ICaST

07/26/2012 - 12:39
TECHNOLOGY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: TECHNOLOGY AS THE DRIVER OF KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND CULTURE
Levent V. Orman

            A technology-driven society is in constant flux, and subject to accelerating change. In that environment, traditions, values, social institutions, and even complete cultures become obsolete at an increasing rate, and lose their value as inter-generational learning tools. More importantly, since traditions, values, and social institutions are critical to human judgment and learning, when technology undermines our institutions, it also threatens our knowledge and beliefs. This article describes the problem with numerous examples, and investigates possible solutions. A dynamic society with flexible and diverse social institutions is suggested as a possible solution. The solution itself requires an extensive technology infrastructure, and fundamental changes to the existing social institutions.

03/15/2012 - 17:59
Sensor Web Services for a Smarter Planet
Melike Erol-Kantarci
Omar Asad
Hussein T. Mouftah

10/11/2011 - 17:16
FREEDM to deliver on Smart Grid technologies
Alex Huang

The current electric grid in the United States looks strikingly similar to the grid from the 1930s, and it’s time for a paradigm shift in energy distribution. A sustainable grid can be likened to the Internet—allowing for ubiquitous generation, storage, use and sharing of energy. The same dramatic shift that occurred when centralized mainframes were replaced with PCs, then connected through the Internet, is needed in the power industry to enable every citizen to participate in energy production, conservation and utilization.

10/11/2011 - 17:02
The Network of Excellence Euro-NF and its Specific Joint Research Projects
Markus Fiedler
Tobias Hoßfeld
Ilkka Norros
Joel Rodrigues
Paulo Rogério Pereira

This article presents the European FP7 Network of Excellence “Euro-NF” (Networks of the Future) and reviews its set of activities. Specific attention is paid to the concept of Specific Joint Research Projects (SJRP), a series of small but focused projects, integrating at least three Euro-NF partners and targeting joint seminal work, publications as well as full-size follow-up projects. Further to the description of the SJRP concept, a set of three selected SJRP from different areas are presented in detail with respect to motivation, goal, contents, results, and impact.

09/27/2011 - 17:06
MOBIMEDIA 2011
Luigi Atzori

Successfully deploying multimedia services and applications in mobile environments requires adopting an interdisciplinary approach where multimedia, networking and physical layer issues are addressed jointly. Content features analysis and coding, media access control, multimedia flow and error control, cross-layer optimization as well as mobility management and security protocols are research challenges that need to be carefully examined when designing new architectures. We also need to put a great effort in designing applications that take into account the way the user perceives the overall quality of the provided service.

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Features

July 26, 2012
TECHNOLOGY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: TECHNOLOGY AS THE DRIVER OF KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND CULTURE
Levent V. Orman

            A technology-driven society is in constant flux, and subject to accelerating change. In that environment, traditions, values, social institutions, and even complete cultures become obsolete at an increasing rate, and lose their value as inter-generational learning tools. More importantly, since traditions, values, and social institutions are critical to human judgment and learning, when technology undermines our institutions, it also threatens our knowledge and beliefs. This article describes the problem with numerous examples, and investigates possible solutions. A dynamic society with flexible and diverse social institutions is suggested as a possible solution. The solution itself requires an extensive technology infrastructure, and fundamental changes to the existing social institutions.

October 11, 2011
The Network of Excellence Euro-NF and its Specific Joint Research Projects
Markus Fiedler
Tobias Hoßfeld
Ilkka Norros
Joel Rodrigues
Paulo Rogério Pereira

This article presents the European FP7 Network of Excellence “Euro-NF” (Networks of the Future) and reviews its set of activities. Specific attention is paid to the concept of Specific Joint Research Projects (SJRP), a series of small but focused projects, integrating at least three Euro-NF partners and targeting joint seminal work, publications as well as full-size follow-up projects. Further to the description of the SJRP concept, a set of three selected SJRP from different areas are presented in detail with respect to motivation, goal, contents, results, and impact.

September 27, 2010
Peering into the online future
Joseph Rushton Wakeling

The New York Times recently reported an exciting online trial of open community peer review. But this was not an experiment by one of the innovative new electronic journals — rather, it was carried out by a longstanding, prestigious publication in the supposedly-conservative humanities literature. ICaST’s co-Editor-in-Chief takes a look at how the web is transforming the way in which researchers in many disciplines share and develop their thoughts and ideas.

April 12, 2010
ICST — a Scientific Society with a New Approach

There are several scientific societies existing in the world. You can send application forms and pay membership fees if you wish to become a member. You can attend their conferences, submit papers to their journals, read their magazines, you know the story. But what if you could have your own society? A society that you govern, where you propose the ideas, define the directions and make the decisions? Well, we have got good news for you: you can have it, by joining ICST!

