B12. Theoretical Foundations Facilitators/Scribes: Gil Zussman (Columbia University), Justin Shi (Temple University)

Attendees: Ioannis Stavrakakis, Gustavo de Veciana, Svetha Venkatesh, Bill Schilit, Gang Zhou

State of the Art PeSC is not a mature theoretical field. a)Lack of theories, metrics, network capacity, context capacity, etc. for PeSC. b)Built on other theoretical areas: control theory, machine learning, networking, social networks, etc. c)Existing theories are not tailored for PeSC. For example: Fitt’s law desktop interaction.

Conceptual Gaps No measure of Mark’s disappearing effect. Model of attention? No Fitts’ Law for PeCS. No big O for power. No theory for power consumption directives to programming. Need to understand component interactions, resource interactions and autonomic interactions. Need exploit temporal dimension for controlling of noise and unnecessary data growth (without relevance). Need insights in scalability on nodes, users, power consumptions, data sharing. Need real-time useful information collection algorithm. Need new techniques that machine learning can be without supervision and adaptable. Understand data entropies. Need to understand theory of emergent behavior. Need a human dimension in existing device theories, since human is part of the device. Lack of unifying theory. Very large numbers, too many varieties. Need to find such theory.

Collaboration Engineering, physical sciences Social scientist, anthropologies, psychology, and economists and other disciplines. – They can help us to ask the right questions.

Educational Activities Foundational contents could be “engineered” into introductory courses, especially in mobile app programming, sensor programming, system design courses. Change “teaching” to “facilitation” for students to find WHAT to do more than learn HOW to do things. (understanding the motivational forces that are beyond the technical developments)

Recommendations to NSF Support more theoretical foundational research and foster collaboration between foundational research with experimental projects. Forster collaborative relationships between multiple mature theoretical areas. Funding may emphasize the application theories. Encourage tools built on sound theoretical foundations. Make sure the theory is disseminated.

Contacts Gil Zussman, Justin Y. Shi,

Justin’s Personal Thoughts

What aspects do we understand well enough? a)App development: Intuition driven. Needs driven. Fun driven. b)System: Direct communication driven (UDP- like). c)Concept: Utility driven (Mark Weiser’s vision)

Conceptual Gaps a)App development: Need to understand the fundamentals of app decision processes. Are we making better decisions or must more decisions? Need to understand API’s impact on overall applications architecture. How long will we be content with 5000 bees? b)System development: PeSC necessarily exacerbates the current scalability challenges in systems architectures. Need to understand the fundamental architectural requirements for sustainable computing. Speed is not the only measure. c)Motivational forces for PeSC: There are probably larger forces than Mark Weiser’s vision. What are they? How can we mitigate these forces?

Challenges App development: – How can we leverage “common sense reasoning”, “compressive sensing”, “non-axiomatic reasoning”, and other paradigms to enhance our decision processes beyond our intuitions? (foundational development…) – How can we engage app designers in the thinking of sustainable architectures that are larger than lab scale? (robot bee design…) – How can we understand and neutralize extreme conflicts in social networking? (forces beyond Mark’s vision…)

Challenges Systems development – How can computer architects, network architects and app designers agree on sustainable architectures? – What are the sufficient and necessary conditions for a sustainable app architecture? – How would these architectures influence industries? (and job creations…)

Challenges Motivational forces – What are the motivational forces? (Medical, health, economics, politics, religion, personal preference, sexual orientation, ethnic preferences, …) – What are the tools that have been used to successfully mitigating conflicts? – How can we leverage these tools? – With the abundance of online data, what new tools can be developed? – Do we understand what makes viral video viral?

How to Improve Experimentation? Workshops like this help bridging concepts and ideas. PeSC has an inherent broad reach appeal. It also has inherent potential risks in privacy and security. There probably would never be a clean- cut solution to all on these fronts. Workgroups (consortium-like) engaging government agencies, social scientists, legal professions, regulatory bodies, computer/network/app researchers under the same roof)? (We may save blind searches by finding out the risks earlier. 1+1 > 2…)

Recommendations to NSF Current NSF divisional structure encourages “depth-first” thinking. Cross-cutting programs may not cut deep enough to expose fundamental research issues. PeSC broad reach nature invites the question for cross-agency funding possibilities, especially with legal, financial and legislative branches.

Architecture Scalability (tentative) Adding sensing/computing and communication components should increase systems performance. Adding sensing/computing and communication components should crease systems availability. Adding sensing/computing and communication components should decrease the probability of information/data losses.