The Intelligent Wireless Web

Rating:
Summary: ESSENTIAL reading for anyone in the technology business
Review: A highly inspirational "GESTALT" view of the mobile internet of the future, a MUST READ for anyone in the 3G Wireless business

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read!
Review: Artificial intelligence (AI) has so far been a major disappointment. After a half-century of work, in only a few instances has it even come close to meeting the expectations and early promise. Researchers and users have found that many of those tasks that appear so simple are in fact extremely complex. So far, the wireless portion of the web seems to be following a similar pattern. The early promise of being able to take our computers with us everywhere has so far not materialized as the problems are turning out to be greater than first thought. And somewhat ironically, the demand has not been a factor driving the production of wireless solutions. Given this background, the title of this book would seem to be a dual contradiction.
However, that is not the case. An enormous amount of work is going into the development of web technologies and the initial goals of building intelligence into the web are not grandiose to the point of impossibility. Most of these efforts are explained in detail and in a style aimed at managers and others who must justify and use the technology once it is available. Technical jargon is largely kept to the minimum and when used, it is not necessary to read it to understand the general concepts.
Despite my deep involvement in technology, I always remain skeptical regarding what it can do. With this background, I was pleased to see how even-keeled the authors remained as they described what is being done now, how they expect it to improve and what they see as some of the consequences. Given the acknowledged potential for new technologies such as voice recognition, it would have been easy for them to become a bit evangelical about something that even this hardened cynic will acknowledge has a greater potential for altering our society than television. Some of the areas covered are Extensible Matkup Language or XML, Wireless Markup Language or WML, web services, mobile protocols such as Bluetooth, and speech recognition.

If you are starting to pay serious, a.k.a about to spend money on it, attention to the role that wireless technologies may have in your business, then this is the book for you. Written with the manager in mind, it will inform rather than overwhelm.

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Summary: Technical Reviewer
Review: As a technical reviewer of this book, I found it to be incredibly complete and technically accurate. This is a very comprehensive introductory guide to a wide variety of related topics and weaves them together in an excellent framework. Useful for the novice and practitioners who may not be familiar with all the topics covered. No matter what your area of expertise, you will find valuable new information in these pages, directly relevant to important new trends, and truly ahead of the curve-- a difficult task for a technical book.

Rating:
Summary: Great Reference
Review: I can only second what others have said. This is a great book to give you a big picture of the wireless landscape and offers some good insights into possible futures. If there's an acronym related to wireless that you didn't know rest assured you'll find it here...

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Summary: Exploring Future Technology
Review: I greatly enjoyed reading this book with its comfortable dialog and interesting historical asides. The Intelligent Wireless Web covers a wide variety of overlapping topics that makes for an exciting glimpse into a possible future. It makes a strong case for its central theme: evolving ubiquitous computing centralized upon mobile wireless communications, speech recognition and AI. It offers some new proactive avenues of thought. While I may not agree with all the projections, the different aspects of alternative controversial technologies in competition were well examined.

The book provided some important technology comparsions, including listing the necessary steps for a particular technology to succeed and its current developmental status. It offered a list of provocative questions that it intended to explore early in the book and I think the authors were, for the most part, successful. In addition, I found the concluding
strategic planning guideline interesting.

I highly recommend this book.

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Summary: Intelligent Writing for the New Web
Review: The wireless web is expected to eclipse the wired Internet and it is difficult to find books that treat the many emerging forms of this technology well. The book is easy to read, and ranges over both the practical and the theoretical in a well balanced and useful manner. With the many connections and devices forming the new wireless web, Peter Alesso and Craig Smith outline and describe the key underpinnings and implications that every technologist and business person should be aware of. This book is useful to business and technology planning. It details the relevant and hard to get information about the emerging wireless technology. With intelligence, it goes further to sensibly describe my favorite parts - the challenges and opportunities of each technology. I recommend it to any senior technology professional - aspiring or already practicing.

Rating:
Summary: Needs more details
Review: This book outlines a proposal to integrate artificial intelligence and wireless technology into the World Wide Web in order to make it more powerful and more tuned to the real needs of the user. It is an interesting proposal, but omits discussion of some important issues. The book is targeted to an audience of developers, engineers, researchers, and IT managers who need to understand how to deliver, via wireless technology, intelligent processes and services.

