INTERNET COMPUTING

The CSE department is launching a new initiative on "Internet Computing". By Internet Computing, we mean highly network-integrated computing on the Internet, where, rather than relying on local computing resources, users buy their computing power (and information) on demand from Internet service providers, with the expectation that this will lead to a thriving large-scale electronic-information market economy. In this seminar, we will explore topics in various areas of computer science that support the Internet Computing paradigm, raising questions like:

• What kind of system infrastructure - e.g. agent-based computing, active networks - best supports Internet Computing?
• What security mechanisms are needed for electronic commerce, software and information privacy, integrity, and authentication?
• How might you write programs that run on the Internet? How do you debug and test them, and measure their performance?
• What does the user interface look like? Given that the Internet will provide the computing power for applications, perhaps the user's local access device (e.g. a wireless PDA or network appliance) can be devoted to multimedia I/O?
• If you are a service provider, how do you provide a reliable fault-tolerant service worth buying? How do you insure quality of service?
• What is the best way to do information retrieval, say using content-based queries on multimedia information? How do you best search the Internet?
• How do you support the high-end user who requires massive computing power that presumably can (only) be obtained by aggregating thousands or millions of network computing resources?
• How do you support "Internet enterprises", i.e. groups of distributed users with a common goal (e.g. a virtual corporation) that require collaboration and other types of software tools?

If you are a student interested in taking this seminar for credit, you will be asked to research various topics on a weekly basis for informal presentation at our brainstorming sessions.

Joe Pasquale
Professor, CSE