A Data Center in every Car
There's some people who have pointed out that electric cars will be dotted about our landscapes soon at charging piints (outside work, home, shops). This represents a great way to sink electricity that is being generated nearby (e.g. from microgenerators on houses) which would otherwise be wasted in long haul transmission or simply thrown away (if there's no easy affordable/deployable way to reverse the stream and send a lot of power up the electricity distribution network). THen when local demand picks up again (opposite end of the day) you just pull the power from the cars - Typical figures for the uk suggest 30% of electricty generated could be stored at any time, whch is a big change from current (pun intended) architectures.
But why not go one more step and distribute data centers to every car? then we could serve the world from the stored power when local data/processing demands are high. One should build a high speed wireless link (e.g. new wireless HDMI link can do 5-10Gbps) into every charging point, and put a petabyte of storage and a few terahz of multicore in each new car. That'd work well - 20M cars in the UK would dwarf what current data centers have and would have zero heat dissipation problems...
Safety in “numbers”?
Two projects wrapped up recently with highly successful final reviews in the European Commission's process - one is Trilogy, which we were tangentially involved in and mainly features some nifty work on multipath (TCP and IP).
The other was SocialNets which we were very involved in - what I wanted to post is that the partner at Eurecom in that project has now released a privacy preserving social networking tool, called safebook - viz:
http://www.safebook.us/home.html
Place-Friends: designing a link prediction system for location-based services
Online social networks often deploy friend recommending systems, so that new users can be discovered and new social connections can be created. Since these service have easily millions of users, recommending friends potentially involves searching a huge prediction space: this is why platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter merely focus their prediction efforts on friends-of-friends, that is, on users that are only 2 hops away in the social network, sharing at least a common friend. Extending prediction efforts beyond this social circle is simply not worth it.
Nonetheless, in location-based social networks there is an unprecedented source of potential promising candidates for recommending new friends: the places where user check-in at.  In a recent paper which will appear at the upcoming ACM SIGKDD 2011 conference we address the problem of designing a link prediction system which exploits the properties of the places that users visit.
IMDEA Workshop on Internet Science
See here for titles/speakers and slides...
So far Pablo's talk had some v. interesting stuff about scaling the twitter service - clever work on solving hotspots andoverloads in memcache/mysql setup - reminded me of previous work on trying to get the IMDB system to scale - seems like these inverted databases are a pain in general, so a fundamental solution would be welcome...for those of you working on social net analysis, worry about (particularly un-self-declared) spambots in twitter - see Mowbray's talk - plus looking at Vattay'sstats talk is worthwhile
anyhow, I was reading this Future Internet Roadmap and decided that Private Green Clouds is defintely the way to go (andwe are there yet, so that is good:-)
here's the barking bit: why not put a data center in every car?
rationale:1. future cars will be electric.2. its proposed that future electricity generation will incorporate a lot of micro-generation(certainly solar here in spain, and wind in uk etc etc)3. the power distribution net is not fit for "uplink" electricity in large amount, so...4. micro-generation is largely intermittent (esp. wind, but obviously solar is at least on/off day/nite)5. hence we need to do local distribution of micro-generated power6. or else we need to store micro-generated electricty
power solution=> use electric cars as storage; to get an idea of scale, (see Mackay's book) cars could store about 30% of UK generated power -when we get to 100% of the carpool of the UK being electric...
so then where we plug cars in, why not also have a dataport too then instead of using meagre compute resource in someone's house, have a big-fat data center in the car(s) in a street - they can run off stored power when local production exceeds demand (or predicted (say nighttime) production/stored exceeds local and car demand...
the numbers should work very well...you can easily smooth day/night variation, but also short term wind variation...
before you all shout, one problem is that the batteries are really designed for a relatively small number of discharge cycles - however, some technologies (hydrogen fuel cell etc) would fixthat
so this needs 2 things.1 a smaller unit for data center2 a plan to do fiber-to-the-charging-point....