Now that the basic technical standards for an open, global learning infrastructure are rapidly maturing, it is time to shift our focus to the development of an integrated toolset that hides the technical complexities from the end user and that enables the author, teacher and learner to be more effective and efficient. In this talk, we will discuss some new approaches to realise this idea and we...

In this paper a brief assessment of the technical, economic and regulatory paradigms underlying design and operations of complex infrastructures is provided. First, a description is given for the industry as it was. This is followed up by the industry in transition driven by technological advances and regulatory restructuring. It is concluded that a major qualitative change of paradigm has take...

Many OS crashes are caused by bugs in kernel extensions or device drivers while the OS itself may have been tested rigorously. To make an OS immortal we must resurrect the OS from these crashes. We present a novel OS-hypervisor infrastructure that allows automated and transparent OS crash diagnosis and recovery in a virtual environment. This infrastructure eliminates the need for reboots or che...

Organizations invest heavily in technical controls for their Information Assurance (IA) infrastructure. These technical controls mitigate and reduce the risk of damage caused by outsider attacks. Most organizations rely on training to mitigate and reduce risk of non-technical attacks such as social engineering. Organizations lump IA training into small modules that personnel typically rush thro...

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety s...

The Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) is a multidonor technical assistance facility, launched in July 1999 with the purpose of helping developing countries improve the quality of their infrastructure through private sector involvement. PPIAF supported an activity in Bangladesh with the long-term goal of strengthening the capacity of the private sector and of micro-finance ...

We review technical and sociological issues facing the Life Sciences as they transform into more data-centric disciplines - the "Big New Biology". Three major challenges are: 1) lack of comprehensive standards; 2) lack of incentives for individual scientists to share data; 3) lack of appropriate infrastructure and support. Technological advances with standards, bandwidth, distributed computing,...

The Internet is increasingly considered a crucial information resource. However, how the Internet is adopted as an information source within a given society depends on factors such as the technical infrastructure of a given area and the local culture. This paper reports on an ongoing study of the information behavior of people in Uzbekistan, a culture that has traditionally relied on social net...

Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at the University of Pennsylvania has participated as a data provider in a variety of governmentsponsored programs that support development of Human Language Technologies. As the number of projects increases, the quantity and variety of the data LDC produces have increased dramatically in recent years. In this paper, we describe the technical infrastructure, bot...