Top Trends for 2013
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.
Cybersecurity is an emerging area of intense activity that endeavors to
provide innovative solutions to ensure uninterrupted communications and
service availability. A special April 2013 issue of
Computer,
the IEEE Computer Society's flagship magazine, aims to disseminate the
latest advances in cybersecurity that are critical in thwarting future
threats, attacks, fraud, and damage. The articles will focus 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. This 2013 theme issue of
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications aims to highlight the latest advancements in solving the big data problems via visual means.
Computer magazine will also be publishing a special issue on big data in June 2013.
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 of this 2013 special issue of
IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering
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.
This special issue of
IEEE Pervasive
aims 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. This special issue of
IEEE Internet Computing will explore 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.
This special issue of
IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications
will focus on research that addresses the opportunities and challenges
around public indoor and outdoor urban display installations. We in
particular encourage submissions that approach the topic from a holistic
point of view, including the design process as well as insights from
field deployments "in the wild."
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. The deadline is 30 June.
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. This special issue of
IEEE Multimedia
aims to provide an 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
In May/June 2013, IEEE Computer Society publications will take an unprecedented look at safety-critical systems with coordinated publication of special issues in
IEEE Software and
IEEE Security & Privacy.
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. To this end,
IEEE Micro seeks original papers for its July/August issue
on all 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. The
deadline is 8 January.
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. A special 2013 issue of
IEEE Transactions on Haptics
is 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.
This special October 2013 issue of
Computer will
focus on approaches to providing scalable, shared memory at the on-chip
level, paramount in a future where individual nodes will have on the
order of 1,000 cores each. Submissions are due by 1 March 2013.
