ICT Policy, Research, and Innovation

Perspectives and Prospects for EU-US Collaboration

Svetlana Klessova, Sebastian Engell, Maarten Botterman, Jonathan Cave

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119632528
• eBook ISBN: 9781119632559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A comprehensive discussion of the findings of the PICASSO initiative on ICT policy

ICT Policy, Research, and Innovation: Perspectives and Prospects for EU-US Collaboration provides a clearly readable overview of selected information and communication technology (ICT) and policy topics. Rather than deluge the reader with technical details, the distinguished authors provide just enough technical background to make sense of the underlying policy discussions.

The book covers policy, research, and innovation topics on technologies as wide-ranging as:

• Internet of Things
• Cyber physical systems
• 5G
• Big data

ICT Policy, Research, and Innovation compares and contrasts the policy approaches taken by the EU and the US in a variety of areas. The potential for future cooperation is outlined as well. Later chapters provide policy perspectives about some major issues affecting EU/US development cooperation, while the book closes with a discussion of how the development of these new technologies is changing our conceptions of fundamental aspects of society.

1
Collaboration in a Globally Networked Knowledge Society

Svetlana Klessova^1,2, Maarten Botterman³, Jonathan Cave⁴, and Sebastian Engell⁵

¹ Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, Valbonne Sophia Antipolis, France

² GAC Group, Valbonne Sophia Antipolis, France

³ GNKS Consult, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

⁴ Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

⁵ Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering, Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

By 2050, the world population is expected to have reached 9.8 billion, 22% being older than 60.¹ 68% will live in cities² [2], with the majority in small households.³ Thus, sustainable solutions to problems such as energy supply, logistics, health care, security, water and food supply, and climate change need to be implemented worldwide. These truly global challenges require multinational cross‐functional, collaborative, and innovative initiatives in technology, policy, commerce, and civil society. Some nations are already more advanced in devising and implementing solutions, although they are not always those countries where the adverse impacts of these problems are currently most acute. In any case, many challenges are strongly related to developments across national boundaries. But these nations' ability to develop and commercially exploit the technologies that will be crucial to addressing these challenges creates an ethical obligation to take a lead role. Failure to do so will ultimately threaten global stability, diminish their own welfare as demographic and environmental change hit home, and undermine the leadership that sustains their standards of living. The United Nations (UN)‐agreed Strategic Development Goals [5] are an expression of that need for global collaboration. Information and communication technologies (ICT) play crucial roles in responding to these challenges and helping us to develop shared visions of the type of societies in which we wish to live.

Before providing details, it is useful to clarify one matter of terminology. Much technological development, policy, and analysis are driven by a particular kind of “problem‐solving” thinking. This is manifest in the unqualified use of the term “solution” to refer to almost every technological, operational, or policy development, whether or not it was stimulated by a problem or effectively solves it. In our view, this leads to two difficulties. The first is that many issues that concern us, whether arising in the public, business, or civil sphere, cannot usefully be formulated as problems to be solved. Indeed, the first question to be answered in an EU impact assessment [6] is not “what is the problem?” but “what is the problem and why is it a problem?”. Not only it is difficult to “problematize” many issues arising in conjunction with the interaction of technology, society, economy, commerce, and policy, but lack of agreement among the key participants may lead to actions – portrayed as solutions – that do not solve any problem at all.

The second difficulty arises because – especially in relation to technology – the term is used without reference to a defined problem. In many cases, things are described as “solutions” simply because they offer some promise of improvement in an undefined or vague situation, stimulate curiosity, or might lead to a sale or justify a policy chosen on other grounds. This lack of clarity may lead to “solutions” that simply transform an initial problem or become problems in their own right, requiring yet more solutions [7].

Where possible, we shall avoid this word, but it is almost inevitable, and we hope the reader will bear in mind that often such solutions have neither the intent nor the capacity to solve or resolve specific problems and are as meaningless as “evidence” without a specification of what the data or arguments are evidence of.

One example of this centrality of ICT is smart energy, ensuring the stable operation of future power grids that will distribute electricity – predominantly from renewables – by jointly optimizing supply, demand, and distribution? Here, “smartness” reflects active use of a rich variety of real‐time data by computationally enhanced management and control systems and the coordinated activity of informed and empowered participants at every level from households and electric vehicles to the grid as a whole. Together with improved energy efficiency in, e.g. buildings, transportation, production, and ICTs, this will be crucial to reduce emissions of CO₂, heat, and other emissions that affect the climate.

ICT also supports the efficient use of space and other resources in ways that foster the sense of shared identity and common purpose needed for Smart Cities and smart regions through, e.g. integrated smart transportation, lighting, and garbage collection, and through new e‐public spaces. To make our homes smarter, ICT can improve the efficiency of water and energy use, interacting with grids via demand, supply, and peer‐to‐peer supply–demand management, while monitoring the safety (including physical security, health, protection against fire, etc.) and well‐being of the inhabitants. Smart home technologies and applications can also reduce food waste and facilitate health and social care for the elderly and infirm. Many of us in the European Union and the United States will use a host of applications to increase our pleasure and convenience. At the same time Smart Cities may be uniquely vulnerable to cyberattack. Smart homes will collect and even act on a wide range of personal and sensitive information, potentially exposing this information (and thereby the home and its inhabitants) to unwanted, unauthorized, or harmful scrutiny and interference. When moving towards a smart society, it is important to note that solutions developed for the European Union and the United States may not effectively address global challenges – that will require additional effort. For instance, megacities pose pressing and unique challenges and require very different kinds of smartness than those being developed for developed‐country Smart Cities – the same is true of smart regions outside of such cities.

