Top trends in Computer Society
As a technology professional,
keeping on top of trends is crucial. Below is a list of technology topics that
Computer Society magazines, journals, and conferences will be focusing on next
year:
1) Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is more
than just the newest buzzword. The IoT promises to be the most disruptive
technological revolution since the advent of the World Wide Web. Projections
indicate that up to 100 billion uniquely identifiable objects will be connected
to the Internet by 2020, but human understanding of the underlying technologies
has not kept pace. This creates a fundamental challenge to researchers, with
enormous technical, socioeconomic, political, and even spiritual consequences.
In recognition of the importance
of IoT, Computer, the IEEE Computer Society's flagship magazine, is planning a
special issue in February 2013. "The Internet of Things: The Next
Technological Revolution" will offer a forum for highlighting what the IoT
could bring to the end user. Recommended topics for this special issue include
design and development methodology for a user-centered IoT; the dynamics of
social media and connected objects; community programming for the IoT,
including citizen science, citizen journalism, and social activism;
opportunistic sensing, big data, and the IoT; and the impact of the IoT on the
future networked society.
2) Cyber security
Recent technological advances in
computing, communications, software, and hardware have enabled the significant
growth of cyberspace, an important aspect of modern life that continues to
transform the way citizens, business, and governments interact, collaborate,
and conduct business. Our heavy dependence on various digital infrastructures
has made them strategic national assets that must be protected to ensure
economic growth, prosperity, and safety in the future.
Cyber security is an emerging
area of intense activity that endeavors to provide innovative solutions to
ensure uninterrupted communications and service availability. The latest
advances in cyber security that is critical in thwarting future threats,
attacks, fraud, and damage. It focuses on effective techniques and approaches
that have the potential to ensure a safe, trustworthy, secure, and resilient
cyberspace.
3) Big Data Visualization
We've entered a data-driven era,
in which data are continuously acquired for a variety of purposes. The ability
to make timely decisions based on available data is crucial to business
success, clinical treatments, cyber and national security, and disaster
management. Additionally, the data generated from large-scale simulations,
astronomical observatories, high-throughput experiments, or high-resolution
sensors will help lead to new discoveries if scientists have adequate tools to
extract knowledge from them.
However, most data have become
simply too large and often have too short a lifespan. Almost all fields of
study and practice sooner or later will confront this big data problem.
Government agencies and large corporations are launching research programs to
address the challenges presented by big data. Visualization has been shown to
be an effective tool not only for presenting essential information in vast
amounts of data but also for driving complex analyses. Big data analytics and
discovery present new research opportunities to the computer graphics and
visualization community. It aims to highlight the latest advancements in
solving the big data problems via visual means.
4) Cloud Computing in
Science and Engineering
Cloud computing has emerged as a
dominant paradigm, widely adopted by enterprises. Clouds provide on-demand
access to computing utilities, an abstraction of unlimited computing resources,
and support for on-demand scale-up, scale-down, and scale-out. Cloud platforms
are also rapidly becoming viable for scientific exploration and discovery, as
well as education. As a result, it is critical to understand application
formulations and usage modes that are meaningful in such a hybrid
infrastructure, the fundamental conceptual and technological challenges, and
ways that applications can effectively utilize clouds.
The goal is to explore how cloud
platforms and abstractions, either by themselves or in combination with other
platforms, can be effectively used to support real-world science and
engineering applications. Topics of interest include algorithmic and
application formulations, programming models and systems, runtime systems and
middleware, end-to-end application workflows, and experiences with real
applications.
5) Mobile Computing Meets
the Cloud
It could be argued that two of
the most important technological developments of the last few years are the
emergence of mobile and cloud computing. By shifting the hardware and staffing
costs of managing computational infrastructure to third parties such as Google,
Microsoft, or Amazon, cloud computing has made it possible for small
organizations and individuals to deploy world-scale services; all they need to
pay is the marginal cost of actual resource usage. At the same time, the deployment
of 3G and 4G networks, the rapid adoption of feature-rich smartphones, and the
growing integration of computation into consumer products such as cars and home
appliances, have brought mobile and pervasive computing into the mainstream.
The aim is to explore the
intersections of these two trends. Mobile and embedded devices make it possible
for users to access cloud-based services and data anywhere and anytime,
extending their reach into everyday life. Simultaneously, cloud computing
platforms are a natural fit to remedy the lack of local resources in mobile and
pervasive devices, while enabling resource-intensive next generation
applications. We invite original and high-quality submissions addressing all
aspects of this field, as long as the connection to the focus topic is clear
and emphasized.
6) Internet Censorship and
Control
The Internet is a battleground
where fights for technical, social, and political control are waged, including
between governments and their citizens, separate governments, and competing
commercial interests. These fights take many forms, including Internet
filtering versus circumvention, surveillance versus anonymization, denial of
service attacks and intrusion attempts versus protection mechanisms, and on-
and offline persecution and defense of online activists. These battles impact
and are impacted by the Internet's technical structure. As the Internet
continues to embed itself into our world, its structural changes will have an
increasing effect on our social and political structures, and our social and
political structures will have increasing impact on the Internet's technical
structure. It explores the technical, social, and political mechanisms and
impacts of Internet censorship and control.
7) Interactive Public
Displays
Recent trends show an increasing
prevalence of interactive displays of varying sizes in public and urban life.
