Computing and Communications in the Extreme Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs
Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs
Pages 55-98
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From page 55... ...
This chapter surveys the range of research directions motivated by opportunities for more effective use of technology in crisis management and other domains, following the same framework of technology areas networking, computation, information management, and user-centered systems developed in Chapter 1. Some of the directions address relatively targeted approaches toward making immediate progress in overcoming barriers to effective use of computing and communications, such as technologies to display information more naturally to people or to translate information more easily from one format to another.
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From page 56... ...
Speed and bandwidth are not the only performance challenges related to scale; national-scale applications must also scale in size. The number of information sources involved in applications may meet or even far exceed the size of the
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From page 57... ...
Sensors are a potential source of even faster growth in the number of end points; as crisis management applications illustrate, networks may have to route bits to and from environmental sensors, seismometers, structural sensors on buildings and bridges, security cameras in stores and automated teller machines, and perhaps relief workers wearing cameras and other sensors on their clothes, rendering them what Vinton Cerf, of MCI Telecommunications Corporation, called "mobile multimodal sensor nets." Medical sensors distributed at people's homes, doctor's offices, crisis aid stations, and other locations may enable health care delivery in a new, more physically distributed fashion, but only if networks can manage the increased number of end points.
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From page 58... ...
What is needed are ways for people to use technology more effectively to communicate, not only with computers and other information sources and tools, but also with other people. Collaboration between people includes many modes of telecommunication: speech, video, passing data files to one another, sharing a consensus view of a document or a map.
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From page 59... ...
. Research issues in network adaptivity fall into a number of categories, discussed in this section: self-organizing networks, network management, security, resource discovery, and virtual subnetworks.
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From page 60... ...
Some notion of priority is typically a prerequisite for load shedding." Networks can be adaptive not only to sharp discontinuities such as crises, but also to rapid, continuous evolution over a longer time scale, one appropriate to the pattern of growth of new services and industries in electronic commerce or digital libraries. The Internet' s ability to adapt to and integrate new technologies, such as frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)
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From page 61... ...
wireless communications systems still often rely on a wireline backbone for networking.2 These factors imply that portable computers cannot currently be used to set up a peer-to-peer network if the backbone fails; radio modem technology has not yet advanced to a point where it can provide an alternative.3 In mobile situations, people using portable computers need access to a wireline infrastructure to set up data links with another computer even if they are in close proximity. In addition, portable cellular phones cannot communicate with each other if the infrastructure breaks down.
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From page 62... ...
Network Management Network management helps deliver communications capacity to whoever may need it when it is needed. This may range from more effective sharing of network resources to priority overrides (blocking all other users)
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From page 63... ...
Advances in lightweight, long-lived battery technology and hardware technologies, such as lowpower circuits, displays, and storage devices, would improve the performance of portable computers in a mobile setting. A possibility that is related directly to network management is the development of schemes that adapt to specific kinds of communications needs and incorporate broadcast and asymmetric communications to reduce the number and length of power-consuming transmissions by portable devices.
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From page 64... ...
The last is a particularly difficult problem for network management. Michael Zyda, of the Naval Postgraduate School, identified predictive modeling of network latency as a difficult research challenge for distributed virtual environments, for which realistic simulation experiences set relatively strict limits on the latency that can be tolerated, implying a need for giving priority to those data streams.
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From page 65... ...
Many traditional ideas of network security must be reconsidered for these applications in light of the greater scale and diversity of the infrastructure and the increased role of nonexperts. To begin with, the nature of security policies may evolve.
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From page 66... ...
It is only through such formal definitions that the composition of such activities can be sufficiently trustable to allow for the provision of a toplevel composite of security policies and mechanisms. A perhaps even more difficult problem is peer-level interaction within a federated model, in which neither domain's security policy takes clear precedence over the other.
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From page 67... ...
As Richard Entlich, of the Institute for Defense Analyses, observed, "Creating a realistic way of providing security at each node involves not only technical issues, but a change in operational procedures and user attitudes." Ideally, technological designs and approaches should reinforce those needed changes on the part of users. Unfortunately, the problems of formulating security policy are even more difficult to address with computational and communications facilities.
