Peter Cochrane is developing technologies to streamline life in the information age of the next century. New Scientist found a forecaster with an eye on the past

DO YOU feel threatened by the prospect of information overload, or frustrated by the need to have your office with you in the car, on the train or wherever you are? If you don't, then you soon will. Or so says Peter Cochrane, head of advanced applications and technologies at the laboratories of BT in East Anglia. He leads a group of 600 researchers who are trying to anticipate how our lifestyles will change over the next decade or so, and what demands this will place on the telecommunications business.

NS: Is there really a problem?

PC: If you go back say 500 years, the Pope had about 400 books and his librarian was the filing system, the index, the contents list, the retrieval mechanism and, most importantly of all, the regulator. The Pope said what he wanted the population to see and his librarian made sure those were the only books they saw. It was a zero serendipity world. When the Dickensian library emerged it had an ordered filing system, and realised a magic quality - serendipity! You could find what you wanted, and chance upon other things on the way. Now leap forward to today, and go onto the Internet. This has 100 per cent serendipity, an infinity of information, but without order, and you can't find what you're looking for--it's total chaos.

Within a decade, we'll have the 24 million volumes in the USA Library of Congress in our living rooms, either on line or, in reality, all on a compact disc. How the heck do you get serendipity back into that world, because when you look at the CD it's an almost zero serendipity world again? Within five clicks of the mouse you're down an information mine shaft and you can't see a damn thing. You have to quit and start again.

NS: So where does the answer lie then?

... in icons, not words. We're very good visually at spotting things, zeroing in, identifying what we want. Look at the Japanese or the Chinese; it takes them about 10 years longer to learn to read, but then they're about four times faster. When you let children loose on a multimedia package, they learn at about a 50 per cent faster rate and they retain about 80 per cent more. The reason? Because it is pictographic, very imagery.

Not so long ago, my kids sat in a real fighter plane, an F15, and, inside five minutes, they were telling the pilot a lot about the instrumentation. How? Because they'd flown every aircraft in World War 2 and every modern aircraft in every war in every theatre on both sides. They've flown as Russians, Italians, Americans, Japanese. Then they brought the pilot home, and sat him in front of their computer. They flew a mission in the Gulf with him in an F15 and then flew the same mission to show him the advantage of the F117, the stealth fighter. So the pilot was saying: "Look out, they're going to fire a missile." And my kids were saying: "Don't worry they can't see us yet." It just fascinates the heck out of me, because what they finish up with is not the mathematical skill to calculate the navigational co-ordinates, but the intuition that says that if I'm heading for you in an aircraft and there's a wind blowing this way, then I'd better steer that way because the wind is going to make me drift over. When you come to do the mathematics of that, it's very quick because you don't have to go through the explanation of why.

Then they have another interesting ability that many other people, who've come into geometry on a sheet of paper in two dimensions, don't have. They've been in 3D all this time. So if you start to do Pythagoras, a2=b2+c2, and then you say to them now let's put it into 3D, very quickly they come to the conclusion that a2=b2+c2+d2. Well, that was a major problem to me when I was a kid.

NS: Does this mean that we shouldn't be teaching children how to read to gather information but how to appreciate and use icons better?

I wouldn't be so bold as to say we're going to stop reading and writing, I think that would be quite wrong. But look at it like this. The Lords prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the United States Declaration of Independence only require a few words. But the United States Department of Agriculture Directive on the pricing of a cabbage has 15 629 words! You do have to ask the question: "Hey guys, what the heck are we doing? If you can write these fundamental laws of mankind of how we're going to live and then a major prayer to a deity, and the basis on which a nation will operate, do we really need all these words to buy a cabbage?"

I look at the electronic world and see information doubling every couple of years --we've got 24 000 CDs on the market, and tons more coming. I want to increase what I do in a lifetime, and I need some help. I would like some personalisation, icons that recognises me as a human being. I would like information to come up and present itself to me, and I'd say "Oh, interesting".

NS: How close is that?

I've an article here on the management of information overload that has been precised by computer down to a single page. Another machine converts the text to speech, for me to listen to in my car or wherever I am. So, all of a sudden, I can get the input to my brain in either a visual form, by sitting and reading, or I can multi-task because the beauty of radio is that you don't have to look at a screen and you can do something else while you listen. I can get a whole pile of information, have it sent to my head acoustically and make the decision I want to know more about that or I'm not interested.

