Network-enabled communication has revolutionized financial services, retail sales, auctions, and business-to-business transactions. But one of the largest global economy's sectors - healthcare - remains locked in a technological netherworld- part paper, part digital, and almost entirely user- unfriendly. Public officials and healthcare industry executives acknowledge that switching from paper-based to network-enabled digital records would save billions of dollars per year. Google and Microsoft are both fielding pilot programs of new technologies for networked, interoperable electronic health records systems. The new technologies, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, are classified as personal health records (PHRs), which are a subset of industry-recognized electronic health records (EHRs). Eventually, the two technologies will allow patients to synchronize their records between their various healthcare providers, including dynamic uploading of new data that will then be available to any authorized doctor, nurse, or pharmacist, regardless of their institutional affiliation. The approaches are different: Google Health is a front-end application, while HealthVault is a database that users will augment with via third-party applications. However, the goal is the same in both cases: patients will have ultimate control of their medical records.
face of IP-based data networks. Multimedia applications (video streaming, online gaming, and so on), social networks, and file-sharing have steadily increased the number of end users and, subsequently, the bandwidth they require to meet their application demands. Service providers are building IP-based multiservice networks for supporting the residential and corporate markets by using a common infrastructure to carry traffic and creating synergies and cost efficiency in terms of capital and operational expenditures. These markets will demand more from the new services in terms of quality of service, personalization, and accessibility.
Advances in grid computing are stimulating the emergence of novel types of grids, such as accessible, manageable, interactive, and personal grids. More and more researchers are realizing emerging grids' potential to bridge the gap between grid technologies and users. This review of emerging grids sets out to develop a comprehensive classification of both traditional and emerging grid systems, with an aim to motivate further research and to help establish a solid foundation in this rapidly developing field.
A review of Grid Computing For Developers by Vladimir Silva
Middleware services facilitate the development of sensor network applications. In a business context, multiple executing applications can use these services concurrently. In addition, network applications can change during the network's potentially long lifetime. DAVIM, the first step toward a lightweight service platform, enables dynamic management of services and isolation between simultaneously running applications.
A review of Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE by Fabio Luigi Bellifemine, Giovanni Caire, and Dominic Greenwood
The International Summer Schools in Grid Computing (ISSGC) have provided numerous international students with the opportunity to learn grid systems, as detailed in part 2 of this series (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MDSO.2008.20). The International Winter School on Grid Computing 2008 (IWSGC 08) followed the successful summer schools, opening up the ISSGC experience to a wider range of students because of its online format. IWSGC 08 repurposed summer school materials and added resources such as the ICEAGE digital library and summer-school-tested t-Infrastructures such as GILDA (Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities). The winter schools shared the goals of the summer school, which emphasized disseminating grid knowledge.
Both the US and the EU are moving toward biometrically enabled travel documents and new border-control proposals meant to combine greater security and more convenience for legitimate travelers. However, technology and policy differences characterize a bumpy journey.
The wild card that might preclude Microsoft's Eclipse isn't a revolutionary online approach or a blockbuster acquisition. Rather, it might emerge from the global rise of a new category of computer, the ultra-low-cost PC, or ULPC. This category combines attributes of feature-laden personal computers with network-dependent thin clients to deliver either a "best of both worlds" or an acceptable performance compromise, depending on your perspective.
Satellite-based Internet access, the preferred solution for remote locations on the ocean, either offers a low-bandwidth connection or is very expensive to deploy. A backbone structure that provides ocean-wide Internet coverage could provide an alternative to satellite uplinks. With a wide-area network forming a mesh of nodes using floating and moving objects as well as coastal facilities, the network would use next-generation long-range surface radio technology to provide medium- to high-bandwidth Internet access. To achieve high-bandwidth Internet access under these circumstances, the backbone must leverage state-of-the-art sensor network technology, autonomous routing mechanisms, and self-organizing abilities.