Chapter 1 is an overview of the five areas that the authors feel are needed to form the Intelligent Wireless Web. All of these are viable and desired from a technical standpoint. However, from a human factors standpoint, one of them is somewhat troubling, namely the need for having voice activation for the user interface. This could be extremely annoying if one is working in the now popular cubicle environments, due to the noise level generated from user's speech. Privacy issues could arise too, since voice patterns are easily recorded. Making the transition from dumb/static Web applications to intelligent/dynamic ones is sorely needed, but voice activation/recognition should be the problem of those who are working in other areas of machine intelligence, such as robotics. Of course, if work environments evolve into more private scenarios, the author's proposals for voice activation could become viable.

Chapters 2 and 8 concern speech recognition. I did not read these chapters so their review will be omitted.

In chapter 3, the authors discuss how wireless technology could be integrated into peronal area networks (WPANs). The authors here exhibit a keen awareness both of the technology and the human factors involved in creating what they call a "Personal Space". Home automation will be slow-going perhaps at first, due to legacy systems now in place, but it is highly desirable from the standpoint of energy conservation and home security. To prevent government and other forms of malicious intrusion, wireless security will have to be top priority before the Intelligent Wireless Web is implemented.

Chapter 4 is an overview of the basics behind both wired and wireless networks, with the goal of merging them effectively. The authors are clearly advocating the use of LMDS for high-speed wireless access. However, they do not discuss any performance studies to give more weight to their arguments for LMDS. "Project Oxygen" is discussed as an approach to accomodate mobile and stationary devices, and for moving away from TCP as a congestion manager, but the discussion is too brief to be helpful.

In chapter 5, the authors discuss the status of mobile wireless, IP version 6, and Mobile IP. The authors are a little more quantitative in this chapter, mentioning for example the inability of TDMA to deal with bursty data flows, but no details are given. A fairly detailed overview of "third-generation" mobile wireless technologies is given however. Performance issues are not discussed though, and it would have been interesting if the authors would have included a discussion of MANET.

Chapter 6 is a general overview of artificial intelligence and how it might be applied to Web protocols. As in all discussions on AI, controversies and disagreements will arise in the mind of the reader, but the authors are fair in representing the main ideas, considering the relatively short length of the chapter. The discussion on distributed AI is the most relevant for the book.

In chapter 7 the authors continue the discussion on AI with the goal of seeing to what extent it can be incorporated into the Web. I was glad to see a discussion of the Cyc application in this chapter, even though it was very short. From the author's standpoint the Web currently does not really express intelligence, since it does not adapt, a necessary requirement for learning. A "learning algorithm" is defined as a process that extracts data from a database to serve as its input, and then performs a set of operations on the input, giving finally an output that represents learning. The authors feel that the Semantic Web holds much promise for building an intelligent Web, and outline several tools, such as XML and RDF, that assist in the construction of the Semantic Web. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the need for self-organization in order for the Web to be considered intelligent. The property of self-organization will also be the most problematic to implement, due to the extreme distrust that some now feel against software that has not been validated by a human. This is especially the case for those having to deal with medical records and information on human health.

So why even attempt to build the Intelligent Wireless Web? The authors attempt to answer this question in Chapter 9. They conclude, based on Moore's law, that wireless chip technology will allow cellular carriers to build networks for less than $100 per customer. They never however answer how much intelligent applications over the wireless Web will improve productivity. This can be accomplished to a large degree with simulation and mathematical modeling, but the authors do not do so.

Chapter 10 is an overview of the actual progress in developing the Intelligent Wireless Web. The challenges are considerable, not only from a technical standpoint in the creation of intelligent applications, but also because of legacy issues. The authors are aware of this and give a network schematic outlining an integrated wired/wireless network. Their concept of an Intelligent Wireless Web is a good one, but their justification for it, especially for the use of speech recognition, is somewhat weak. They need to perform a lot more modeling studies to see just how these smart applications are going to behave on the Web.

Rating:
Summary: A Descriptive and Organized Read
Review: This new book provides an excellent description of current developments in implementing intelligent applications for mobile, wireless systems. More importantly, it suggests a broad and comprehensive vision of the future development of the internet. The organization and style of the book facilitate understanding of an otherwise complex set of topics. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in fully understanding the future trends in information technology.

Rating:
Summary: What lies ahead in data for wireless data transmission
Review: This very well organized overview of information on current and future wireless communication should be must reading for anyone involved with data transmission and storage technology. It provides a particularly fascinating glimpse of what may lie in store for the future.