At my 10th birthday I got a great present that influenced my life a lot - I got two books: "Personal Computer" and "Brain and Vision". Since then I became very curious about Computing and Brain Studies ...

1992

I read about Brain organization and Hopfield Neural Networks and tried to implement them on my x86 8MHz PC but the simulation was extremely slow. So I started thinking about distributing my simulation software and thought that it would be very useful to have a multi--core processing systems with the memory layer on top of them one day to be similar to the brain organization in a hope that it may considerably speed up computing. It seems that 15 year later we may have similar systems from Intel (TeraScale Processors). I hope to find some time to work on biologically inspired systems with such processors ...

I have been reading many books about robotics and started thinking about philosophical aspect of cyborgs: which amount of body can be replaced with the machinery to still keep human identity? Is it only brain? The same thing about theoretical teleportation: if one live entity is removed in one place and reconstructed in another even with the same physical processes - does it keep the same identity? I think that these are interesting philosophical questions that may become important one day ...

1993

I started having troubles keeping all information, references, data, software, links and knowledge I encounter so I developed some software to update and systematize all the knowledge with cross-references. This helped me systematize my knowledge ;) ... So I was very glad to see the development of wiki, blog and live journal technologies later and actively use them now.

1996

I had been working with the neural networks once again and read different articles about genes, DNA and the problems to understand how brain works. So I had an idea that instead of slicing brain in order to study it and trying to understand how it works, we should look at the DNA and try to understand how brain is developing in an embryo step by step - one day we should have technology to get precise information about that and I hope to be working on it ...

1998

Internet started becoming popular in Russia and I have been working a lot with new Internet technologies and Java language. At that time I started realizing that this environment can be used to deliver high-performance computing resources remotely through unified interfaces and services while being machine independent. So, for my M.S. project I developed Internet services to enable simple remote access to heterogeneous high-performance computers in the Russian Academy of Sciences. The server software provided provided hidden MPI parallelization and resource balancing. I wanted to continue researching on this topic but unfortunately my advisers didn't find it very exciting so I decided to move abroad to fully utilize my knowledge and skills. I didn't work directly on this topic but glad that lots of R&D have been done in this area since then, and many companies including Google and Microsoft provide such services.

2000

I read and thought about genomics, and thought again about its philosophical aspects. I had a weird and sad vision of the future (and it seems that some people share this vision unless we are careful about these technologies) when human genome is modified to produce healthier people; companies appear to speculate on or sell better genomes; natural adaptability is disturbed; mistake is made in one of the genomes that pollutes bank of "good" genomes which results in a disaster destroying human race. To be honest, I still feel optimistic and hope that there are many reasonable people that will prevent this, but I find it important to think about that since it may become a reality sooner than we may think ...

So, as a potential solution ;), the genome bank should have a recovery system similar to current computing systems, to be able to backtrack mistakes, problems and restore older working versions ;) ...

I had a few ideas about ergonomics of e-book readers to make them easily usable - glad to see that some recent e-book readers have much better ergonomics ...

At some point I have been using a mobile phone a lot and was quite annoyed that I have to pay a lot for mobile calls even if I use it at home when the land line is available. So I thought that it would be useful to have a system that would automatically recognize available phone systems (mobile or land) and switch to the cheaper ones. Glad to see that Skype recently developed a similar system but for WiFi phones ...

2002

Looking at the advertising boom in the Internet, I realized that the efficiency of advertisement could be improved considerably if they were content-driven. Just for fun, I built a prototype of such a system that would generate advertisements based on the website content but didn't have time to play with it due to finishing Ph.D.. Later, I found out that at the same time Google developed and started actively using similar system. This event made me really think whether I should continue Ph.D. or switch to a private sector. However, I still love my current research and glad to continue it but I also started looking at the possibilities for knowledge transfer, consulting and startups...

Actively using Internet, I saw many of my friends suffering with viruses, spy-ware and Internet phishing so had to spent a large amount of time to help them cleaning their computers ;). Even though it is possible to protect computer from some viruses and spy-ware, it will never be possible to save them from the incompetence of the users. I think that a special Internet training is needed before using it - otherwise it is the same as allowing anyone to drive cars without passing exams. And nowadays, Internet is used to keep a large amount of personal sensitive information (contacts, emails, financial data, passwords, etc) so it is important to educate users how to keep their data safe and protected.

At some point, I have been looking at the Windows internals and wanted to add some additional security to better define levels of accessibility from different processes to OS and registry, and produce warnings if this is infringed. Glad to see that they are implemented in the new Windows Vista ...

I thought about more effective ways to protect computers and users from viruses and spyware, and thought to use machine learning to continuously monitor user behavior (on the processes level) and detect unusual and suspicious behavior... I still didn't see this implemented, so anyone is interested to research it ?

2003

A few times I had a problem that due to current IT publishing system and slow response some of my ideas have been published with a very long delay. Current technologies are changing so fast that I think we need more electronic conferences and journals to considerably speed up reviewing and publishing process.

That year I started using GPS navigational system very actively and thought that it would be nice to have a system to connect addresses, contacts, phones, etc in my files and on the web to the map and GPS position. I tried to implement it within my old personal wiki-system but was very glad to see that implemented in Google Maps and TomTom navigation systems ;) ...

2004

Sometimes having troubles finding reliable reviews for different products, guides, reports, I had a thought about a system that I provisionally called WikiParison similar to Wikipedia that would allow users to create reviews, questionnaires and comparison tables for anything imaginable ;) ... Didn't have time to check if this is done though but think that it could be very useful ... Anyone is interested to implement this idea ;) ?

2005

At one of the conferences, I had been talking to a few guys from Google who mentioned that power dissipation and cooling becomes a major problem for their parallel systems. So I got maybe a bit crazy idea that instead of developing a better cooling systems, why not to move all such computing systems to the colder North areas. For example, each year people in the northern Russia suffer warming up their houses, so instead of cooling computing systems, we would use their dissipated heat to warm up houses, etc. It can also help these regions socially with investments, reliable power and Internet ... I didn't have time to think more if it is economically, physically and politically reasonable - anyone is interested to research it ;) ?