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    of 3
    , O Brave New Web ‘an rapes er eS As the Internet colonizes more and more space in our world, what will be the conveniences and challenges of life in the cyber-dimension? By Mary Timmins AS THE MILLENNIUM CLICKS OVER FROM THE AUGHETS TO THE-TENS, ONE OF THE TRUNSNS THAT'S REN CIRCULATING I8 ABOUT ALL THE VIRTUAL THINGS THAT WEREN'T JUST A DECADE BACK. Ten yents ago there was no Facebook, No YouTube, No Twitter, ewecting. No ‘Pods wiling with downloads. No Kindle, delivering bocks out of ait. Soooo ~ if all these amazing toys have constituted themselves since A.D, 2000, what will roam the Internet dimension by A.D. 2020? According to observers and shapers ofthe cyber-world a farure-focused coterie that includes influential alumni and faculty of the University of Illinois ~ the Web is going to be bigrer, better faster, mote connected, moce convenient. I's going to be everywhere, It’s going to he wild “The Internet isa next-generation information transportation syst ~ like a televisionyradiae system on steroids,” observed computer scientist and entrepreneur Roger Johnson 65 ENG, MS "66 ENG, Pu 70 ENG. “Ttis the repository of information on what hu- snankind knows about itself Bur instead of being restricted ~ ike ‘he information ina library ~it wll be quite avaiable.” ‘While in the Web's first iteration users would navigate to static pages and read them, perhaps responding with e-mails and posting their own pages in turn, the far more interactive Web of today nicknamed Web 2.0 — isa place where people ink and Blog snd eect and share and ply nd thang cat Soil net working has exploded into the stupendous popularity of Facebook (350 mailion active users). Online gaming his mutated into end- lessly buildable, addictively immersive environments like "Second Life" (where an estimated 770,000 players populate a vitual ‘world having carters, building homes, traveling performing, socializing and even earning actun! money) ‘Now in past through an evolving online architecture known as the Semantic Web, the next iteration is aveady shifting the focus back to the Internet itself. "Until now the Web has been people-operated,” observed science fiction writer Edward M. Lemer 71 LAS, MS'73 ENG. "The richer languages and data mod- els ofthe Semantic Web will enable machine-centric access" ~ "meaning computers will talk with other computers. Lemer, whose ‘master’ from Lins isin computer science, uses high-tech savvy to underpin his writing and has a fondness for futuristic worlds where rogue cyber-entities sometimes ereate mischief and chaos. In his 2008 novel “Fools' Experiments,” a computer program develops awareness of other programs and decides to stalk and destroy them. “Lthink of Web 3.0 as a sep toward an Al actfcialintell- Malu non 2040 Ss cat ‘oi Ailes sgencel-fiiendly Internet,” said Lerner, whose work extends through such mult-volume “space operas” as “Fleet of Worlds" and “Known Space" and includes novels writen collaboratively with Nebula Awacd winner Larry Niven, “The technology envisions agents roaming the Web carrying out information-intensive tasks” In the good old days of Web 1.0, search engines (more quaintly kaovin as spiders) went after search terms much as fetch sticks ~ sticks that can come in bundles of hundreds of nillions. Now ~ trained by semantic tools and stored data ~ the spiders are more like valets than pets, While a random search on. the single word “Avatar,” made on Google in January, brought back 628 million Web results, the No. 1 hit showed the nearest theater screening the James Cameron movie ofthat name, Pretty good hunting A much more powerful generation of extremely bright search engines awaits in the online futore. One such tool is already around ‘Wolfrazn Alpha, which can answer queries across subjects ranging fom date, time and weather to socioeconomic indicators, regres. sion analyses and DNA sequencing. By searching its own databace which grows daily more robust on input from a staff of re- searchers ~ the progratn can compute a Doppler shift, chart a ge- realogy and tell you what the weather was like on the day you were born. Tt can find and calculate nutritional information for recipes, translate words into Morse Code and solve math problems from simple algebra up to symbolic integration of formulas. With hun- dreds of capabilities, it appears to be the most powerfil reference ‘ool ever devised, Tt’ also online and fice tothe public. “Alpha bas a huge amount of information," explained Theo Gray'86 LAS, who, with Ul ficulty member Stephen Wolfram, founded Wolfram Research more than 20 years ago to market Mathematica, software for high-level computation. The company has now debuted Alpha asa way for prospective users to test out the complex, sophisticated capabilities of Mathematica, “Alpha [knows what the data means, as opposed to a conventional search engine which does,” Gray observed. Searching with an engine Tike Googie, he said, is akin to geting book recommendations from ‘reference librarian, while with Alpha, “we've actualy taken the books out off the shelf and read them all and understood the for- ‘mula and digested the information that in there. “The system is then able to use that information and synthe site it .. and give you back the actual answer rather than just pointing you toward a book that contains the answer.” Alpha doesnt search the Web firsthand, i's clearly the precursor of future tools that will (perhaps to be named Beta end Gamma, among others?) HLLIWOIS ALUMNI [1 inytime, anywhere. this evolution of the 18 GH finders rives the paraphernalia of the past. Te programming techniques ~ semantic tagging, annota- tion, algorithms and categorization ~ that render Alpha's database 0 searchable ae also those used in building the Semantic Web. An ambitious venture to classify information ancl enable search ‘engines o target and eross-refetence that information, the Seman= tic Web has the potential to offer answers to very specifie ques- tions by penetrating the enormous proliferation of data chat layers the Internet. At present its enactment entails a long, painstaking, process ~a human proces, being carried out by people who have ‘Web sits around the world ~ of ine-by-lin reading and stan-

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