In the past year, SaaS has emerged from its pioneering group of start-ups and medium-sized vendors delivering software on demand to be embraced by software giants such as Oracle and SAP. Some veteran technologists and industry analysts also see SaaS as a catalyst for more interactive, iterative software development.
Ubiquitous applications are characterized by variations in their execution context. Their correct operation requires some continual adaptations based on the observation of this context. The design and implementation of these observation policies is thus the cornerstone of any ubiquitous application. COSMOS is a component-based framework for managing context information in ubiquitous context-aware applications. COSMOS decomposes context observation policies into fine-grained units called context nodes, which it implements as software components. These units perform basic context-related operations, such as gathering data from a system or network probe and computing threshold or average values. The framework assembles these units with a set of well-identified architectural design patterns. A mobile computing scenario illustrates the framework's benefits.
Teaching distributed computing requires environments that provide adequate training infrastructure, or t-infrastructure. In practice, t-infrastructure includes the computing equipment, digital communications, software, data, and support staff necessary to teach a course. The International Summer Schools in Grid Computing (ISSGC) series and the first International Winter School on Grid Computing (IWSGC 08) used the Grid INFN Laboratory of Dissemination Activities (GILDA) infrastructure so students could gain hands-on experience with middleware.
Governments and other funding agencies worldwide have recently been investing in the development of research- and production-quality e-infrastructures. To allow for the full development and use of these technologies, the necessary infrastructure must be in place, and researchers of all disciplines--and ultimately all citizens--must acquire the skills required to access the available services. Therefore, it's vital to develop policies to support e-infrastructure education and training. However, distributed computing teaching must address issues beyond the strictly technological. This installment is an introduction to a description of experiences in addressing these issues at national and international levels.
In the aftermath of the global market meltdown and ensuing economic crisis, leading risk-management technologists are saying it's time for the engineering community to reassess the shortcomings of old risk models based on rigid math and physical sciences assumptions. Despite shortcomings, existing technologies might have helped avoid the current market disaster if they'd been more widely used. Whether the failure to use these tools was a legitimate but shortsighted business practice or malfeasance is still an open question, but also now a public one.
While the IEEE Task Group for the 802.11n network standard stalls on ratification, network deployments proceed apace. The State University of New York at Morrisville deployed the world's first all-encompassing 802.11n enterprise network in October 2007. Duke University replaced its two-year-old 802.11g network with an 11n network that has 2,400 access points running campus-wide. The pre-standard deployments work well in university network environments where the security risks are lower than they are in enterprise networks.
Researchers and developers are finding great opportunities in youth-oriented social networking sites, but legal and privacy issues are emerging as the platforms expand.
Grid technologies serving large distributed systems can help address many application areas' computing and storage needs. Consequently, the scientific and large-scale information processing communities are increasingly interested in studying large-scale distributed systems, such as Grid-based ones. Unfortunately, there are relatively few reports on best practices in teaching Grid topics that teachers can follow when they start building a new Grid-related course. Part 1 of this two-part department surveys reported efforts. Most of these efforts concern training activities organized by research teams for Grid user communities, but some discuss semester-long courses for advanced computer science or computer engineering students.
Grid technologies serving large distributed systems can help address many application areas' computing and storage needs. Consequently, the scientific and large-scale information processing communities are increasingly interested in studying large-scale distributed systems, such as Grid-based ones. Unfortunately, there are relatively few reports on best practices in teaching Grid topics that teachers can follow when they start building a new Grid-related course. The second installment of this two-part department presents a case study of the author's experiences in teaching Grid computing to PhD students over the last three years.
Two North American telecommunications regulatory agencies are proactively entering into some gritty details of network management. The results might announce a new era of strengthened regulatory capabilities to enforce net neutrality. The new traffic-management discussion centers on how far Internet service providers (ISPs) can go in limiting customers' bandwidth and how much information they must disclose about how they're doing it. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission found that cable ISP Comcast illegally used deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to throttle application-specific P2P packets. Specifically, Comcast separated BitTorrent P2P packets from the message transport, then used TCP reset packets to make the P2P packets look as though they were coming from other end users' computers.
