Digital savant

Kees Immink, pioneering visionary in digital consumer electronics, discusses the prospects of tapping life's information storage system - DNA - to tackle the looming data storage crisis, and takes a trip through hi-fi history.

Published Fri, Apr 10, 2020 · 09:50 PM

AS we go about creating humongous amounts of digital content, we hardly worry about where we will store the data. Running out of internal storage on our phones? No problem; listen to the folks at Google, Apple and Samsung, store everything online for free and access anytime, anywhere.

The problem, which most people may not even realise, is that while our capacity to create new content is limitless, the "space" to store the content is hardly infinite, even though there have been dramatic improvements in data storage technology. And so experts like Kees Immink worry that the world is going to face an imminent data storage crisis due to a mismatch in demand and supply.

Dr Immink is a legendary visionary in the field of digital consumer electronics. His pioneering coding techniques were key to developing CDs, DVDs, and hard disk and solid-state drives. He's also founder and president of Turing Machines Inc, and a visiting scholar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)'s Advanced Coding and Si…