1.2 Computers and the Internet in Industry and Research

These are exciting times in the computer field! Many of the most influential and successful businesses of the last two decades are technology companies, including Apple, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay and many more. These companies are major employers of people who study computer science, computer engineering, information systems or related disciplines. At the time of this writing, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Apple were the two most valuable companies in the world. Figure 1.1 provides a few examples of the ways in which computers are improving people’s lives in research, industry and society.

Fig. 1.1 Improving people’s lives with computers.

Name Description
Electronic health records These might include a patient’s medical history, prescriptions, immunizations, lab results, allergies, insurance information and more. Making these available to health-care providers across a secure network improves patient care, reduces the probability of error and increases the health-care system’s overall efficiency, helping control costs.
Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project was founded to identify and analyze the 20,000+ genes in human DNA. The project used computer programs to analyze complex genetic data, determine the sequences of the billions of chemical base pairs that make up human DNA and store the information in databases, which have been made available over the Internet to researchers in many fields.
AMBER™ Alert The AMBER (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alert System helps find abducted children. Law enforcement notifies TV and radio broadcasters and state transportation officials, who then broadcast alerts on TV, radio, computerized highway signs, the Internet and wireless devices. AMBER Alert partners with Facebook, whose users can “Like” AMBER Alert pages by location to receive alerts in their news feeds.
World Community Grid People worldwide can donate their unused computer processing power by installing a free secure software program that allows the World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org) to harness unused capacity. This computing power, accessed over the Internet, is used in place of expensive supercomputers to conduct scientific research projects that are making a difference—providing clean water to third-world countries, fighting cancer, growing more nutritious rice for regions fighting hunger and more.
Cloud computing Cloud computing allows you to use software, hardware and information stored in the “cloud”—i.e., accessed on remote computers via the Internet and available on demand—popular examples are Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. You can increase or decrease resources incrementally to meet your needs at any given time, so cloud services can be more cost effective than purchasing expensive hardware to ensure that you have enough storage and processing power to meet peak-level needs. Using cloud-computing services shifts the burden of managing these applications from the business to the service provider, saving businesses time, effort and money. In an online chapter, you’ll use Microsoft Azure—a cloud-computing platform that allows you to develop, manage and distribute your apps in the cloud. With Microsoft Azure, your apps can store their data in the cloud so that it’s available at all times from any of your desktop computers and mobile devices. For information on Microsoft Azure’s free and paid services visit https://azure.microsoft.com.
Medical imaging X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans, also called CAT (computerized axial tomography) scans, take X-rays of the body from hundreds of different angles. Computers are used to adjust the intensity of the X-rays, optimizing the scan for each type of tissue, then to combine all of the information to create a 3D image. MRI scanners use a technique called magnetic resonance imaging to produce internal images noninvasively.
GPS Global Positioning System (GPS) devices use a network of satellites to retrieve location-based information. Multiple satellites send time-stamped signals to the GPS device, which calculates the distance to each satellite, based on the time the signal left the satellite and the time the signal arrived. This information helps determine the device’s exact location. GPS devices can provide step-by-step directions and help you locate nearby businesses (restaurants, gas stations, etc.) and points of interest. GPS is used in numerous location-based Internet services such as check-in apps to help you find your friends (e.g., Foursquare and Facebook), exercise apps such as Map My Ride+, Couch to 5K and RunKeeper that track the time, distance and average speed of your outdoor ride or jog, dating apps that help you find a match nearby and apps that dynamically update changing traffic conditions.
Robots Robots can be used for day-to-day tasks (e.g., iRobot’s Roomba vacuuming robot), entertainment (e.g., robotic pets), military combat, deep sea and space exploration (e.g., NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity) and more. Researchers, such as those at Robo-How (http://robohow.eu), are working to create autonomous robots that perform complex human manipulation tasks (such as cooking) and that can learn additional tasks both from the robots’ own experiences and from observing humans performing other tasks.
E-mail, Instant Messaging and Video Chat Internet-based servers support all of your online messaging. E-mail messages go through a mail server that also stores the messages. Instant Messaging (IM) and Video Chat apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, AIM, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, Trillian and others, allow you to communicate with others in real time by sending your messages and live video through servers.
E-commerce This technology has exploded with companies like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Walmart and many others, causing a major shift away from brick-and-mortar retailers.
Internet TV Internet TV set-top boxes (such as Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Chromecast and TiVo) allow you to access an enormous amount of content on demand, such as games, news, movies, television shows and more, and they help ensure that the content is streamed to your TV smoothly.
Streaming music services Streaming music services (such as Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and more) allow you to listen to large catalogues of music over the web, create customized “radio stations” and discover new music based on your feedback.
Self-driving cars and smart homes These are two enormous markets. Self-driving cars are under development by many technology companies and car manufacturers—they already have an impressive safety record and soon could be widely used saving lives and reducing injuries. Smart homes use computers for security, climate control, minimizing energy costs, automated lighting systems, fire detection, window control and more.
Game programming Global video-game revenues are expected to reach $107 billion by 2017 (http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/22/8471789/worldwide-video-games-market-value-2015). The most sophisticated games can cost over $100 million to develop, with the most expensive costing half a billion dollars (http://www.gamespot.com/gallery/20-of-the-most-expensive-games-ever-made/2900-104/). Bethesda’s Fallout 4 earned $750 million in its first day of sales (http://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/)!
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