transmit to the others as small as possible, otherwise it could take a lot of time to synchronise. Your friends wait for ages. It is an algorithmic problem. Different devices need to understand instantly what the change you made was. “There are many ways to solve that, but one of them is to use some data structure – you hash the data, make signatures of it. A signature is very small, and with the help of smart algorithms, other devices now know what the change was. This is very difficult to achieve,” Skachek says. And they found a smart way to do the synchronisation more reliably.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR THIS FATHER AND HIS DAUGHTER?
Interest from companies
Skachek says that there are many unresolved problems in the field of information theory, which were not solved by the scientific community in the last 70 years, and therefore he expects that some of them will remain unresolved by the year 2050 as well.
How does it all benefit companies and people? Is there an interest among enterprises? Skachek says it is a tricky question, suggesting Estonian companies are usually quite small and mostly app-oriented. Big companies like Amazon and Google are more diversified. To them, even a little step forward in how their technology works results in millions of dollars in profit. “The amount of data there is astonishing. Traffic is huge. Usually, this type of research is interesting to them. These companies are based mostly in the big technological hubs in the USA, Europe and China,” Skachek acknowledges. However, when it comes to security and privacy, it’s not just the big corporations that are interested - the smaller companies may be interested as well. “We don’t necessarily know the needs of smaller startups. They might not be aware of their problems and that we may have potential solutions. Maybe it is time for universities and companies to get to know each-other, because smarter solutions can be of use to any company that deals with data“, says Skachek.
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Father Toomas (30) and daughter Emma (5)
“At the same time, there was a lot of progress in error correction, which led to the development of much faster and more reliable communications systems. For an ordinary observer that progress manifests itself in faster mobile communications (2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G), in faster internet connections via fiber optics, in higher capacity of hard disks and portable memory devices, and in more accessible and efficient cloud storage,” he says to Toomas and Emma. In the last few years, the techniques from the field of errorcorrecting codes have found new applications in distributed systems, in network communications, and in privacy and security. “I predict that in 2050 the error-correcting coding will be employed to a higher degree in decentralised systems, such as cloud storage and cloud computing. There will be more synergy between coding theory and other fields, such as machine learning and privacy and security.”
Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research
