Monday, August 15, 2005

NSF: Information and Intelligent Systems

According to NSF's Program Solicitation, this looks to be an area that my research could fit within:

Collaborative Systems topics include, but are not limited to:
  1. Data, text, speech, and multimedia storage, organization retrieval, and mining. Extraction of structured information from unstructured sources. Information discovery, fusion, summarization, and visualization.
  2. Algorithms for personalizing, organizing, navigating, searching, interpreting, and presenting information of different types, using various modalities.
  3. Designing, managing, and governing information infrastructures.
  4. Knowledge environments for science and engineering.
  5. Physical and cognitive interaction between a person and a robotics system and robots to project and extend human capabilities into unknown and hazardous environments.
  6. Policy and technical issues, including security and privacy issues, that relate to sharing information across boundaries.l Innovation and learning in distributed systems.
  7. Multimedia and multi-modal interfaces in which combinations of speech, text, graphics, gesture, movement, touch, sound, etc. are used by people and machines to communicate with one another.
  8. Intelligent interfaces and user modeling. Information visualization. Adaptation of content to accommodate different display capabilities, modalities, bandwidth and latency.
  9. Information privacy research that explores policies and technologies that permit collaboration across organization boundaries, and the ability to draw conclusions from data while still maintaining the privacy of individuals, including definitions of privacy other than confidentiality-security, for example conceiving of privacy as the reciprocal of intimacy in online contexts.
  10. Problem solving in distributed environments, ranging across Internet-based information systems, grids, sensor-based information networks, and mobile and wearable information appliances.
  11. Models for effective mediated human-human interactions under a variety of constraints, (e.g., video conferences, collaboration across high and low bandwidth networks, etc.).

Especially3, 5, 9 and 10.

SensorNet

SensorNet may be the answer i've been looking for. I haven't done more than a glance at it, but it has all of the right words. I will dig in and post additional information.


Georgia Tech

I'll be taking my cyberinfostructure efforts to Georgia Tech this fall as I enter the PhD program within the College of Computing.

Other programs that were in the running included the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Maryland at College Park. Both schools were impressive and I'm hoping to be able to collaborate with professors in the future.

As part of my warm up for the program, I'll begin creating a valid reading list and start focusing my reseaerch on a couple of areas.

The key components of the research will include:
  • information security, privacy and policy
  • information access/retriveal
  • wireless/rfid/sensor networks
  • ubiquitous computing
  • human access and visualization
One possible area of focus is the idea of "Supply Chain Visualization" -- using wireless sesors, location aware computing, information security, privacy and access, and providing the visualization capability to the massive amounts of moving/distributed data.

I call this the "Where's my stuff" problem...

Disappearing computer

Beyond the ubiquitous computing scene in the UK and the various projects/labs in the US, there appears to be a large effort afoot in the EU around what they are calling the Disappearing Computer with project such as Ambient Agoras.

Still trying to find out if there is some national US initiative that could/should be acting as the umberella for the various efforts around the states.

Grand Challenges

Inspired by the Grand Challenges that various organizations have issued, I've been taking a look at how 'Ubiquitous Computing' fits into the idea of the Cyberinfostructure.

In particular, the Grand Challenges identified by The British Computer Society struck a chord with me. They combined two of their original GCs (2 & 4) into a single challenge on ubiquitous computing agenda.

Professor Morris Slomon chairs this particular challenge. He has pointed me at a couple of things, including the latest on "Global Ubiquitous Computing: Design and Science" which can be found at UbiNet.

Also, the Computing Research Association issued a report on the "Grand Research Challenges in Information Systems" which has a bit different take than the UK report. Elements of the Ubiquitous Systems can be seen in several of the CRA grand challenges
  • Create a Ubiquitous Safety.Net
  • Build Systems You Can Count On
  • Conquer System Complexity

While most of the push for Cyberinfrastructure is around 'bigger is better' the push for ubiquitous computing is in the opposite direction. Smaller and more is the mantra for this, and it means a lot of different problems have to be solved.

I'm especially interested in the implications regarding the data/information, in particular:
  • security
  • privacy
  • provenance
  • filtering/overload
  • context
  • relevance
  • storage and archival


Kipp

Consolidation

I'ts been awhile, I've taken the summer off from writing in my blog, bad Kipp!

As part of getting back into shape (writing shape that is), I'm consolidating my blogs and eliminating my cyberinfostructure blog. The next few posts will be regurgitated from that blog so I have a full listing in one site.

I'm so much looking forward to going back to school! More to come shortly on this topic.

Kipp