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The Marconi Society is convening a first-ever global conversation to identify and solve the technology and policy challenges that must be resolved in the next decade to connect everyone in the world. We welcome you to join us by submitting a new challenge, offering feedback on existing challenges, and signing up for our mailing list.
Topic Areas
Access is one of the longest areas of focus within digital inclusion work and study. Having taken on many different characters over the years, the ‘access’ that we consider in our digital inclusion discussions is complex, contextually dependent, and constantly evolving. Some examples of access are: infrastructure development, hardware availability, software availability, reasons for needing a connection (fixed or mobile), etc.
Accessibility is an area of work that continues to evolve and will always evolve as new ways fixed and mobile connections and accompanying hardware and software are adopted throughout society. Accessibility work and conversation has looked at how to better include people with disabilities in use and innovation. This is also a space that considers how accessibility needs change as people move through different life stages.
While the past decades have delivered significant advances in computing, we are reaching a point where fundamental changes in approach will be required to achieve new levels of speed and quality. Advanced computing will include topics such as next-generation chip design, the role of quantum computing and communications in the P v.s. NP problem, and advanced architectures such as asynchronous circuits.
Even though the rate of innovation should signal increased savings for both producers and consumers as well as more opportunities for entrepreneurship, this has been shown not to be the case in many situations. Lack of affordability in infrastructure deployment, hardware, setup, maintenance, and rates of both field and mobile connections result in uneven levels of digital inclusion across many groups of people and communities across the globe.
Machine intelligence is at the front and center in technical and social discussions due to the availability of large data, high computing power, and the development of superior algorithms such as convolutional neural networks. The topics of interest in AI/ML include technology development, ethical considerations, accessibility and usability, and applications such as healthcare and language translation.
Community participation, which can also be understood as community advocacy, is the understanding of work towards digital inclusion that emerges from and is driven by communities. Community participation (advocacy) can be seen in many spaces of digital inclusion work, including, but not limited to, policy development, innovation, infrastructure deployment and maintenance, and education.
With significant development in wireless communication behind us, leading to the ubiquitous deployment of cellular 4G, indoor and outdoor WiFi, and billions of IoT devices, the focus is now on 5G, 6G, and beyond. As a new generation of cloud natives connects, bringing billions of new devices and demand for bandwidth-intensive applications, network capacity and performance will become a bottleneck. Our interest lies in increasing the network capacity using MIMO and Full Duplex technologies, exploring Giga-Hz and Tera-Hz bands for communication, reducing inter-device interference, and supporting ultra-reliable and low-latency applications.
Optical fibers are considered the backbone of networking infrastructure since they can deliver unprecedented speeds. However, we are reaching the fundamental limits of fiber. Topics of interest include ways to move beyond the fundamental limits of how much data we can transmit over optical fiber, opportunities to reduce the cost of optical networking to be the primary infrastructure for communications, and exploring alternate technologies such as free-space optics.
As cybersecurity moves to the forefront with national and industrial infrastructures under attack, and individuals’ privacy and security on the line, anticipating security and cybersecurity needs over the next decade is critical. Topics for discussion include making user devices trustworthy in a way that is automatic, transparent, and easy, the use of quantum communications in security, the role of security in smart cities, and more.
Skills training has become a more nuanced conversation as recognition of a variety of skills and lifelong learning are necessary for inclusion in the network society. This area of work is not only in what is being taught, but also how it is taught, in what spaces teaching takes place, and who is doing the teaching.
Our world is increasingly dependent on ever more complex software created in both proprietary and open-source environments. This software has complicated development and testing processes, frequent releases, and nearly constant updates, in many cases. Topics for discussion include designing and building software to expose programming errors and ensure quality, using AI to reduce human programming errors, and the right balance of backward compatibility and industry advancement.
Trust is a social and technical construction within the digital inclusion work. Trust is not just about the machines and infrastructures that people rely on, but also those who manage these spaces, maintain these spaces, develop policy for these spaces, fund these spaces, and innovate in these spaces. Trust is a socially constructed and defined concept and can take positive and negative forms. Trust is also contextually and community based, resulting in a variety of definitions that are held, understood, and constantly evolving.
Challenges
Explore a selection of challenges below:
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