Books of 2024: Final Part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of 2024. In the final part, Professor Polina Bayvel, Hojjat Salemi, Professor Laura Lechuga, and the editor of Gazettabyte share their selections.

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Professor Polina Bayvel, Royal Society Research Professor & Head of the Optical Networks Group, Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, UCL

I recently attended a Royal Society Discussion Meeting where Leslie Valiant gave a brilliant talk on educability as a better definition than intelligence. A Harvard professor, he has developed many algorithms that underpin today's networks, including Valiant's load balancing. He is a profound thinker, and I wanted immediately to read his book, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness.'

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Books of 2024: Part 3

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the penultimate entry, Prof. Yosef Ben Ezra, Dave Welch, William Webb, and Abdul Rahim share their favourite reads.

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Professor Yosef Ben Ezra, PhD, CTO, NewPhotonics

My reading in 2024 continued to augment my technical knowledge with insights on how to bring innovation to the market.

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AI’s next wave

The spectacular rise in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) is directly attributable to the scaling of the computing hardware used to train AI models.

Nigel Toon

“People discovered early on that if you increase the size of those models and the amount of data to train those models, you get a big step-up in accuracy and performance,” says Nigel Toon, CEO and chairman of AI processor firm Graphcore. “The results have been stunning.”

Toon cites research that shows that for large language models the size of the model and the data must be scaled equally.

However, AI developers have started to see a slowdown in the gains achieved solely by such scaling. This is leading to new thinking in how engineers build an AI model and how it generates its output when prompted. The result is a new wave of AI, says Toon.

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Books of 2024: Part 2

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 2, Scott Wilkinson, Nigel Toon and Kailem Anderson select their best reads.

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Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst, Networking Components, Cignal AI

I spent the year enjoying a poem a day from Brian Bilston’s Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems.

You may have seen his poems on social media, as he’s sometimes called The Poet Laureate of Twitter. It’s been a joy to end the day with one of his hilarious, occasionally poignant, and always topical poems.

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Books of 2024: Part 1

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their notable reads during the year. Harald Bock, Jonathan Homa, and Maxim Kuschenrov kick off with their chosen books.

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Harald Bock, Vice President Network Architecture, Infinera

I love reading but have not read as many books as I would have liked in recent years. I decided to change that in 2024.

My pick of fictional books this year was mainly classic science fiction after seeing the movie Dune Part 2 with my family. I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert, published in 1965, a while ago, and I wasn't sure that the movies did the book justice.

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Is 6G’s fate to repeat the failings of 5G wireless?

Will the telecom industry embark on another costly wireless upgrade? Telecom consultant and author William Webb thinks so and warns that it risks repeating what happened with 5G. 

William Webb

William Webb published the book The 5G Myth in 2016. In it, he warned that the then-emerging 5G standard would prove costly and fail to deliver on the bold promises made for the emerging wireless technology.

Webb sees history repeating itself with 6G, the next wireless standard generation. In his latest book, The 6G Manifesto, he reflects on the emerging standard and outlines what the industry and its most significant stakeholder - the telecom operators - could do instead.

Developing a new generation wireless standard every decade has proved beneficial, says Webb. However, the underlying benefits with each generation has diminished to the degree that, with 5G, it is questionable whether the latest generation was needed.

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Books of 2023 - Final part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the final part, contributions are from Larry Dennison, Tim Doiron, Catherine White and Neil McRae.

Larry Dennison, Network Research Group, Nvidia

At this point in my life, book reading is to unwind and is mostly fiction. I get nearly everything else from reading selected technical papers, the daily news and Real Clear Politics. There is just so much cognitive dissonance in the news and editorials that I retreat into fantasy for some down-time.

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