Featured in Five is a monthly section where we pose questions to a Computing Reviews featured reviewer. Here are the responses from our January featured reviewer, José Manuel Palomares.
Q) What is the most important thing that's happened in computing in the past 10 years?
A) For me, the Internet of Things has definitively and irreversibly changed computing: billions of sources sensing the environment, acting on it, and sending data that is transformed into knowledge. All these facts reshape the conception and requirements of computing. The immediacy of real data can feed intelligent devices to produce knowledge; however, with billions of nodes sending data, networks must be efficient so that the huge amounts of date can be handled properly, for example, irrelevant data should be pruned as earlier as possible. This paradigm stresses the computing field in every different aspect: hardware, software, networking, power consumption, and so on. I think the IoT is the major challenge for computing in the foreseeable future.
Q) If you weren't working in the computer science field, what would you be doing instead?
A) Probably something related to cinema and the audiovisual field. However, I also love rugby and I’m a rugby coach for kids in my spare time. Thus, if I wasn’t working in computer science, I could be a coach.
Q) By the end of your career, where do you think computer science will have taken us? What are you working on that might contribute toward that?
A) It is hard to know. I guess computers will be able to provide intelligent information obtained from billions of sources in milliseconds. Will that lead us to a Terminator-style apocalypse in which computers decide that humanity must be eliminated? No, I don’t think so. What about a WALL-E-style future in which robots do all the work humans did and humans become lazy beings? No, I think intelligent robots and devices, combining machinery and computing, will allow humanity to change their workforce to different scopes, and these devices will be constrained and limited by ethical issues as in Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”
Q) Who is your favorite historical figure? Why?
A) Actually, I don’t have a single historical figure: I believe in humanity as a whole. We have all progressed not by means of a single person but by the impulses of many people (who when combined are millions). One such relevant person, who acted as a science propeller, was Leonardo da Vinci: a genius, a person ahead of his era, a visionary.
Q) What is your favorite type of music?
A) I like rock music, and in particular heavy metal.
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Click here to read one of José Manuel’s reviews.