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From page 68... ...
In crises, some of the tools mentioned above for network management and reorganization in the face of partial failures may also help to identify which local computing, communications, and networking resources are functional. If highperformance computing is necessary for a given task, such as additional or more detailed weather forecasting or geological (earthquake)
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From page 69... ...
COMPUTATION: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING The networked computational and mass storage resources needed for national-scale application areas are necessarily heterogeneous and geographically distributed. A geographically remote, accessible metacomputing resource, as envisioned in the Crisis 2005 scenario in Chapter 1, implies network-based adaptive links among available people (using portable computers and communications, such as personal digital assistants)
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From page 70... ...
, including field trials in 1995 that demonstrated the ability to generate and deliver high-performance modeling results within a time frame useful to crisis managers. For areas within 30 km of a Doppler radar station, microscale predictions have been made at a 1-km scale and can predict rapidly developing events, such as microbursts, heavy rain, hail, and electrical buildup, on 10- to 30-minute time scales.
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From page 71... ...
Because the model's performance scales with added computing capacity, more detailed predictions can in principle be made if enough computational resources can be coordinated to perform therms Crisis managers also require a sense of the reliability of data they work with the "error bars" around simulation results. To achieve this, an ensemble of simulations may be run using slightly different initial conditions.
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From page 72... ...
(Needs for information integration and display are discussed in the next two sections.) This implies higher-bandwidth connections and greater display capabilities on the frontline user's platform.
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From page 73... ...
These advances could be more generally relevant to many aspects of software systems, as discussed below in the section "Software System Development." Storage Servers and Meta-Data Crisis management applications employ databases of substantial size. For example, workshop participants estimated that a database of the relevant infra
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From page 74... ...
Reformatting data rapidly through services such as those discussed in the section "Information Management" can be computationally intensive and require fast storage media. Comprehensive provisions must also be made for storing not only data, but collateral information (meta-data)
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From page 75... ...
Timely access to and sharing of these data require highperformance communication, including network management, both to and from
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From page 76... ...
Workshop participants suggested that security cameras also provide opportunities for unusual use; with ingenuity it may be possible to estimate the amplitude and frequency of an earth tremor or the rate at which rain falls by processing video images. Given the high cost of dedicated sensor
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From page 77... ...
Other important issues are enforcing the proper use of network resources, determining the scale and quality of service available, and establishing priorities among the users and uses. Mechanisms are needed to address these issues automatically and dynamically.
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From page 78... ...
experimental network as a useful early demonstration of such capabilities.~° Software System Development To the extent that it improves capabilities for integrating software components as they relocate and interact throughout networks, research enabling a network-intensive style of computing may be helpful in addressing a long-standing, fundamental problem for many application areas, that of large software system development. Speaking about electronic commerce systems, Daniel Schutzer, of Citibank, said succinctly, "The programming bottleneck is still there." DARPA's Duane Adams described the problem as follows: Many of our application programs [at DARPA]
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From page 79... ...
Distributed object libraries such as those facilitated by the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA; discussed in the next section, "Information Management") may be useful, but more developed frameworks and infrastructure are needed to make them fully usable in the building of applications by large distributed teams of people.
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From page 80... ...
It would be extremely useful for system developers to be able to predict the performance, fault tolerance, or other specified features of a system composed from parts whose properties are known. This problem of composability of software components is very difficult and requires fundamental research.
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From page 81... ...
It examines several important issues and trends in information management and suggests additional challenges. Information management involves a broad range of resources with different purposes, such as traditional databases (typically relational)
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From page 82... ...
Information integration. In many of these applications, information must be integrated with other information in diverse formats.
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From page 83... ...
A final information product can be derived through a series of steps involving multiple information producers and organizations. This involves addressing the development of models for the kinds of steps that add value to a product beyond the information integration problem mentioned above.
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From page 84... ...
