Keynote Speech at IEEE P2P'13
- Details
- Published on 16 September 2013
- Written by Adrian Moreno
Pedro García-López, from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, presented a keynote speech at IEEE P2P'13!
Abstract: There is an ongoing battle between the forces of centralization and decentralization in several human fields (energy, economics, politics, …). In computing, these tidal waves of hype have periodically raised some boats while sunk some others. In particular, P2P rode the hype wave the past decade but now seems an outdated technology. Cloud Computing and Big Data are the current buzzwords where centralization is again the dominant trend. But unlike other old trendy topics, the P2P community captured the essence of decentralization. And decentralization is here to stay, … and come back.
We are now in a decisive turning point that will definitely influence how we interact with the information in the following years. If the forces of centralization prevail, a few big players will control the market with vertical walled-garden solutions heading towards a Big Brother future. On the contrary, we must push towards decentralization in order to retake the control of our information.
In this talk, I will give an historic perspective of the forces of centralization and decentralization in our computing setting. I will also explain the transition from Personal Computers to Personal Clouds and the inherent risks of centralization. I will describe how P2P and decentralization can contribute to create the next generation of Personal Clouds where users retake control of their information. In this line, as the coordinator of the CloudSpaces project I will describe our main achievements in this topic, and the open challenges that we must face in the next years.
You can find more information about the content of the speech and the conference at http://www.p2p13.org/index.php/program/keynote-speakers
