IT Professional

PrePrint: Managing Disruptive and Sustaining Innovations in Green IT

Green IT has emerged as a major issue or opportunity for both IT and business organizations. Green IT offers the potential to significantly impact the entire organization, from IT operations to core business processes in the organizational value chain. While green IT has gained significant attention in practice, specific guidance to top management and IT professionals on how to implement and manage various green IT initiatives is largely underdeveloped. We develop a framework that classifies green IT used in organizations as sustaining and disruptive innovations. Using this framework which identifies four strategies, we provide recommendations for managing green IT initiatives.

PrePrint: Conflicts Among the Pillars of Information Assurance

Interactions are described among some of the pillars of information assurance: authenticity, availability, confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. For some pairs, efforts aligned with the goal of one pillar can frustrate efforts aligned with the other pillar. For example, availability may introduce conflicts with each confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, whereas confidentiality and integrity are largely complementary.

PrePrint: A Browser-agnostic Digital Signature Architecture for HTML Web Content

Digital signatures can help to build more secure and efficient web applications across business segments. A wide adoption of digital signatures can be made possible if the HTML standard specification is extended to provide integral support for digital signatures while defining tags that can trigger digital signature creation by browsers. With standardization of this feature into HTML, vendors can provide their proprietary implementations supporting digital signatures and developers to develop applications as per the standardized HTML syntax that is browser-agnostic. However, there are no standards that define how digital signatures can be applied to web content, except a draft initiative at W3C to use XML digital signature syntax to sign HTML content. In the absence of established standards to digitally sign web content, this paper discusses a browser-agnostic architecture that can be utilized to build digital signature support into web applications in a productive, flexible and extensible manner.

PrePrint: Improving Knowledge Discovery for the Justice System Through Informatics

This paper examines the importance of deepening the connection between the field of informatics with that of our justice system. Just as informatics has been instrumental in improving knowledge discovery in the medical field, we can help improve the way informatics can help to empower lawyers and judges with enhanced knowledge discovery about documentary evidence. The volume of documentary evidence is growing exponentially in litigation, and one single document has the potential to settle an entire case. As lawyers apply their expertise with the law and legal concepts, they deserve to have access to the most effective knowledge discovery techniques and tools that can be brought to bear as they search and examine documents in the search for the truth.

PrePrint: Why Software Engineering Certification Makes Sense in Today’s Environment

This paper explores the challenges faced by software industry stakeholders, what is driving these challenges, how these stakeholders are impacted, and the benefits associated with software certification solutions.

PrePrint: MedlinePlus Mobile: Consumer Health Information On-the-Go

In 2009, with mobile Internet use on the rise, NLM began work on a project to create a mobile-optimized version of MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en español. The goal was to provide a core set of the authoritative health information found on MedlinePlus.gov to mobile users accessing the Internet with any kind of device, which meant creating MedlinePlus Mobile as a mobile Web site, not a mobile app (application). This approach allows the site to reach all mobile Internet users, not just those with specific devices. It was important that MedlinePlus Mobile reach as broad an audience as possible, and the project team did not have the resources to build and maintain separate apps for a variety of platforms. A mobile-optimized site is the best way to reach the diverse audience of mobile users seeking health information.

PrePrint: MedlinePlus® Connect: Linking Patient Portals, Electronic Health Records and Health IT Systems to Consumer Health Information

In November 2010, the National Library of Medicine® (NLM®) unveiled MedlinePlus Connect, a service that extends the reach of the consumer health Web site MedlinePlus.gov to deliver targeted information to patients and providers via health IT systems, EHRs, and patient portals.

PrePrint: Swarm Technology at NASA: Building Reslient Space Exploration Systems

The design and development of modern aerospace systems is an inherently complex task driven by standards and safety requirements where complex hardware and sophisticated software must exhibit adequate reliability. Such systems are complex conglomerates of components where control software drives rigid hardware. In addition to careful design and thorough testing, to increase their survivability, NASA has pioneered special self-management features using various AI techniques including swarm computing. Swarm-based spacecraft systems, based on the cooperative nature of a hive culture, provide a new robust way of space exploration. A system of this class is composed of multiple self-organizing and autonomous spacecraft. The design and implementation of such systems requires new engineering approaches. We briefly recap the history of special AI approaches to spacecraft design, particularly swarm computing, review the current status of these efforts at NASA (namely, ANTS), and briefly describe the potential derivative uses in civilian and military applications.

IT Professional - January/February 2012 (Vol. 14, No. 1)

IT Professional

PrePrint: A Look at the Impact of High-End Computing Technologies on NASA Missions

From its bold start nearly 30 years ago and continuing today, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center has enabled remarkable breakthroughs in the space agency’s science and engineering missions. Throughout this time, NAS experts have influenced the state-of-the-art in high-performance computing (HPC) and related technologies such as scientific visualization, system benchmarking, batch scheduling, and grid environments. We highlight the pioneering achievements and innovations originating from and made possible by NAS resources and know-how, from early supercomputing environment design and software development, to long-term simulation and analyses critical to safe Space Shuttle operations and associated spinoff technologies, to the highly successful Kepler mission’s discovery of new planets now capturing the world’s imagination.