23rd March 2006

News Source : Gulf News (http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/03/23/10027419.html)
Author : Rhys Jones, Special to Gulf News

Ever imagined having a two-way conversation with your computer or being told to slow down by your car? Maybe you fantasise about watching a live football match on your phone on the way back from work or dream of wearing a necklace which doubles as an MP3 player. Though these possibilities sound far-fetched today, they are highly likely to be commonplace in 10 years' time.

Technology is moving on at a breakneck speed one minute the latest portable gizmo is a 'must have' and the next it has been usurped by a slicker, smaller, swifter alternative. This rapid technological advancement is down to the large-scale IT research and development (R&D) currently taking place worldwide. Much of this work is taking place in the Middle East and the chances are that some of the high-tech gadgets we will find ourselves using in a decade's time will have been wholly or partly developed in the region.

These days many of the big IT firms including Intel, Microsoft, Siemens and Sakhr, have an R&D presence in the Middle East. However, IBM is the company really driving regional R&D growth, mainly due the work going on at its Cairo Technology Development Centre (TDC) most notably with its speech technology research.

The American company, which set up the Cairo TDC in 1984, has made great strides with its English and Arabic speech technology and hopes to see us all having proper conversations with our computers in the near future. Though speech recognition is already built into products like Microsoft's OfficeXP, many users still prefer to use their keyboards something IBM wants to change.

"Communicating with machines via a keyboard is not a natural method but talking is," says Dr Ahmad Tantawy, technical director at IBM Middle East and head of Cairo TDC. "Today you can talk to your computer through speech recognition software but the machine should be able to talk back to you. In the past the technology to do this wasn't there but it will become very usable in the future and the Cairo TDC has played a big role in this with Arabic speech technology now we are working on perfecting technologies that go both ways."

IBM also extended its commitment to Linux in the region by establishing a large Cairo-based development team to work on Arabising Linux. The team in Egypt adapted the core operating system components necessary to make Linux capable of handling Arabic properly.

"In the past the majority of the general public in the Arab world couldn't really use Linux because it didn't have Arabic support in the system," says Tantawy. "So we led the work on standardising Arabic support in that community and helped develop the Arabisation of Linux and our contribution is out there in the open source community today."

It is not just the big-shot researchers in Cairo marking a difference, however. In conjunction with the 'Big Blue', the UAE University and the country's Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT) have designed, developed and tested a telematics 'smart box' for cars a tool similar to the black box found in aircraft, which can capture, analyse and deliver relevant data via a wireless network. IBM. The device can be attached to an automobile's carriage, for example, to monitor the vehicle's speed, comparing it to the speed limit of the street. If the car speed is higher than the speed limit allowed by the traffic department, the box talks to the driver and issues a verbal warning. The box can also be used by police to track speeding violations and is expected to be widely adopted around the region.

Even scarier than being shopped to the police by your own car is the advent of mobile phones in chip form, which are implanted under the user's skin. IT companies across the world are working on such devices but some industry analysts believe this may be a step too far for today's consumer.

"There's always a fear that this [implanted chip] technology could be used in an inappropriate way," says Jawad Abbassi, the founder and president of Arab Advisors Group, a research and analysis company focused on the region's communications markets. "At the moment you can turn you phone off and leave it at home but if it's embedded in your head it's very different because you're compromising your own privacy."

IBM's Tantawy agrees, saying, "I don't think people like having things planted under their skin and they would probably be more receptive to wearing devices in the form of necklaces or bracelets." Whether mobile phones are implanted or worn as a piece of jewellery, Arab Advisors' Abbassi sees television as the next revolution in the telecommunications market.

"Mobile TV is the future you will be able to watch breaking news or live sports events in crystal clear quality using the 3G network while you are commuting," he predicts. "The industry is betting that there will be a huge demand for this in the coming years."

Despite the positives, many observers feel the IT R&D successes coming out of the region are too few and far between. And IBM's Tantawy, whose team came up with 16 patents last year, believes the Middle East's industry and business community need to help by providing researchers with challenging tasks, which will in turn help society.

"The Middle East plays a relatively minor role in global R&D and unfortunately the results coming out of the region are small," Tantawy claims.

"Researchers can keep thinking about problems and solving them and most of the time the results will be very good but of no real use to anyone. But if the society around you needs to solve specific problems and you solve them then you get results that are useful."

Investment in the region's R&D scene is also lacking. Some governments have put their hands in their pockets for research projects (especially Egypt, the UAE and Qatar) but all in all financial backing for R&D in the Arab world is lacking.

"If you look at the regional technology oriented investment funds private equity and venture capital funds their performance is lacklustre when you compare it to investments in property, tourism and telecommunications," says Abbassi. "However, many countries in the region have realised the potential for IT as a driver of knowledge-based economies and given the fact that the telecommunications markets are the star markets and are being liberalised this will hopefully drive a lot of IT-based applications in the region to maturity."

With the likes of CERT in Abu Dhabi already making progress and Qatar's Science & Technology Park as well as Dubai's own DuBiotech complex set to add to the region's R&D industry, the future could well be bright.

Apart from all of those talking cars and computers, of course.

At a glance: Speech recognition technology

Speech recognition technology can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it as you work and even create on-the-go subtitles for foreign-language television programmes.

It can also be trained to recognise a particular user's voice. But interpreting sounds from a variety of speakers can be even more challenging, unless a limited library of sounds, or phonemes, is used.

Some speech software can dynamically translate English speech to Arabic speech. For example, the user can speak English into a microphone, and the system will translate the sentence into Arabic, and reply out loud. The goal of this type of system is for someone to be able to have a conversation with someone who is Arabic, even if they don't know Arabic and the other person doesn't know English.

Such translations are based on statistical analysis of the language, where the source sentence is first decompiled into a set of conceptual ideas. Then, the translated sentence is constructed in the target language, based upon these conceptual ideas.