In smart infrastructures (over and above the power grid), ICT supports capacity and connection management, such as traffic management systems, smart grids, and secure communication systems by providing automatic load balancing and rejection of attacks. The Internet is nowadays critical to almost any socioeconomic activity; many factors affect the coherent operation of Internet infrastructures, applications, and services. Smart cars are connected to the infrastructure using open standards to optimize the use of infrastructures (including the charging network) and improve safety of road transport. This hyperconnectivity is increasingly part of our life. Within two years, the increasing digital interconnection of people and things anytime and anywhere will encompass about 20.4 billion networked devices⁴ with profound social, political, and economic consequences. Such quantitative projections are highly politicized and uncertain, but the importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) as an area for potential research and innovation cooperation and policy concern is certain. The “hype” surrounding such numbers may actually be useful; it concentrates minds in the research, industrial, policy, and finance communities, creating windows of opportunity for internationally collaborative and interdisciplinary research that can drive progress in more fundamental (and less technology‐specific) areas.

The density and importance of connections are attracting increasing attention. One term that is associated with this recognition is “hyperconnectivity,” which is used to describe pathological psychological states, the characteristics of electronic networks, and, more fundamentally, a way of understanding how humanity itself is being transformed by technologies and how the concepts we use to experience, interact with, and make sense of the world may fail to keep up with the pace and extent of technologically driven change. As Floridi notes,⁵ this type of hyperconnectivity is not simply a matter of numbers of connected devices, but refers as well to the density, importance, scope, and complexity of the connections among them. In particular, it extends to Earth's ecological infrastructure; ICT is increasingly integrated with agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and systems for warning of (and, where possible, mitigating) natural disasters. This is not without risk; the growing dependence of critical infrastructures on efficiency‐enhancing ICT‐based systems may reduce societal resilience by removing “slack” and local capabilities in favor of dependence on connectivity, displacing non‐ICT governance mechanisms (like laws and regulations).

It is important to draw out both the positives and the negatives; both promises and threats can stimulate innovation and development. The negatives block or distort technology development and uptake and point the way to further challenges that will have to be addressed by a mix of technology research and innovation, market developments, and policy. All these are linked, and all have strong international dimensions – the technologies and in some cases the services are global and asymmetrically supplied. Even between the United States and the European Union, incentives, interests, and capabilities differ. It cannot be assumed that the US suppliers of technologies and technology‐enabled services will automatically meet European requirements or vice versa, even if they are sensitive to their own citizen's fears and desires as expressed through domestic standards, market incentives, and regulations.

The discussion above makes much of “smart” devices, systems, and services. In this book, we use the following indicators of “smartness” in relation to technology development and use:

• Collecting, processing, and using a wide range of real‐time data from the micro to the system level;
• Applying advanced information processing including data analytics and machine learning/artificial general intelligence tools to detect and exploit emergent phenomena and to manage complex systems;
• Developing architectures that allow data to inform choices at the most effective and efficient level (avoiding too much centralization or fragmentation);
• Making systems more resilient and adaptive by integrating rule‐, principles‐, and outcome‐based control and management; and
• Where appropriate, replacing centralized controls with architectures based on transparency, accountability, and explication, to minimize burdens and maximize flexibility while protecting the coherence of the system as a whole.

With these in mind, we can advance a few useful precepts for identifying and implementing research and implementation towards smart responses to the overriding challenges:

• In the end, it is all about people. Smartness is not an end in itself – it should support better functioning systems and societies in order to advance human welfare. This is not an automatic consequence; it requires involving real users from the outset;
• Smartness should not always be maximized – in relation to the systemic challenges mentioned earlier, the collective intelligence of the system may be more important than the cleverness of any component and is not always improved by making components “smarter”;
• Smart expedients like Big Data analytics and algorithmic decision can crowd out modeling and understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Contributors
• Editor Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• A Note from the Series Editor
• 1 Collaboration in a Globally Networked Knowledge Society
• 2 Industrial Drivers, Barriers, and Societal Needs
• 3 Research and Innovation Programs as a Mechanism to Support Collaborative Efforts
• 4 International Context and the Specific Value of EU–US Collaboration
• 5 Challenges and Potential for EU–US Collaboration at the Intersection of the Internet of Things and Cyber‐physical Systems
• 6 Challenges and Potential for EU–US Collaboration in 5G and Beyond Networks
• 7 Big Data Policies and Priorities
• 8 Cybersecurity and Privacy
• 9 The Next Generation Internet Initiative
• 10 Privacy and Data Protection Issues
• 11 Information and Communication Technology Security Issues
• 12 Standardization Issues
• 13 Spectrum Issues
• 14 Digital Communities and EU–US ICT Development Collaboration
• 15 Opening Towards a New Reality, Together
• Index
• End User License Agreement