#OI2Dublin – Interview with Intel researcher Chris Woods on the future of the cloud (video)

22 May 2013

Chris Woods, researcher at Intel Labs Europe and European Young Leader

Intel researcher Chris Woods believes we are at an interesting time in the cloud revolution and predicts the onset of proxy devices in homes and cars that provide cloud consumers with backed-up versions of the internet.

Chris Woods is a researcher at Intel Labs Europe and a European Young Leader who produced a European Institute of Innovation and Technology report on big data as a service for social change. Woods has a strong technical background in both cloud and mobile technologies.

Prior to joining Intel, Woods worked at Microsoft, leading teams working on the Azure (cloud) infrastructure components. He helped create a big-data solution to support profiling of mobile devices and the automatic adaption of web content for them. The solution has been deployed on Hotmail and Bing.

Woods also released this is an open-source contribution for. NET developers. Within the mobile industry, he worked as a Symbian certified trainer, and developer. He developed and designed system software – adding new 63 APIs to the operating system, and created a number of mobile applications.

Woods said that in terms of personal computing we have come a long way and we are now at the point where we can do pretty much anything on handheld devices.

A proxy on the future of the personal cloud

“Yes there’s computing power behind it, but not limited to the device. From my point of view, the interesting bit is how we are going to use this new technology, what else we can do with and that’s the fun bit.

“It’s been quite an evolution. When I was working with Hotmail and Bing, I assisted the team and looked at making them mobile enabled and released big-data figures and we had 5m data points in that dataset.

“We started off thinking about mobile phones and how people were using them differently – we predicted people were going to spend more time reading emails on their phones than composing them … that was the thinking then.

“But now people are using mobile phones as their primary means of doing things.

“So there’s been this shift in dynamics – first it was an extra product but now the mobile device is the primary access point for internet, a remarkable shift.

“From what I’m doing, I’m really just understanding how computing is changing with connected devices.

“I’m looking at the implications for the software; the mobile phone talks to the server on the cloud, what it is doing and the type of software that is in the cloud and what if we had something in middle.

“We’re developing a proxy device in the house or the car that could provide local backed-up content from the internet or local processing … the bit that will sit in the middle.”