VOA常速英语:“技能互联网”能否成为下一个技术飞跃？

What happens when music is combined with technology?

“Kids or anybody could learn how to play the piano really properly from the best musicians in the world.”Wireless Communications’ professor Mischa Dohler’s aim is to build a database that records the movements of the piano player’s hand with the help of the special sensing glove.That data can then be used to help a student wearing another glove.

“You could imagine this so-called exoskeleton which you put on your hand.It will pressurize the hands and the joints, and will move it gently at the beginning,and nudge essentially the body into the right shape and in the right way of moving your hand.”

This is Dohler’s vision of what he calls the “Internet of Skills” can do.“We use digital today to negotiate for jobs, right?So we use LinkedIn, emails, etc., but then to execute the work, we still need to drive, we need to fly, we need to walk.So I was thinking, ‘Could we virtualize it? Could we digitize skills?’”

Another application for the “Internet of Skills” is health care.

Motivated by the Ebola crisis in Africa, Dohler is trying to develop a way for doctors to treat a patient thousands of miles away,especially in remote areas where medical skill is lacking.He says virtual reality and low-cost technology can link the doctor and patient.

“What I’m trying to do is first of all give all the surgeons back the feeling of touch, so he feels what he does inside the body;and the second thing is, I want him to be able to have this console somewhere in another hospital.So the only thing we’re doing is the cable between the console and the patient and make it longer and make it an Internet.”

But it’s only possible if large amounts of data can travel very quickly.Companies are already developing hardware to move information faster.

“It all came about with video.The way we view content today is very different from the way we viewed it before, and getting the content to everybody,whether it’s on their iPhones or their android devices or on their PCs everywhere takes the underlying network.”

More new networks these days that transport and transmit growing amounts of data are being built by private networks.

Cisco’s Eve Griliches (says), “Everybody has a stake in the game now.The other step, is as we’re opening up the networks and creating the sort of open source society in the networking area,it allows people to build on it.”

As technology continues to catch up with what the brain can imagine,Dohler envisions the “Internet of Skills” democratizing labor in about ten years, just as the Internet has already made knowledge available to all.

Elizabeth Lee, VOA News, Los Angeles.