Photos: Advancing machine intelligence

Jan Rabaey, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, describes his vision for the future of radio communications.

Rabaey said he believes each person will have about 1,000 radios soon, most of them vanishingly small. Radio devices, he said, will become "cognitive," so they can automatically sense where there's uncluttered radio spectrum available and which communication protocols should be used at a given moment.

He also believes they'll become more collaborative--able to link together in a mesh network that collectively can transmit data faster, in greater quantity, more efficiently, and more reliably.