To her, back in the ageing USSR, information technologies were widely used for the ends of state security: "This was not publicly known and is not publicly known today - it is not the job of scientists or developers".
But there is open information which, Uskova said, should be accessible to a civil society: "For instance, it is the concept of technological antiterrosism".
Towards this end, the Information Technologies Ministry has come up with an initiative. It will develop general-purpose technologies, such as speech recognition. "Picture a crowd. An evil-doer in it is issuing orders. Try in the flow of words to recognize and single out key words indicative of a potential threat. The technology is complicated indeed. Different countries have been working it out for 30 years".
Another example is nanometry. A fly-sized nanorobot can transmit information from a room in which hostages are kept. Or visual observation systems identifying an unusual situation inside the waiting room of an airport. "It is not secret services that are working on this technology", Uskova says. "It is the job of the industry".
They are complex technologies and investments are risky: "The failure of one or several companies hits all and the investment activity subsides".
But this is not the reason for abandoning development, Uskova thinks. "More so that our specialists are among the best in the world. Say, we have sold Matsushita Electric our speech-recognition technologies and now the Japanese use them in their 'digital homes' for control of house appliances. We have also been long engaged in nanotechnologiesmostly for medicine".
For sectoral stability "follow-up monitoring of each project" is required. "I mean technological monitoring", she explains. In state-funded IT projects, planned-work failure sometimes reaches 90 percent. "This is why nobody must be held responsible, for instance in selecting the contractor. There must be a body to control work from the engineering point of view", Olga Uskova believes.