They often involve solving information management problems that rely on multiple sources of data, possibly including legacy databases that are difficult to reengineer. This creates a problem of information integration in which multiple information resources, with different schemes, data representations, access management schemes, locations, and other characteristics, may have to be combined to solve queries.
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From page 85... ...
Applications such as crisis management increase the difficulty of information integration by introducing the need to integrate rapidly a set of databases whose integration was previously not contemplated. The accounts of information management in crisis situations that were presented in the workshops focused on ad hoc information integration solutions designed to meet very specific needs.
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From page 86... ...
While cataloging techniques can characterize a bibliographic information resource statically, I would like to see a "feature extraction" approach that would support abstraction of information resources based more closely on the user's needs at the moment of searching. Natural language processing may help in the direction of search based on knowledge representations, but the more general problem is to support a full range of pattern matching to include imagery and numeric models as well as human language....
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From page 87... ...
,, i - - , i i.- - ~ii -. i - - - i al~ ~-ne -- -l-~l-MM-~ -- .A pp.r acn -- -to -- -M-e0latl-on-:~u.a ta~MoGe-ls -- -an-~Lan-g-u-age$ -- -~en-0e-~ -- -ADst.r.a ct} ~ :::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: To me, the most immediate problem is that it is very difficult to find and retrieve information from disparate information sources.
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From page 88... ...
Information location also relates to the distributed computing issues raised above, since one approach involves dispatching not just passive queries to information sources, but active information "agents" that monitor and interact with information stores on an ongoing basis. Information agents may also deploy other information agents, increasing the challenges (both to the initial dispatcher of the agents and to the various willing hosts)
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From page 89... ...
This issue also reinforces the increasing convergence between concepts of information management and concepts of software and computation. Production and Value National-scale applications provide many more opportunities for information producers to participate in an increasingly rich and complex information marketplace.
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From page 90... ...
The distributed information resources can be public or private, with varying access control, security, and payment provisions. They can include traditional databases, wide-area file systems, digital libraries, object databases, multimedia databases, and miscellaneous ad hoc information resources.
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From page 91... ...
This is more difficult when there are data quality problems or when kiosks support direct interaction and creation of new information. USER-CENTERED SYSTEMS: DESIGNING APPLICATIONS TO WORK WITH PEOPLE Research on natural, intuitive user interface technologies has been under way for many years.
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From page 92... ...
For example, it is important that user interfaces and similar services for accessing a remote computing resource be usable, given the fidelity and quality of service available to the user. An additional focus for research in making interface technologies usable in national-scale applications is reducing their cost.
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From page 93... ...
Photographs and locations of important or damaged facilities, visual renderings of simulation results, logs of team activity, locations of other team members, notesall can attach to points on a map. Given adequate bandwidth and computing capacity, another way to provide this common perception might be through synthetic virtual environments, displaying a visualization of the situation that could be shared among many crisis managers.
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From page 94... ...
A crisis management anchor desk would presumably be located outside the crisis zone, for readier access to worldwide information sources and expertise; however, it would require sufficient communication with people working at the scene of the crisis to be useful to them, as well as the ability to deliver information in scalable forms appropriate to the recipient's available storage and display capabilities (e.g., a geographic information system data file representing the disaster scene for one, a static map image for another, a text file for a third)
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From page 95... ...
Information integration techniques such as those discussed in the section "Information Management" are generally presented in terms of finding the best information from diverse sources to meet the user's needs. The flip side of this coin is the advantage of being able to cull the second-best and third-best information, reducing the unmanageable flood.
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From page 96... ...
If a problem can be represented adequately, a judgment support system should be able to assist the judgment maker by giving context and consequences from a multidimensional exploration of the undefined problem represented by the current crisis. This context construction requires automated detection and classification of issues and anomalies, identifying outlier data points (which could represent errors, but could also indicate emerging new developments)
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From page 97... ...
5. Many telephone carriers now provide frame-relay virtual subnets that are intended to support the isolation discussed here.
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From page 98... ...
These are addressed primarily in the section, "Information Management," but it should be understood that without semantic understanding of, for example, a user's requests, no interface technology will produce a good result.
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