2002: The Year Ahead in Technology Mobility, Safety Forecasted for Future in Gadgets

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Byline: Anna Marie Kukec Daily Herald Business Writer

From self-healing computers to more sophisticated mobile devices and software, advances in technology are expected to dazzle you in the new year.

Our world will become more mobile, and we hope, more secure with new online safeguards. Also high-speed services are expected to become faster and devices to become smaller.

A variety of area executives and academics offered their forecasts on how technology will improve our lives and our work:

Dan Pelino, central region vice president of IBM in Oak Brook:

From a business perspective, I believe services will continue to be an important growth area for technology. Yet as technological innovation outpaces even human constraints such as time, it will be even more important for computers to take care of service themselves. This is what we call autonomic, or self-healing computing - the idea that technology will be able to diagnose and maintain itself in much the same way as the human body protects itself against disease.

Susan Cheney, area vice president of Sprint PCS in Oak Brook:

In 2002, consumers will finally enjoy wireless phones and devices that provide lightning-fast data speeds and other enhancements to existing applications and services - thanks to third-generation wireless networks. The 3G network that is launching in 2002 will also open the door for new and more robust applications such as video and audio streaming, high-speed Internet browsing, e-mail with attachments, digital imaging, rich messaging, on-demand conferencing, voice-to-text applications and more on a variety of wireless devices.

Shaye R. Mandle, president of The Illinois Coalition in Chicago:

There are a few great developments that will occur this year. First, we should see the first development of a Terascale Computing System. This system will work in terms of teraflops, or handling 1 trillion floating operations per second. This will be incredibly valuable in many areas, but especially in bioinformatics. As we discover the relationships between human DNA and human proteins, we will need this almost unimaginable computing power to be able to handle the mass of data. The University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Argonne National Laboratory are leading the efforts on the Terascale project. In addition, we will see breakthroughs in materials sciences and optics. Developments such as new polymers and plastics that can conduct electrical current will surface as well as molecular level computing and other nanoscale technologies, some that will prove critical to national defense.

Tom Moylan, director of global accounts for Compaq …