How we can make the world a better place by 2030

I picked a video titled “How we can make the world a better place by 2030” (http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_how_we_can_make_the_world_a_better_place_by_2030) by Michael Green who was introduced as a social progress expert. 

                                            

                                             Note: Video upload failed due to being over-sized.

The video is about raising a global challenge on several enormous problems and that is can we end hunger and poverty, halt climate change and achieve gender equality in the next 15 years?, Michael created a model for measuring social progress called the Social Progress Index. It has three parts to it. They are Basic Human Rights, Foundations for Wellbeing and Opportunity each defined by a set of criteria. He then pointed out the relationship between a country’s GDP and its Social Progress Index score. The graphs in tracking both GDP and Social Progress scores show that as GDP becomes higher, Social Progress index is higher as well. It also shows that as a country gets richer, each unit of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. By looking at the goals defined for 2030, Michael gave us hypothesis as to what the social index figure and the average GDP have to be in order to meet our goal for 2030. 

Michael warned that if business as usual, we would not reach our goal. Changes have to be made on various levels in each community and each country for any hope to succeed but it should be achievable.

He introduced the People’s Report Card as a way for regular people to keep score of social progress in terms of safety, health and freedom. Currently, the world in 2015 scores C-. It is up to the people to track progress and speak up and take action to hold the government and the communities accountable. According to Michael, this is a workable way to make sure that we can make the world a better place by 2030.

I do not find the People’s Report Card theory realistic. I think to a certain degree, Michael the speaker was simply stating the obvious. Although he pointed out the relationship between social progress and GDP figures and how social progress does not always go up when the GDP goes up, the reason he gave to be hopeful for a better world in 15 years is to keep a People’s Report Card. It should help solve societal problems by enabling leaders to systematically identify and prioritize issues. When scores are low, it is up to the people to hold the government accountable and demand improvement. The two forces that will impact his theory are people having to keep track of progress and demand better if the government underperforms and that the government will indeed have the ability to do better under the pressure of the people. Neither force can be easily built to specifications let alone sustaining them long enough to make a difference. 

The “Social Progress Index” measurement method however, is touted as ground breaking (Sherne, D. 2014). In the Fareed Zakaria GPS website, Sherne reported on how U.S. scores according to this scheme of measurement. U.S. rated 31^st in personal safety which includes homicide rates and violent crimes. In fact, U.S. homicide rate ties at 41 with Lebanon and Ukraine. In the realm of political terror, we are rated 80^th alongside Cuba, Indonesia and Venezuela. These are dismal numbers. They should be eye-opening as well. Given these statistics, it is indeed up to the majority of the public to urge changes from their government or local officials from the grassroots up but can we do it? Will we do it? Even if we do it, just by demanding change, will the world change for the better?

Reference

[TEDGlobal-London]. (2015, Sept). How we can make the world a better place by 2030. [Video File]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talk/michael_green_how_we_can_make_the_world_a_better_place_by_2030.

Sherne, D., (April 2014). How to measure ‘social progress’. Retrieved from http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/20/how-to-measure-social-progress/.

Nailing down the title of my PhD dissertation

One more semester of course work and finishing up the dissertation for my Computer Science doctoral degree. This would have been the normal sequence of things to come had I not postponed four Doctoral Research courses in the first year due to the overwhelming workload from my regular day job. I had a hard time determining the dissertation title and struggled to convince myself that the research topic for the dissertation is a sufficiently worthwhile endeavor to take and will indeed be adding to the existing body of knowledge at completion. What I deemed as novel and new that could be accomplished within the boundaries of my allotted time to obtain the degree and my technical capabilities did not exactly jump out or appear in my mind's eye not because I had no idea but too many ideas to sort out. It became apparent that I was all over the place starting with very ambitious research subjects to ambitious subjects and everything in between. Machine learning, Neural Networking, Cognitive Radio, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Self Organizing Networks (SON), Machine-to-Machine Communications and Internet-of-Things just to name a few. Indeed they are big glitzy topics that are relatively new and certainly full of problems to solve and gaps to pursue. After all, these technologies are not entirely foreign to me as an experienced telecommunications software and protocol engineer, with a strong penchant to stay in the cutting edge of technology career-wise and reflected by my interest in wired and wireless signaling standards and other networking and security domains, and so I thought. It took almost a year for me to realize that picking a topic and narrowing it down to the actual research item is no small feat. Neither did I fully comprehend that the main goal of doing this dissertation is to obtain the degree and nothing much else should take priority over that. Thanks to my professors who grilled me in grasping this reality and not to try building a castle in the sky or even think about building a castle in the sky.

The 2nd phase of my title-research period was focusing on Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) since these were the project areas that I was involved in at work and not without great interest in them. But what about them that I could nail down as research topic was a whole different matter. Two things stood out as I was digging into possible title candidates for research. One was how fragmented the M2M/IoT standardization bodies were which is typical for new emerging technologies. Second was how critical that an abstraction layer for the delivery of M2M/IoT services are to M2M/IoT service providers that support heterogeneous access networks and various industry and commercial applications. A common platform that allows sharing of IoT core services in the creation of vertical IoT applications; not at all a newfangled idea in the principle of software engineering but there was no mistaken that this had to be the very next new area to explore and perfect for this emerging technology.

The title of my dissertation was born under the name of "State-of-the-art Internet-of-Things Horizontal Service Platforms towards Standardization".