Ian Foster

Cool Second Life Hack ...

Matt Biddulph writes about connecting a physical sensor to an object in Second Life (there's a neat movie). The connection is one-way (from sensor to SL object), although presumably it could work the other way too (SL object to sensor).

I'm interested in exploring the use of Second Life to mirror the real world (David Gelertner wrote about that). It seems it's easy to do. Not clear what data rates SL can sustain, though.

Digital Humanities

I'm back from a pleasant week's vacation in Vancouver, including two day's skiing at Whistler. One more year and I think my 9-year old son (and my now-8-year old daughter) will be faster than me ...

As a start to the new year, here is an interesting perspective on digital humanities (and what sounds like a fun course) from Michael Shanks, an archaeologist at Stanford:

Are information technology and digital media fundamentally changing the Humanities? I argue that the changes we are seeing in Humanities disciplines are not about new technologies, as conventionally understood. The quantitative expansion of information technology in contemporary society is precipitating reflection upon some age old questions in the humanities - the distinctiveness of the human, the role of science and technology in cultural production, authorship and creativity, the sharing of knowledge, the conservation of cultural resources for the future, the character of a community's public sphere, the propagation of a community's memory. Digital and analog media both prompt such questions. The questions sometimes historically become more urgent, but this is not because of technology.

Say "no" to technological determinism!

GapMinder: Myths about the developing world

From Dan Atkins, a pointer to a wonderful source of animated information on world development trends. "Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics." You can also see Hans Rosling's talk on this work at TED. I'm not sure which is more amazing: the ways in which modern visualization techniques can be used to bring dry economic data to life, or the misconceptions that many of us (well, myself, certainly) have about the state of our highly dynamic world.

A Wish for GENI

Charlie Catlett wrote recently about the GENI program. A quiz: is this ambitious proposal from the networking research community intended to (a) redesign the Internet, (b) get a lot of new money for computer science research, or (c) build testbeds to support innovative networking research?

The answer is "all of the above." Thus, I find GENI interesting for several reasons. First, there's the research agenda, which is to redesign the core Internet protocols to incorporate security, quality of service, and other good things left out by the original designers.

Irving, Lick, and Man-Computer Symbiosis

I have written about the (utopian or distopian?) belief that the inevitable march of Moore's Law will result in computers overtaking us stick-in-the-mud humans in intelligence within a decade or two.

I'm a skeptic, not because I don't think computers are going to get faster and more capable, but because I think human intelligence has a fair bit more evolution to do itself. Human "intelligence" has long been more than simple biology: biology, culture, and technology have been co-evolving for a very long time, and there's no reason to think that culture and technology, at least, won't continue. (Perhaps biology, too, but that's another story.)

In this regard, I find a recent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger refreshing. He writes about (among other things) how the goal of technology should not just be to automate the easy but also to assist people in doing the hard. To that end, we should be working not to remove people from the picture, but working to "integrate people into all aspects of our systems designs."

These sentiments remind me of J.C.R Licklider's wonderful 1960 paper, "Man Computer Symbiosis," in which he proposed "to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs." (Of course, Doug Engelbart is always worth reading on these topics too.)

Some 50 years ago, Licklider studied his work habits, and noted that "my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability." I suspect that this observation is still far more true than we would like to believe.

But while the problems and ideas may not be entirely new, we are in a far better position to pursue them, given quasi-ubiquitous personal computers, Internet, and innovative new technologies that build on those platforms. As Irving says, "By integrating people into our system designs, we can leverage these community-based, people-oriented technologies [like advanced collaboration environments] into our complex engineering systems ..." The consequences for the many complex activities that occupy our time nowadays could be very significant.

What do Cars and Software Have in Common?

An article by Damian Smith has some interesting things to say about service oriented architecture (SOA). He first compares the software industry today with the automobile industry in the 1980s: a few major players, all massively vertically integrated, little customer choice.

Then he notes that in the automobile industry, competitive pressures led to the definition of common platforms, disaggregation, offshoring, etc.--basically a move to a horizontally stratified market, in which (counterintuitively?) vendors differentiate by how they put together standard pieces:

Although components continue to be manufactured offshore by a wide range of component suppliers, the cars themselves are assembled onshore, close to the consumer, where they can be customized to their desires and needs.

He then argues that:

Over the next five to 10 years, SOA will facilitate developments in the software industry similar to those that have taken place in the auto industry.

Although services will predominantly be developed offshore, applications will be assembled onshore where they can be customized to client needs. Services will come from a variety of sources, including major software vendors, open source developers, and offshore niche vendors. If a suitable existing service is not available, new services will be home grown using custom development (SODA) technologies, Business Process Management (BPM) and/or Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) tools.

Applications and services will be deployed on both public and private open platforms. Organizations will provide private service platforms within their firewalls, probably using network devices, and will deploy services and assemble applications via those platforms. Public service platforms will be provided over the Internet and applications will be assembled and deployed using open source, home grown, and micro-charged Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

As integration will no longer be a barrier, assembled applications will be very specific to organizations’ needs and desires. In effect, we will be back to best-of-breed, but at the service level rather than the application level. As a result, all applications will be ‘custom’ to some degree and services will be added, removed, and replaced as business needs change—think plug and play concepts applied to applications.

He also has some interesting things to say about how this transformation is going to be achieved:

A cultural change to create and use reusable services will have to be facilitated. More formal methodology and tighter management and governance will have to be adopted. Carrots and sticks will need to be created to encourage and enforce reuse, and rules and guidelines regarding service ownership, sharing, and accountability will need to be developed.

We've been working for several years with Web Services in the Globus team, and overall this has been a positive experience. We're now starting to gain experience with service outsourcing and composition (e.g., with BPEL in caBIG).