise technology predictions are impossible, as is shown by 
extensive experience. However, general trends in technology 
and markets suggest that the convergence of wireless with the 
Internet Protocol will have a large and likely surprising impact 
on the Internet.
Fighting over the Future 
of the Internet Communications Revolutions
David Clark
Technologists like to think that it is their inventions that de ne 
the future, but for the Internet, deeply embedded in society, it 
will be issues like economics, culture, and law that will shape 
its future. Technological innovation will be successful only it if 
 ts into these larger constraints. A critical factor about these 
ii I E E E  I N T E R N E T  COMPU T I NG  W EB  E X T R A  W WW.COM P U T E R . O RG / I N T E R N E T /
web extra
larger constraints is that arguments about preferences go on 
forever, in what I have called a tussle over outcomes. Advo-
cates tussle over things like regional identity, the preservation 
of local norms and laws, and economic advantage. I catalog 
some important tussles that we should watch if we want to un-
derstand the forces that will shape the future Internet.
Back to the Future of Internet
Viviane Reding
Setting the right policy is key to ensuring that the future In-
ternet is open to technical innovations, is fast, reliable, and 
secure, and available to anyone. With emerging challenges 
such as the growing amount of data, there’s a need to act now. 
Smart energy grids and transport systems can bring substan-
tial cost savings to citizens, and the introduction of IPv6 can 
allow for the development of a fully connected world. Getting 
the digital trust and con dence right could provide us with 
additional growth, but failure to act will result in great losses.
Intercultural Collaboration 
Using Machine Translation
Toru Ishida
Even for supporting local schools, which include students 
from different countries, we need worldwide collaboration to 
generate all the necessary language services. Machine trans-
lators are half-products. Multicultural communities have to 
customize and use machine translators to  t their own con-
text. The obvious  rst step is to combine a domain-speci c 
and community-speci c multilingual dictionary with those 
translators. Even if translation quality is increased, we can’t 
solve all communication problems through translation, so we 
must deepen our knowledge of different cultures. Wikipedia 
will become a great resource for intercultural collaboration 
when combined with machine translators.
The New Way of Business
Sharad Sharma
Business innovation at the bottom of the pyramid is creating 
new delivery systems for education, healthcare, and govern-
ment services. These innovations will blowback into more 
mainstream markets in the next 10 years, and  rms will orga-
nize themselves differently to become much leaner. To manage 
the knowledge workers inside these  rms, a new paradigm of 
connect and collaborate will come to the fore.
Future Imperfect
Vint Cerf
As the second decade of the 21st century dawns, predictions 
of global Internet digital transmissions reach into exabytes per 
year by 2013. Traf c levels might easily exceed many zetta-
bytes by the end of the decade. Setting aside the challenge of 
somehow transporting all that traf c and wondering about 
the sources and sinks of it all, we might also focus on the na-
ture of the information being transferred, how it’s encoded, 
whether it’s stored for future use, and whether it will always 
be possible to interpret as intended.
As we look toward a future  lled with an increasingly large 
store of digital objects, it’s vital that we solve the problems 
of long-term storage, retrieval, and interpretation of our digi-
tal information. Without such attention, we’ll preside over 
an increasingly large store of bits whose meaning has disap-
peared over time. We can hope that the motivation to circum-
vent such a future will spur creative solutions and the means 
to implement them.
Warehouse-Scale Computers
Urs Hölzle and Luiz André Barroso
Large data centers have emerged as a new class of machines, 
bringing along some of the most challenging design and pro-
gramming problems in computing today.
The Internet of Things: Here Now and Coming Soon
Geoff Mulligan
The Internet of Things  rst mentioned in 1999—that seed of 
an idea—has taken root, and as it grows, it impacts both our 
everyday lives and the Internet itself. Tiny battery-powered 
smart objects, some as small as a dime, are today being con-
nected to the Internet to sense the environment, energy usage, 
and human activity. Over the coming years, these types of in-
expensive devices will permeate our homes and businesses, 
and it’s crucial that we start to explore the social, privacy, 
and technology issues so we are ready to deal with billions of 
nearly invisible Internet ready devices.
Interplanetary Internetworking
Adrian Hooke
The internationalization of space exploration motivated the 
extension of TCP/IP-like techniques to support the long de-
lays and intermittent connectivity characteristic of space 
communications.
GENI: Opening Up New Classes 
of Experiments in Global Networking
Chip Elliott
The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is 
a suite of research infrastructure components rapidly taking 
shape in prototype form across the US. It’s sponsored by the 
US National Science Foundation, with the goal of becoming 
the world’s  rst laboratory environment for exploring future 
Internets at scale, promoting innovations in network science, 
security, technologies, services, and applications. 
This Web extra accompanies the article, “Internet Predic-
tions,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 14, no. 1, 2010, pp. 12–
42; http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2010.12.
Selected CS articles and columns are also available for 
free at http://ComputingNow.computer.org.


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