Ўзбекистон республикаси ахборот технологиялари ва коммуникацияларини ривожлантириш вазирлиги муҳаммад ал-хоразмий номидаги

TRENDS AND ISSUES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 
Khonturaev S.I. (TUIT of Fergana branch, senior lecturer) 
 
Advent of Digital Wireless Communications. Wireless communications received a major 
boost from the effort to develop mobile communications systems in the United States. Interest 
and investment also have been stimulated by the possibility of creating competition in local 
telephone service, heretofore a 100 year monopoly. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has 
forced aerospace companies to seek new markets for satellite technology, including direct 
broadcast television and satellite based cellular telephony. Wireless communications links are 
being installed worldwide, enabling mobile communication and, for developing countries and 
other nations with historically weak telecommunications infrastructure and rapid growth, 
avoidance of much of the capital cost of a wired communication infrastructure. New competition 
will drive down the cost of telephony and offer new applications. Video broadcast from space or 
from fixed terrestrial sites may offer new ways to deliver data in interactive communications 
systems. 

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Increasing Exploitation of Broadband Networks and Capabilities for Transmission of Video 
Data. Commercial providers believe that new applications such as video conferencing, 
interactive television, and the ability to access movies on demand from a large archive will be 
the dominant factors in the development of networks over the next 10 years. Voice 
communications will require an ever smaller share of telecommunications capacity. 
The widely discussed convergence of personal computers and television has been accelerated 
through the widespread licensing of new tools for interactive World Wide Web (WWW) 
applications and through emerging standards by which cable television companies can provide 
high-speed Internet access. Much of this activity is driven by the goal of providing interactive 
access to large video databases in "real time" (at least 1 megabit per second). 
New, higher bandwidth protocols such as the high-performance parallel interface (HIPPI), 
the first gigabit per second standard begun at Los Alamos National Laboratories in the early 
1990s, and the MBone (a virtual multicast backbone network for delivery of audio and 
rudimentary real-time video across the Internet) are being developed. In the short term, however, 
the impact of high-bandwidth applications will be negative (especially for high-data-rate users in 
OECD countries), since the need for higher bandwidth has already been outpacing bandwidth 
improvements, both on major backbone networks and on bridges between them (see the section 
below titled ''Specific Technical Concerns"). 
Shifting Dominance in Data Networks. The international public infrastructure for data 
communications is built around the Internet. Originally developed in the United States by the 
Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies to support 
scientific and technical collaboration, the Internet now serves a much wider range of purposes. In 
recent years, it has become a high-visibility source of entertainment as well as an indispensable 
tool for many commercial and noncommercial applications (e.g., catalog sales, news, social 
interaction, dissemination of company and product information). Advertisers use the Internet to 
promote themselves and their wares as "high tech" and, moreover, view the current 
demographics of Internet users (who have disposable incomes that are typically much higher 
than average) as extremely favorable. 
In 1995, the total number of commercial (".com") sites on the Internet grew to exceed the 
number of educational and government sites for the first time, and this continues to be the sector 
of most rapid growth. For example, the percentage of Web sites on the Internet running from the 
".com" domain in the United States increased from 1.5 percent in June 1993 to 50 percent in 
January 1996.
This trend toward commercial use of the Internet could have a significant impact on the 
scientific community. What has been until now a government-subsidized activity could become a 
significant cost factor to scientists as networks become privatized. Further, the scientific 
community originally played a major role in developing the technologies and standards for the 
Internet, but this is no longer the case. Scientific activity will have to follow (and potentially 
benefit from or suffer because of) the standards and pace set by others. 
Increasing Technical Support for Collaborative Work. Scientists are increasingly aware of 
the importance of information technologies that facilitate collaborative work. The electronic 
messaging capabilities of operating systems used widely in the context of the ARPANET and in 
private, commercial messaging systems, as well as text retrieval systems such as IBM's STAIRS, 
System Development Corporation's ORBIT, NASA's RECON, Battelle's BASIS, and the work at 
Cornell University by Gerard Salton on SMART, provided much of the early technical 
framework for knowledge management and sharing. In recent years, electronic mail (e-mail) 
systems, mailing lists, and bulletin boards have enabled rapid information sharing among groups 
of people distributed throughout the world. Other commercially available computer-based tools 
and technologies have enhanced collaborative work by facilitating cooperative research 
involving, for example, the use of remote instruments, and electronic data publishing that speeds 
the dissemination of research results. Indeed, the success of many complex scientific 
investigations now is predicated on bringing the capabilities of diverse researchers from multiple 

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institutions together with state-of-the-art instruments. In addition to the purely technical issues 
raised by these requirements, however, the research agenda for creating such "collaboratories" 
must address fundamental psychosocial questions. 
Desktop video conferencing is a next logical step in the use of collaborative tools and may be 
as widely available within 10 years as e-mail is currently, provided that adequate bandwidth can 
be supplied. Users can now obtain rudimentary desktop video conferencing systems for as little 
as $100 using the CUSeeMe software from Cornell University; such systems provide crude 
service today but offer great promise. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and several 
universities are using the MBone to broadcast symposia and conference events worldwide. Video 
conferencing systems based on integrated services digital network (ISDN) services and 
asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) are now available commercially, offering high-quality 
images and advanced application sharing features. "Plain old" telephone service (POTS)-based 
video conferencing is expected to be available with the next release of major PC operating 
systems. 
The low cost of desktop video conferencing equipment and the ability to operate over a 
variety of media types will enable scientists who have access to these technologies to 
communicate more readily. These types of technologies can help improve the efficiency of 
scientific fieldwork, especially in remote areas, but only if they are supported by links with 
sufficiently high bandwidth. Investment in commercial products that support information sharing 
and workflow has accelerated as vendors recognize the importance of multiuser support to 
acquiring and sustaining market share. 
Growing Capabilities for Natural Language Processing. Natural language processing has 
been an active branch of artificial intelligence for decades. Recent approaches and products have 
significantly improved automated document subject classification. In addition, the Internet has 
greatly increased interest in capabilities for indexing and locating knowledge, thus contributing 
to the rapid growth of the text retrieval industry. Users can now gain more rapid access to a 
wider base of scientific information. Moreover, numerous products (e.g., Fulcrum, Context, 
Limbex, InQuizit, Excaliber, Excite, Systran) and services (e.g., Digital Equipment's Alta Vista, 
Yahoo, Lycos, Dejanews, InfoSeek) are now using natural language processing capabilities to 
help organize information. More advanced products from the U.S. government's Tipster project 
are maturing for "information robot" ("knowbot") applications, such as agent-based information 
gathering, data overload filtering, and extracting key facts from raw text. These new tools 
accelerate work by reducing the volume of information that needs to be evaluated. 
Slow but steady advances in machine translation are already beginning to produce acceptable 
levels of quality for some applications. New applications in handwriting and voice recognition as 
well as voice synthesis promise to bring the world's information resources within reach of many 
who previously had been excluded because of language differences or disability. The 
development of new language-processing capabilities is increasingly important as the historical 
dominance of English in data networks gives way to multilingual communications. 
The ability to perform automated language translation, though still crude, facilitates global 
data and information access by helping users with native languages other than English to 
participate in scientific activities. Although current investment is limited to a small number of 
the languages most widely used for political and economic purposes (e.g., English, French, 
Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, German), advancing techniques in language processing and 
computer power will make extension to new language domains less costly and time consuming. 
Some databases, such as the European Dictionaire Automatique, have been developed explicitly 
to facilitate machine translation and semantic analysis.