Gene Frantz

Pretty much my first geek blog. So got the presentation from Gene Frantz (here’s his blog) this morning (the inventor of Speak & Spell, legend), which was really pretty interesting. He was given a tour of the department afterwards, and came into our wee office where I ended up talking to him for a good 5 mins. Very interesting guy. Told him about what I do etc then managed to tell him how much I loved Speak & Spell, ha!

He was talking about the ‘3rd wave of DSP’. Up until now us DSP engineers can pretty much take a massive chunk of the credit for 2 big changes in the last 20-30 years that have radically transformed out lives. The first “wave” was the telecoms revolution, where DSP enabled the switch from analogue to digital, and gave us the feature rich comms we have today, i.e. SMS, WIFI, GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth,  ADSL (broadband), 3G etc, and still to come 4G, UWB etc… Google them if you’re even slightly interested. Secondly, and more recently, we enabled the transformation of multimedia from analogue to digital. Without DSP there would be no digital TV, satellite TV, CDs, MP3, digital video, digital photos, digital radio etc… basically no digital anything. And there’s an awful lot of further advances that have built on these underlying communications and digital audio/video/image processing capabilities.

Bored yet? Anyway his talk was about predicting what the 3rd wave might be. He split it into 4 categories…

1. Security – automating a lot of security applications, such as automatic face recognition for CCTV cameras.
2. Transportation – most of the electronics in your car (ABS for example) are basically there to compensate for the most dangerous part of the car, the driver. Carry on along this path, and one day cars will be automated. This is already being developed.
3. Quality of life – medical advances. Remove the need for hospitals. Allow the treatment of chronic illness to take place in the home, aided by technological advances, and prevent/predict catastrophic disease early by monitoring health.
4. Green – macro (wind/tidal/solar) and micro (piezoelectric/kinetic) energy generation. When I was talking to him we got onto the green thing a little bit, and he said his definition of green could also include things like noise cancellation (already present in your mobile phone), i.e. cutting out the environment noise from around your head, making your local environment all the more pleasant (he also said this would be good cos his wife could cut out the noise of him snoring!).

That’s about it really. First geek blog, well done if  you made it this far!