April 12, 2010
Innovative, Fast, and High-Quality Peer Review with e-SCRIPTS – the ICST’s Journal Publication System
Paolo Bellavista

ICST is exploiting the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies to improve the quality, rapidity, openness, and effectiveness of the collaboration within the scientific community. Central to this strategic perspective, e-SCRIPTS enables an innovative, fast, and high-quality review process, for both the ICaST Magazine and the portfolio of ICST Transactions.

Columns

September 12, 2011
THE OPEN COLUMN: Learning to read ... again
Dominik Ryzko

When I was young, life was simple. Or should I say, reading was simple. Am I getting old? Certainly, but looking at the pace things have changed over the last two decades, this statement is true even for my students. What I mean is, that after seamlessly accepting all the technological advances supporting consumption of the digital content, we are starting to have problems with reading. I believe it is not even clear what we mean by reading anymore. Let me explain why.

April 18, 2011
THE OPEN COLUMN: Technology, Society, Culture
Jan Kaczmarek

On many occasions in the past I have felt uncomfortable with the claim that we live in the era of knowledge, rationality, technology and primacy of empiricism. The source of this unease felt like a dissonance in some deeper insides of me. Postmodern philosophers prophet the decline of religion and the rise of rationality, professionalization, constant self-actualization, expert-dependence, pragmatism, dominance of market-like relationships (panmarket), cynicism and egoism, resembling a dehumanized world of characters from Philip K. Dick’s novels. One who claims we are leaving in romantic times would be considered out of mind, no doubt. Meanwhile if you type 'rational' in Google search you will get some 50 mio hits, when you write romantic you get some 200 mio hits. Of course it does not prove anything but you may find this fact curious, curious enough to consider some other clues that inspired my thoughts before it even occurred to me to make this awkward comparison. I encourage you to expand the list by posting comments below.

October 29, 2010
A platform to re-invent the Internet?
Andreas Foglar
Christian Liss

Many experts today propose enhancements for the Internet. They claim that the 30-year old concept, originally designed for a handful of military bases and universities, cannot cope with today's challenges of more than a billion of participants, and new features such as VoIP, VoD, IP-TV, videoconferencing etc. Many ideas and concepts to improve the Internet have been proposed. Among the many trends which can be observed is the re-introduction of connection-oriented communication based on flows or streams, like the flow transfer mode (FTM), which has been proposed by van As.

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Technical Articles

March 15, 2012
Sensor Web Services for a Smarter Planet
Melike Erol-Kantarci
Omar Asad
Hussein T. Mouftah

October 11, 2011
FREEDM to deliver on Smart Grid technologies
Alex Huang

The current electric grid in the United States looks strikingly similar to the grid from the 1930s, and it’s time for a paradigm shift in energy distribution. A sustainable grid can be likened to the Internet—allowing for ubiquitous generation, storage, use and sharing of energy. The same dramatic shift that occurred when centralized mainframes were replaced with PCs, then connected through the Internet, is needed in the power industry to enable every citizen to participate in energy production, conservation and utilization.

June 23, 2011
Cooperative Cognitive Radio Network Testbed
Raghavendra Rao
Qi Cheng
Aditya Kelkar
Dhaval Chaudhari

Cognitive radios with their ability to dynamically access unused portions of the radio spectrum have generated a lot of interest recently. In this paper we demonstrate an experimental cognitive radio network using Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs). We have constructed a fully functional cognitive radio network with the ability to incorporate many of the requirements of a dynamic spectrum access system like the Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN). The function of spectrum sensing is studied in detail. Along with the commonly used energy detector, two wideband sensing algorithms are implemented and a collaborative sensing scheme is also presented. A simple protocol is constructed which proves to be quite effective for the cognitive radios to dynamically change their transmitter and receiver parameters accordingly. Although the focus is on spectrum sensing, the whole system is scalable to conduct extensive research in all areas of cognitive radio.

April 18, 2011
An Overview on the status of Near Field Communication Technologies
Fabrizio Granelli

Near field communication is a technology for transmitting over short-range distance. The fact that possible targets do not require batteries and can be relatively small makes such technology a good candidate for supporting mobile payment systems. The paper provides an overview of the technology and its perspectives for mobile payment systems.

November 3, 2010
Green Communications: The C2POWER Approach
Ayman Radwan
Michele Albano
Jonathan Rodriguez

Energy is becoming a very scarce resource. Hence, a shift towards a Green paradigm is increasingly dominating all kinds of industries nowadays. Energy saving is not the only goal of the green paradigm. Reducing pollution and waste emissions, especially CO2, is among the foreseen targets. A high percentage of research efforts, in all areas of industries, is devoted to reducing the CO2 footprint. Although ICT contributes to the CO2 emission only with a low percentage, ICT is not much different.  Many research efforts have been devoted to decrease the CO2 footprint of ICT. C2POWER, an EU funded project which aims at decreasing power consumption within mobile terminals in a multi-standard wireless environment, is one of those research efforts.

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