Alan Kay

Alan Kay is the person who I choose to do my assignment.

While studying at the University of Utah he learned to use the innovative Sketchpad program developed by Ivan Sutherland and began programming in Simula. Borrowing ideas from these and other programs, as well as from his background in Biology, he formulated his "biological analogy." Kay postulated that the ideal computer would function like a living organism; each "cell" would behave in accord with others to accomplish an end goal but would also be able to function autonomously. "Cells" could also regroup themselves in order to attack another problem or handle another function.

After writing a thesis about graphical object-orientation and being awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Utah he spent two years teaching at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was at this time that he also began work on the Smalltalk language.

Smalltalk was designed to mimic Kay's biological model of individual entities, or "cells," communicating with each other via messages. Eventually his Smalltalk language would father the genre of Objected Oriented Programming languages.

In 1972 Kay took a job at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (Xerox PARC) and began using Smalltalk in an educational context. Young children were exposed to computers and their reactions were analysed. Kay concluded that children learned more through images and sounds than through plain text and, along with other researchers at PARC, Kay developed a simple computer system which made heavy use of graphics and animation. Some of the children became very adept at using this system; in fact, some developed complicated programs of their own with it!

While leading a research group at PARC, Kay also made a model of a laptop computer and contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and the "client-server" network model. Sadly, the technology to make his prototype laptop called "Dynabook" did not yet exist. Kay, however, pushed Xerox for funds to develop some of his ideas but the Xerox management, not blessed with Kay's foresight, was not willing to commit major resources to development. When Steve Jobs  and some other Apple pioneers visited PARC in 1979, they recognized immediately that Kay's ideas were the way of the future. They were impressed with the idea of a windowing GUI and were astounded with the flexibility of the Smalltalk language. Kay's work at PARC were the seeds from which the Apple Macintosh's look grew. Even Microsoft Windows, the most popular computer operating system in the world today, is a scion of Kay's ideas. 

In short Kay made object oriented programming. Now when you hear 20 year old programmers talking about the latest program they created with object programming you know he created it. He also helped in making GUIs along with Douglas Engalbert who inspired him in a lecture at university.

Here is a video of Kay talking about Computer science and normal science

Part 2

In 2010 there will be processors 25 times faster than what we have now at the same price according to Moore’s law because of using mirrors instead of lenses and that was caused by Reagan an American president.

In addition to soaking up less electricity than LCDs, OLEDs are easier to manufacture. That simplicity, along with lower materials costs, makes them cheaper to build. Yet they're brighter than LCDs, with better color saturation and a wider viewing angle. And because they can be quite thin, OLEDs make all sorts of sci-fi scenarios possible. Imagine stock quotes scrolling across your pen, or movies playing on your handheld.

Businesses will be doing a lot more research with business technology. Today's business intelligence systems improve on these predecessors by presenting their findings in more useful formats -- using advanced data visualization tools -- and by deploying artificial intelligence to look for patterns human users might not look for. A bookseller, for example, might use traditional data tools to find out which kinds of books sell best on weekends (and adjust her Sunday book section ad strategy accordingly). But business intelligence software might show her a wholly unexpected correlation between, say, her advertisement for the Oprah Winfrey opus and sales of fishing guidebooks.

Professor Warwick plans to put a computer that will connect to his nervous system.  The main part of the silicon chip consists of a battery, radio transmitter, receiver and processing unit. Pins connected to the chip will pierce the membrane surrounding Warwick's nerve fibers.

Once the chip is activated, scientists will experiment with signals associated with motion and pain. When Warwick moves a body part, the signal will be sent to the computer. It is hoped that the computer will record and successfully replicate the movement by sending a signal back to Warwick.

"His brain should be able to adapt to the incoming stimuli, recognize them and respond appropriately," Kennedy said.

"(Computers) have huge memory banks," he continued. "We have intuition and insight the computers don't have. And we have the ability to respond or not to respond.

If the experiment is successful, Warwick's wife Irena will also receive a silicon chip implant to explore how movement, thought and emotion can be transmitted from one person to another. Questions abound as to how this will affect the couple.

"In linking two people together thus, will it be possible for Irena to literally get into her husband's mind?" queries Warwick's Web site.

"With Kevin in New York and Irena in the U.K., if he sprained an ankle, could he send the signal to Irena to make her feel as though she had injured herself? Could she feel the same pain as Kevin?" There are so many question that will be answered by the cyborg.

Basically there will be a faster and better computers that can do a lot more but there is a human side. When the industrial revolution came people who had nothing to offer expect their muscles were put out of work because the engines could do a much better and faster job than any one else. What could happen is that there will be a computer revolution that will put people out of work who have nothing to offer except for their mind. But I don’t think this will happen because after he industrial revolution there are still people who use their muscles like Brick layers and factory workers. The main reason for factory workers is that is very easy to ell people what to do rather than program a machine e.g. In a car factory the manager can tell people to adjust the rear view mirror 35 degrees to the left programming the machine is much more difficult. Also until there is a very good artificial intelligence system built in to the computer it will not take over very many jobs but there has been very significant progress in AI from when computers started  so it could be possible.