One of the things I've been doing recently, which is a lot of fun, is destroying a Sunday newspaper in real time in front of audiences. I walk up and down with the newspaper and say "here's a Sunday morning, loads of information. But I'd actually pay more for less. This newspaper cost me ?1.50, I'd pay ?2 for it if they did this..." And I just destroy it. I throw all the bits away that I don't want, and finish up with a single sheet of paper. Because out of that entire 100 and odd pages that I get as a Sunday paper, there's only one page of information that I'm interested in reading and I have to search for it. It's a case of off loading serendipity. I'm trying to create a world that allows us to do much, much more in the same time more effectively. That's what the key is. From a personal and a professional point of view, one of the objectives is to do ten times more in a working life. That's what we've been doing ever since we started, I mean going back two million years. My father had a working life of 100 000 hours. I can now do what he did in ten thousand hours, and my son will be able to do it one thousand hours. He'll do it differently, but that's the power.

NS: But that's an astonishing improvement in efficiency, in effectiveness. How close are you to showing that it's possible?

With just my standard car phone I can call up to ask for any information I want while I'm driving. I can bring down my medical records, weather reports, news bulletins, and listen to them as I drive along. "This is all very nice," I said to my guys, "but we've now got the ability to make the computer sound like anyone. And I like my wife's voice." I could get her to sit in the room with the computer, record the characteristics of her voice, and use that to deliver the data. Why? Because I'm used to listening to her voice and, travelling at speed with lots of background noise, I could then pick up, without any stress, what's being said. Or I could get the computer to sound like me. Or not. Our machine provides the ultimate customisation: any language you like, any accent you like, any person you like. But what's missing is the emotion. Emotion's a jolly difficult thing to put in, employing about 100 times more computing power. The machine has to look at the entire context and decide that this should be said with some emotion. For the moment, it will just say, in a monotone, something like: "You're going to crash". It's that urgency in a voice, that intonation that we get, that's very difficult to reproduce.

NS: How did you record the voice you use in your car at the moment?

One of my folks sat in a cubicle talking to the computer for about two hours. It made tracks of all the features, and fed those characteristics into the synthesiser. The earlier synthesiser, which is the same one that Stephen Hawking has, made you concentrate to listen to it; this one is much better. We think it's probably the best synthesiser on the planet, a sort of dangerous claim to fame if you like, but we've not heard one as good.

I've recently demonstrated the system at the Mayo clinic [in Rochester, New York, during an international conference on IT and medicine]. I dialled up on an international line and talked to our computer on line, and brought down directory enquiries and medical records, and surprised a few people. I wanted to show them that if you were an MD on your rounds, from your car, using your cellphone, you could just ring up the computer and get all the medical records down and you could also get medical advice using the telephone.

NS: So you were in Rochester and you rang up the computer here?

Yes. The point is that you and I were never designed to hit a keyboard, we were designed to look each other in the eye and talk. I'm very much of the Captain Kirk genre. I want to walk up to the computer and say "give me the weather report... I'd like the BT share price", and those kinds of things. I would like to interact with the machine in the same way as I'm interacting with you. I don't want to be bothered with machines. This damn keyboard is a hundred years old plus technology. It's just archaic. Video conferencing is just as bad--you sit looking at a flat screen with a tablet of people of all the wrong size, shape, colour and a bit jerky, and you don't get important visual cues. If you were to close your eyes [in a face-to-face conversation] and I just look over here and talk, you'd know that I was talking over there. If you were writing, you'd probably look up at me because you'd feel my acoustic being standing over there. We can recreate all that electronically. It makes the environment much friendlier, easier to work in. At the other end there is also our ability to swing our acoustic beam and look at somebody, and we can actually listen to a conversation over here or over there. We can do that electronically as well. Putting those kinds of facilities into a video conferencing environment enhances it no end...makes it much more human.

NS: Are these developments still at the research stage?

Yes. It requires more kit. It's more expensive, but it's important for us to understand the advantages and disadvantages and get the designs right before we do anything in terms of real development. But in terms of dropping information into your hand on your cellular phone or on your screen, an awful lot of that we are running with now. It's just a matter of making the decision to turn it into a product. That's all.

NS: Does that mean your car's got a powerful computer on-board to test drive all these prototype gadgets?

No. All the computing is back here at the lab. But we're now asking how much of the stuff needs to be in the vehicle, on the human being, and how much needs to be in the network. We're working with a number of companies to develop computers that you wear. My objection is this. Four years ago, I had a large briefcase that was full of paper and very heavy; today, I have a small briefcase that is four times heavier, full of batteries. My arms are getting longer, this stuff is killing me. Not only batteries. I've got cables and plugs and sockets and all kinds of stuff. Now I've got a cellular phone to plug on so that I can work on the train. And this lot is like the Boy's Own Meccano Set... it's really inconvenient but it's the only way I can work.

My wristwatch was the carriage clock only three hundred years ago; now it's a bit of body furniture. So what I want is body furniture that allows me to get up in the morning, quickly put it all on and go. The office you wear!

NS: How far off is that?

