Il 14 novembre 2017 alle ore 15:15 in Aula Caianiello del Dipartimento di Fisica Ettore Pancini presso il Complesso Universitario di Monte Sant'Angelo, il prof. Ton Beregsen dell'Università di Groningen e Direttore del Centro di Ricerca su Exascale Computing dell'IBM di Zurigo, terrà un seminario su:

The future of IT..... you ain't seen nothing yet!

Abstract:

Information Technology as we know and deploy it today found its start in the 50- and 60-ies of the last century. Since the emergence of the first mainframes have we continuously automated processes in administrations and organizations worldwide. A significant boost in the use of IT, especially by consumers, occurred with the emergence of the world wide web in the mid 90-ies and continues until today. This created another trend: the increasing digitization of our world, as increasingly everything which was analog is being digitized or done digitally. The result of this massive digitization and the substantial increase in sensors everywhere, led to the Big Data phenomenon which is certainly well known today. But what is the significance of this Big Data actually? And is it really so that we need to store continuously and permanently each piece of data we generate? Or are there more natural, smarter methods? How will future IT systems deal with the combination of Big Data, smarts and the already existing automation as we know? We will make the argument that what we observe today, e.g. targeted advertising, albeit not exactly as one expects most of the time, is just a very shy beginning of an immense development, ultimately augmenting and extending human abilities beyond what we can even imagine today. Each and every business, university, healthcare institution, administration will be impacted profoundly. In fact, we are just at the beginning of extending human abilities beyond our imagination: IT…you ain’t seen nothing yet….

Prof. Dr. Ton Engbersen is currently scientific director of the IBM-ASTRON Center for Exascale Technology, which focuses on developing technology for addressing the big data challenge of the Square Kilometere Array. He is a honorary professor at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands. Ton held a range of managerial positions during his career in IBM Research, which started in 1980 when he joined the IBM Research Laboratory in Switzerland. He was responsible for chip development in communication technologies as switches, routers and data transmission, development of server I/O technologies like Infiniband, message brokering in early IoT prototypes and served for two years as an innovation exponent for IBM's European IT outsourcing engagements. From 1995-1998 he led the IBM Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. He is the author of over 50 refereed publications and has given more then 250 presentations on various topics involving IT and the impact of IT on business and society.