With their prominent visibility and the integration of diverse methods for
interaction, they can offer new opportunities to enrich user experiences beyond
the personal sphere, for instance in public knowledge institutions such as
museums and libraries, or integrated within public plazas or architectural
facades. The public context with its social and cultural particularities and
constraints provides a large variety of intriguing but challenging settings and
use-case scenarios for interactive displays of varying sizes. It focuses on
research that addresses the opportunities and challenges around public indoor
and outdoor urban display installations.
8) Next-Generation Mobile
Computing
Ubiquitous, pervasive mobile
computing is all around us. We use mobile computing not only when we interact
with our smartphones to connect with friends and family across states and
countries, but also when we use ticketing systems on a bus or train to work or
home, purchase food from a mobile vendor at a park, watch videos and listen to
music on our phones and portable music playing devices. In other words, mobile
computing is not only the interaction of smart phones with each other. Any
computation system that is expected to move and interact with end users or other
computational systems despite potential changes in network
connectivity—including loss of connectivity or changes in type of connectivity
or access point—participates in mobile computing infrastructure, and the number
of such systems is expected to grow significantly each year over the coming
decades.
Many of these systems in urban
areas take advantage of robust networking infrastructure, gigabit bandwidth
backbones, high-speed relays, and unlimited power and recharging capabilities.
However, many of these systems operate within degraded network, power, or
computing environments, such as for first-responders in a catastrophe, mobile
phone users in remote regions or in countries where communication
infrastructure is degraded or even millions of people watching fireworks along
a river and overwhelming the local networking infrastructure in a major
metropolitan area. IEEE Software seeks submission of articles that explore the
next generation of mobile computing within the contexts of mission-critical
scenarios, quality-of-service differentiation, and resource constraints.
9) 3D Imaging Techniques and
Multimedia Applications
With the advances in sensing,
transmission, and visualization technology, 3D information has become
increasingly incorporated into real-world applications—from architecture to
entertainment, manufacturing, and security. Integrating depth perception into
such application can help present an even richer media interface. For example,
in immersive telecommunication, spatialized audio and 3D parallax increases the
effectiveness of communication; in medicine, 3D instrument tracking enables
more precise and safer operations; and new low-cost 3D cameras are starting a
new chapter in interactive gaming and human-computer interaction.
One of the fundamental
requirements of these applications is the estimation of scene depth
information. The extraction of 3D information has been studied in the field of
computer vision for more than three decades, but it remains a challenging
problem, in particular under unconstrained environments that can include
variable lighting, specular and deforming scene surfaces, and occluded objects,
among other things. Multimedia researchers must account for imperfect depth
information when designing their systems, making this a unique research
opportunity. Overview of recent rapid advances in 3D acquisition systems
and the many multimedia applications that can benefit from 3D integration and
understanding.
10) Safety-Critical Systems:
The Next Generation
Safety-critical computer-based
systems are woven into the fabric of our lives. These days, they can't be safe
without being secure—yet security is just one of many challenges. These systems
must be trusted to work adequately given user behavior, system interactions,
changing environment and expectations, organizational turbulence, regulatory
caution, routine component and operator failure, the complexity of
international projects, and adaptation and refurbishment. In addition, there
are the security-related issues such as intentional, malicious attacks and
supply-chain risks.
11) Reliability
Over the past decade, designers
have sought after efficient design points with respect to power, performance
and cost. Of these, power has undoubtedly emerged as a first-order design
challenge. In the coming era, this challenge may be subsumed by the challenge
of building robust and reliable systems. As technology advances, susceptibility
of systems to transient errors, such as timing violations, parameter
variations, aging and infant mortality, is steadily increasing. Without
innovations in the areas of microprocessor and software reliability, future
systems may face continuous failure. Thus, new computing paradigms are required
that incorporate adaptive techniques at both the hardware and software layers
to ensure robust and resilient execution. The system, as a whole, must
dynamically detect and recover from errors to meet historically established
high reliability standards without exceeding power budgets and cost
constraints, and violating performance targets. Topics related to reliability
that span the spectrum of layers in the system stack, from device, circuit and
architecture design to the role of software in enabling robust and reliable
computing.
12) Haptics in
Rehabilitation
Robotic devices have been shown
to be effective at delivering the intensive and repetitive therapy that is
known to induce brain plasticity and foster restoration of motor coordination
after stroke, spinal cord injury, and other neural impairments. Engagement of
the sensorimotor system, including haptic feedback to the participant during
rehabilitation, is an important factor in regaining motor control. Further,
haptic feedback can enhance the natural control, utility, and efficacy of
advancement of prosthetic and orthotic devices that restore mobility and
manipulability to lower- and upper-extremity amputees. However, advanced
prosthetic devices, for example, have decoupled the normal afferent-efferent
loop and rely heavily on visual feedback to the amputee for control in the
absence of haptics. The science and technology of haptics thus has great
potential to affect the outcomes of rehabilitation and adoption of advanced
prosthetic and orthotic devices. About understanding the role of touch in
sensorimotor coordination, including rehabilitation of motor deficits and use
of advanced prostheses and orthoses.
13) Multicore Memory
Coherence
As we enter an era of large
multicores, the question of efficiently supporting a shared memory model has
become of paramount importance. Massively parallel architectures lacking
coherent shared memory have enjoyed great success in niche applications such as
3D rendering, but general programming developers still demand the convenience
of a shared memory abstraction.
Efficiently using a message
passing interface requires that the individual computation tasks must be
relatively large to overcome the communication latencies, and it becomes
difficult to use MPI at the fine-grained level when fast on-chip communication
is available. Higher-level mechanisms like MapReduce or shard-based databases
are popular in particular application domains but researchers have not yet
efficiently applied them at the chip/node level.
