Cyberinfrastructure: computing in the 21stCentury

Expositor: PhD Jorge Diaz

Fecha: 2 de Octubre de 2012

Hora: 6:30 p.m. Hora local en Bogota, colombia [GMT-5Hrs]

Link de la Conferencia web: https://ieeemeetings.webex.com/ieeemeetings/onstage/g.php?d=592412832&t=a

Local: Hotel Cosmos 100 – Salón Torre de Oro – Calle 100 # 21 A – 41, Bogotá, Colombia.

El Doctor Jorge Díaz se centrará en resolver el siguiente cuestionamiento: ¿Cuál debería ser la infraestructura para el siglo 21, el siglo de la información?

Sin lugar a dudas el reconocimiento de la información como la savia vital de los tiempos modernos, ha hecho que las organizaciones y sociedad actual la reconozcan como un activo en forma de conocimiento de una organización, como el capital intelectual que transforma nuestro mundo y que a partir de esto, genera la nueva infraestructura informática habilitada del siglo 21 que se ha denominado ciber-infraestructura.

Este término hace referencia a las redes y tecnologías de la comunicación, distribución y algoritmos de cómputo paralelo y el desarrollo de software necesarios para funcionar en una economía del conocimiento en la era de la información de hoy. El objetivo es «unirse a la comunidad [informática] con las disciplinas científicas y de ingeniería para construir un alto rendimiento, sistema de red de computación distribuida, el almacenamiento, capacidades de visualización y sensores en una escala sin precedentes.

Esta charla se centra en cuatro puntos principales:

• Los requisitos para la infraestructura de la economía del siglo 21
• Los avances actuales en el diseño de una nueva Internet, es decir, el proyecto GENI
• La noción de un mundo totalmente conectado con ejemplos de entornos de computación en la nube.
• La garantía de la información y seguridad informática

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Short Bio Doctor Jorge Díaz:

Dr. Jorge L Diaz-Herrera is Professor and founding Dean of the College of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, since July, 2002. Prior to this appointment, he was Professor of Computer Science and Department Head at SPSU in Atlanta and Yamacraw project coordinator with Georgia Tech. He has had other academic appointments with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, Monmouth University in NJ, George Mason University in VA, and at SUNY Binghamton, NY.

Dr. Diaz-Herrera has conducted extensive consulting services with a number of firms and government agencies including: New York Stock Exchange (SIAC), MITRE Corp., the Institute for Defense Analysis, General Electric, Singer-Link, TRW, EG&G, IBM, among others. He has also provided professional expertise to international organizations including the European Software Institute, Australian Defense Science and Technology Office, Kyoto ComputingGaikum, Kuwait University, Cairo University, Instituto Politecnico Santo Domingo (INTEC), and Malaysia University of Technology, among others.

Dr. Diaz-Herrera has chaired several national and international conferences, and has been a technical reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the American Society for Engineering Education, and several conferences and journals. He has more than 90 publications. He served as writer of the IEEE-CS Software Engineering Professional Examination, and co-edited the Software Engineering volume of the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2004. He is also an active member of the CRA-Deans group of the Computer Research Association in Washington, D.C. He serves and has served on various technical advisory committees and national governing boards including SEI Technical Advisory Group, NSF/CISE Advisory Committee, NY State Universal Broadband Council, among others.

Dr. Diaz-Herrera completed his undergraduate education in Venezuela, and holds both a Master’s and Ph.D. inComputing Studies from Lancaster University, in the UK. He recently completed the Graduate Certificate in Management Leadership in Education from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Abstract:

“All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm,” said Steve Jobs comparing the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, with that of the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation [New York Times, June 3, 2010]. That was the infrastructure of the 20th century. What should it be for the 21stcentury, the century of information?

The advent of powerful calculating machines in the mid 20th century made it possible for many scientific discoveries and engineering feats to take place that would not have been feasible by hand or slide rule. Information is the lifeblood of modern times. It is the raw material from which understanding and decisions happen; it is an asset in the form of knowledge of an organization; it is the intellectual capital that transforms our world. More information with more value is being generated due to the widespread use of computer systems and networks. Today your ability to complete business requirements is tied directly to information assurance and computer security. However, it is also a fact of life that productivity is hampered by faulty systems and software that does not work. As Disjkstra once said “when we did not have computers, we did not have problems, when we had a few computers we had a few problems, now we have lots of problems.” With the advent of the future Internet and new multi-modal connecting devices, the way we “compute” will change drastically.

This computing-enabled infrastructure of the 21st century has been termed cyberinfrastructure, and it refers to the networks and communications technologies, distributed and parallel computation algorithms and software development required to function in a knowledge economy in today’s information age. The recently coined term was introduced to describe the global information technology environments in which capabilities of the highest level of computing tools would be available in an interoperable network. The goal is “to join the [computing] community with scientific and engineering disciplines to build a high-performance, networked system of distributed computing, storage, visualization capabilities, and sensors on an unprecedented scale … with national, and ultimately global, presence.”

This talk focuses on four principal points, namely (a) the requirements for the infrastructure of the 21st century economy, (b), current advances on the design of a new Internet, i.e., the GENI project, (c) the notion of a world totally connected with examples of cloud computing environments, and (d) information assurance and computer security, the former referring to the set of technologies and methods to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, while the latter refers to methods and tools in place to make sure that the cyberinfrastructure that create and transport information can be trusted.