Well... I can get an entire cellular phone down to a single chip. I can get a 486 computer down to about three chips. I can run them all on less than 5 watts. Then you ask: "Do I have a screen and, if so, what form should it take?" And then there's the keyboard to consider. I've very large fingers and hit four keys at once when I use one of those personal organisers. Instead, I'm pushing voice I/O [input/output]... I could carry a keyboard in my case and use it when I need it but, for the most part, I could do all my business straight from my arm--talking and listening to a unit strapped to my wrist. When it comes to display systems, we've done an interesting experiment. If you want to get a railway carriage to yourself, get on the train and just clip your electronics on your head, and boy you get a carriage on your own. So there are social things; people get very upset...

NS: Have you done that?

Oh yeah... Now it's different if you've got a pair of ski goggles on. People think: "Oh, this guy's blind or something." It's weird. I've got an immersive system, which allows me to sit and work with a laptop. The reaction to that is a lot less strong, so we're now looking at other subtle ways of doing it, which are entirely different. Implants are one possibility. We could mount information onto a contact lens, or onto a simple clip-on for your glasses. We can already project a full page of A4 into the eye that's readable...

We're playing with all this stuff, trying to find what works well and is robust. We're working with a couple of companies to realise this office you wear, and we're looking at all the social aspects. For example, if my secretary came bursting into here and interrupted us, you'd think she was awfully rude. But if that phone rings in the middle of our conversation and I answer it, that would be all right. I'm interested in how socially acceptable things evolve.

NS: But what happens if the office-you-wear becomes socially acceptable and everyone straps on a unit when they get up in the morning and begins work over breakfast?

The implications for the network are of prime concern. Look at cellular telephones, and how they changed the nature of telecommunications. What you finished up with was all the capacity you needed, but in the wrong place. A train's cancelled at Liverpool Street, everybody picks up their cellphone at the same time and calls home or office. A traffic jam on the motor way leaves a hundred more people in the cell than it was ever designed for, and everybody makes a phone call. So what you've got to do in the network is to get the capacity to the point where it can accept communications traffic in lumps. It all comes in lumps now, it's not nice and evenly spread. The same is true of a fixed network when we have these phone-ins on television. All of a sudden, thousands of people pick up the phone to vote, or to bid or whatever. That's a pretty tall order. It's like twenty thousand people arriving at Liverpool Street station for one train, instead of being spread out over the day. That's what we face.

NS: So is a lack of capacity holding up development?

Oh no, we can solve those problems. The point is that the office-you-wear is not so far away. And when it arrives, it will change the way we work, and it will have an impact on our network. That's what the worry is. Somebody else could develop it outside the network, outside our influence. So our purpose is to find out what the implications are before it arrives. It's very easy to get caught by a paradigm change that you didn't see coming. We have to be out in front trying to figure out what next paradigm is, and what the threat is and what it means to the network so that we've got the capacity in the right place and can deal with those things.

NS: What's the time scale?

I think that we're looking at some of these things within five years. Some of them may be ten years away, but it's not a long way off.

NS: Business people on trains with screens on their eyes?

Business people on trains with a new device that is much more like an office than a cellular phone. So we might see secretaries disappear and be replaced by electronic counterparts - a bit like the typing pool - remember them?

NS: Within five years?

In some organisations it will be shorter; in others, it'll take 10 or 15 years. I ask audiences: "How many of you people have got a secretary between you and the keyboard?" Sometimes, 90 per cent raise their hands and still believe they're using IT. Wrong! Other times, 90 per cent of the audience have no secretaries at all. So there are very fast moving organisations out there, who are way downstream, screaming for this technology. There are other organisations saying what's all this information technology about--we've got a postman. Those guys are going to be sidelined.

There are now degree courses that you'll fail if you haven't got a PC linked to a network because the lecture notes come on line. It's all about critical mass. If I've got a cellular phone and nobody else has got one, you're not under any pressure. But if 90 per cent of us have got cellular phones and you haven't, you're under tremendous pressure to buy one. You get frozen out if you don't succeed with technology.

NS: So, do you succeed with technology?

I'll let you into a secret. My mission statement is to boldly go and be first technologically, managerially and operationally. I have instituted electronic working, throughout my department and I now communicate in a semi-mathematical form with my people. My Email replies might go something like "A=OK, Go.P" or "B+C=No, don't think it's a good idea, let's talk.P" or "D=Wow, I agree.P".

So if you write to me on e-mail, I no longer do this Dickensian stuff: "Dear Sir, In response to your letter of 21st inst. regarding our discussion the other day, I am pleased to inform you that blah blah blah." Great big wadges of text that I have to type in, and then down at the bottom: "I do hope that you find this blah blah blah. Yours sincerely." I've got rid of all that stuff because I'm now shifting ten times more communication than I was before. Why? Because instead of the five layers of management for 600 people that we used to have, there are now only two. And I have to move much much quicker.

So that's the essence; to try to move with the technology, and use the technology to advantage to make things work better and faster. It's good fun round here. I've got a great job.