Aug

31

Interactive Systems Architectures

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Thirty researchers met August 11-13 to discuss the future of interactive systems. This workshop was sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium, ACM/SIGCHI and Canada’s GRAND initiative. The interactive systems architecture is the foundation of what is feasible when people interact with computing technologies. An interactive architecture creates an ecosystem within which diverse user experiences can be developed. UNIX introduced the idea that software modules could be interactively “piped” together. X-Windows laid the foundation of distributed interaction. The Macintosh put graphical interaction in the hands of the masses and the Web distributed interaction around the world.

The researchers gathered at this workshop in Jackson, WY, envision a world where information and interaction readily flows from person to person and device to device with few walls or barriers. The interaction of the future must be highly adapted to the diverse needs and desires of individuals ranging from science and technology experts to the most marginalized members of society. In a world of multi-terabyte smart phones, interaction can adapt to the physical world in which we live. Such personal computing can simultaneously explore thousands of possibilities while searching for the solution that is best for each individual. Interactive systems can exploit extended histories of personal interactions to identify the right solution for each person. In this world groups of collaborators form and dissolve in unstructured ways that reflect social and physical situations rather than being siloed from each other based on server architectures.

With great computational leverage comes the power to do the wrong thing with huge consequences. With freely flowing information come potential losses of security and privacy. Powerful yet safe forms of interaction is less a mathematical problem than a social, human and interactive one. Designing powerful and effective yet safe interactive ecosystems is fundamental to the future of computing.

The Interactive Technologies Workshops continue September 23-25 in Burbank, CA (Persuasive Experiences), and October 25-27 in Chicago (Ultra-large-scale Interaction).

(Contributed by Dan Olsen, Jr., Brigham Young University)

Jul

21

DARPA a year later

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Dr. Ken Gabriel, the deputy director of DARPA, delivered a plenary address at CRA’s biannual Snowbird Conference on Monday morning — one day short of the one-year anniversary of the arrival of DARPA’s new leadership, including new DARPA director Dr. Regina Dugan. Gabriel spoke about DARPA’s incredible transformation over the past 12 months, including its renewed commitment to academic research.

Specifically, Gabriel started by highlighting five key changes that have occurred at DARPA in the past year:

- “Go/no-go” is gone.

- Contracting has been simplified. The process is as clear, simple, and fast as the law allows.

- More realistic conflict of interest rules have been applied to people coming to work at DARPA.

- Program managers are once again managing programs.

- Program managers have been reeducated about the need to consider basic research as a critical element of their programs.

He further reeled off three directions moving forward:

- Manufacturing. “One of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is a decline in our ability to make things,” he said. “Americans consume more goods today than ever before – and yet we are less likely to be employed in manufacturing than we have been at any time in the past 100 years. [But] to innovate, we must make. It’s hard to build and field systems needed to protect the nation with a service economy.” Gabriel stated that DARPA is identifying and building on the fundamental challenges in making things.

- Edge-finding. “We often talk of globalization as boundless,” he said. “But sociologists will tell you that as long as there are humans involved there are boundaries. In the cyberworld, our inability to define the edges is a world of peril. This is one of the most technically challenging tasks of our time.” Gabriel challenged us to understand the following: What are the edges of truth in this environment? How do we assess them? How are they relevant?

- Cyber. “In 2010 and 2011, DARPA will invest over $300M in cyber-enabled initiatives,” Gabriel advised. “DARPA-developed technologies are already prevalent in both government and commercial venues. For example, DARPA technology protects DARPA servers again denial-of-service attacks.” DARPA is pursuing several new initiatives, including clean-slate technology on adaptive posts for resilience; safer computing that seeks to create assured confrontations on un-trusted hardware without the traditional performance sacrifices; etc.

Finally, Gabriel called on the computing research community to help by getting to work:

So today, I’d like to call you to action. [It’s] a call to return to the core values of the agency. A call to service. And a call to collectively reach for something bigger – more expansive – and more enduring. This is the time to dig deep and go to the edge – to find the nerve together.

At DARPA, we say you can’t lose your nerve.

The deputy director’s talk underscores the dramatic evolution of DARPA that we have witnessed in just the past year.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

Jun

14

Taking on Healthcare: The Time is Now

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The Computing Community Consortium recently prepared a white paper titled, “Information Technology Research Challenges for Healthcare: From Discovery to Delivery,” as a follow-on to the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop that the CCC co-sponsored with various Federal agencies in October 2009. The paper describes basic research opportunities that can catalyze transformations in healthcare — an enterprise that costs U.S. taxpayers $2.3 trillion (yes, that’s trillion!) each year but, by all accounts, is poorly equipped to handle the evolving needs of patients and providers.

A multitude of factors — poor diet habits, stressful lifestyles, aging populations, etc. — is causing chronic diseases like cancer and arthritis to soar, and our twentieth century healthcare delivery infrastructure is simply not designed to handle the surge in these types of ailments. We need far better ways to mine huge volumes of patient data from multiple sources, and to effectively present the critical pieces of information to the right person at the right time to help yield the right decision, all the while ensuring privacy and security. We need ways to improve process flows, to create feedback loops, to establish care “control rooms,” etc. We need ways to monitor (sense) and assist patients’ health, activities, and behaviors in their homes, offices, and churches. We need an entirely new social infrastructure, one that builds off of today’s “connected” world and incentivizes integration and adoption of new technologies, a belief in wellness management (“prevention is better than a cure”), and the role and persuasive effects of one’s social network. And we need to do all of this work in the context of the incredibly complex organizational structures, payment plans, policies, and regulations underlying the healthcare enterprise. Health information technology is not just about electronic medical records (EMRs), in which the Federal government has invested significant resources over the past year (see ongoing programs); it’s also about robotic surgery, telemedicine, home monitoring, Health 2.0, and much more.

But we can’t revolutionize care delivery overnight. To achieve a safe, effective, reliable, and far less expensive system five, 10, or 15 years into the future, we need groundbreaking research now in areas like data management, data mining/machine learning, human-computer interaction, modeling and simulation, software engineering, reliability engineering, process engineering, sociotechnical systems, etc. Yet, to date, Federal investment in health IT research has largely been fragmented.

As we’ve articulated in the white paper, the recent passage of healthcare legislation makes a broad research initiative in this space incredibly timely. There is no better time like the present — and, frankly, with chronic disease on the rise, doctors and hospitals increasingly overburdened, and friends and families lost in an abyss of uncertainty about their loved ones’ conditions and care options, we can’t afford to delay any longer.

As a community, we are calling for a large-scale, comprehensive, coordinated, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary basic research investment by the Federal government. We believe this investment must involve computer scientists, but it should also include allied areas of systems engineering and the social sciences. As these areas are core constituencies of the National Science Foundation, the agency must be heavily involved. (Indeed, NSF’s CISE Directorate just announced a Smart Health and Wellbeing Program for FY 11, which “aims to facilitate large-scale discoveries that yield long-term, transformative impact in how we treat illness and maintain our health”: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10575/nsf10575.htm.)

The work can’t proceed without medical practitioners either, as they need to inform the technologies as they are being developed — and consequently the National Institutes of Health, the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research, must be at the table as well. And there are a whole host of other Federal agencies that should be consulted: the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), which have invested billions in developing and deploying EMRs around the country; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the nation’s public health agency; and the Food and Drug Administration, which must regulate technologies emerging from our nation’s research labs and arriving in hospitals and clinics.

Let’s do something big in health IT today — so that we can enhance the quality and length of life tomorrow. It’s critical for our society, for our economy, and for our success and prosperity as a nation. For more, I encourage you to review the CCC-led white paper.

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