Join Us at The Decade of Digital Inclusion

In scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, biology, high energy physics, and similar hard sciences, it is standard practice for practitioners and researchers to assemble every decade to discuss and debate the direction research should head to yield important discoveries or resolve difficult questions. 

We have had the “decade of the brain” and decadal studies on climate change among many others. Astronomers and planetary scientists debate which galaxies, stars, planets, moons and asteroids deserve attention. Often these debates are critical because the instruments needed to make progress may be extremely expensive and may take many years to build before they can yield results. Some efforts could take decades, such as the Large Hadron Collider or the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The Laser Interferometry Gravity Observer project spanned decades, as did the Hubble Space Telescope. The Voyager spacecraft have been on their way since 1979 and have left our immediate solar system. Mars rovers have lasted for decades despite their original design life of 90 days. 

All of these efforts by the scientific community deserve great respect for the discipline shown by its members to maximize likely research gains especially when costs are high just to ante into the game. In the past 50 years, it has become eminently apparent that information and communication technology (ICT) represent an increasingly important part of daily life in all its dimensions: government, private sector, academia, and ordinary citizens. We are also discovering that these technologies have their strengths and weaknesses and that preservation of benefits while limiting deficits is going to take serious thought and action.

The Marconi Society envisions a world in which everyone enjoys the opportunities of the network. It is evident that, in addition to the massive contribution that ICT makes to our social and economic well-being, it is also abused by unscrupulous actors who do not have the best interests of others in mind. How can we make the products and services dependent on ICT safer, more secure, accessible, reliable, affordable, sustainable and resistant to abuse? 

Now is the time to convene a Decadal survey about ICT, with an end goal of true digital inclusion and all the implications that phrase brings to mind. To this end, the Marconi Society is facilitating discussions by groups of experts to formulate questions whose answers may guide research and development in the ICT space for the next decade. On October 22 at 1:00 eastern time, we will hold an open plenary at The Decade of Digital Inclusion to hear descriptions of critical challenges and the impact of solving them.  We hope that interested parties will join us in person in Washington, DC or virtually.

We ask ourselves: What hard problems to which we do not yet have answers would, if solved, offer a major step forward toward realizing benefits and diminishing deficits of ICT? What are the hard problems in the use of cryptography to protect privacy and confidentiality or to assure provenance and integrity of digital content? What are the hard problems in hardware design given the essential expiration of the classic Moore’s Law and how might they be solved? How can we develop methods for the creation of software that is error-free and does only what was intended and not something potentially harmful? How can we share radio spectrum more efficiently so as to take advantage of the properties to be found at lower and higher frequencies? How can we improve our implementations of machine learning and neural networks so that the behavior of these systems is more reliable and understandable or explainable? What problems must we solve to ensure that digital content is accessible and useful over centuries? How can we do a better job of predicting the social and economic impact of the increasing and more intense uses of ICT applications? How can we make ICT systems more sustainable and robust in the face of deliberate attack?

The list of questions is long and growing. How can we organize our thinking about these questions and choose paths forward that will lead to useful answers? Who should be consulted and who can carry out the research to yield results? How will these efforts be paid for and by whom or what agency?

I believe that it is timely to ask these and hundreds of other questions so as to formulate serious research programs for the decade ahead and I hope that readers of this essay will choose to engage to help formulate the questions and pursue the answers for the benefit of everyone. 

The Decade of Digital Inclusion is a semester long virtual master class led by experts in technology, policy and digital inclusion. Participants include Ana García Armada (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), Doreen Bogdan-Martin (ITU), Vint Cerf (Google), John Cioffi (Stanford University and ASSIA), Muriel Médard (MIT), Sir David Payne (University of Southampton), Steve Unger (former Ofcom Director) and many more. Our Symposium will be held virtually and in person in Washington, DC on October 22.  Virtual student tickets are priced at $25 for the entire series and we offer special discounts for the in person event to student, faculty, nonprofit and government attendees. Please register here.