Keynotes

Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

Tuesday, May 14

William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed." The shape of things to come is already implicit in a thousand small clues. Then, in a sudden shift of mindset, it becomes obvious to everyone. In this talk, I will review some of the technologies that are, bit by bit, providing the raw materials for the future "internet operating system", as well as the cognitive shifts that are allowing leading edge hackers to put those technologies to work in new ways.

While increasingly powerful computing systems enable the automation of key tasks and processes, these systems also become more complex as they work across distributed networks. Paradoxically, the growing complexity of the infrastructure created by the I/T industry threatens to undermine the very benefits it aims to provide. At the current rate of expansion, it's estimated that, by 2010, every single person in the U.S.would have to be a systems administrator just to keep up.

It's time to design and build computing systems capable of running themselves, adjusting to varying circumstances, and managing their resources to most efficiently handle the workloads we put upon them. It's time for autonomic computing -- we must build computer systems that regulate themselves much in the same way our own autonomic nervous systems regulate and protect our bodies.

As we look at the challenges of autonomic computing, we see that the opportunities are vast to improve overall IT costs, reliability and user experience, in particular. But no one company can do it all. It requires a great deal of teaming in the industry with the best minds from IT, academia and government. A successful approach will be open, interdisciplinary, ambitious, cooperative, and real.

The user's fundamental view of a computer's operating system has changed surprisingly little in the last 30 years. Users still "run programs" -- either by typing or through a graphical user interface. Programs read data from files, write and create files, and then terminate. Data files stored on disk are generally viewed as static repositories for information. Virtually all of the work done by a computer on behalf of an individual is done as the result of an explicit command. The keyboard, screen and mouse remain the dominant forms of human input/output.

While certain key operating system concepts have remained largely static, the technology around which our modern day notion of operating systems was built has changed dramatically. In this keynote, Rick Rashid examines the reasons why our operating systems came to be designed the way they are and looks at how increasingly rapid changes in technology may allow us to rethink the operating system and user interface design. Rashid will demonstrate new technologies and research-in-progress.

Wednesday, May 15

Software development and programming models are borrowing increasingly from the study of self-organizing, complex systems, and online gathering places are now populated by hundreds of thousands of users. Steven Johnson, co-creator of the Webby-award-winning Plastic.com community site, examines the connection between software and the "massively parallel" growth and evolution of real-world cities. For millennia, urban centers have been capturing and storing group information with astonishing efficiency, creating neighborhoods that detect and broadcast patterns of behavior back to their residents.

What lessons did the creators of Plastic take from the dynamic structure of the metropolis, and how can software designers apply those principles generally?

Network security has long been considered an engineering problem, and companies try to solve it by applying technologies. This approach is failing; the technologies are failing and the problem is worsening. What we need are security processes, such as detection, response, and deterrence. However, the only way to get corporate management to adequately address security is to change the risk-management equation. This can be achieved by enforcing liabilities, and giving corporate management the means to reduce or insure against those liabilities. It's only after we do all of these things that the Internet will be a safe and secure place.

Thursday, May 16

From the beginning, Web Services have been intended for application to application integration where the traditional distributed object models fail. To make application to application integration feasible, three features must be delivered: coarse grained messages (now XML packaged in SOAP and described by WSDL), asynchrony (describable by WSDL), and loosely coupled implementations. These very basic requirements are difficult to deliver. Adam Bosworth explores these three key components of Web Services and provides additional insight by drawing examples from BEA's new project, code-named "Cajun."

Lawrence Lessig will be joined by advocates of the Open Source, Open Spectrum, Web Services, and standards worlds for a frank discussion on the future of innovation in a time when commercial and governmental interests are exercising their control over plumbing, software, content, and patent laws to impede competition.

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