The IEUC Homepage 7/30/10 — 6:52 EDT

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The Chronicles of End User Computing…

Early Computing Pioneers envisioned powerful open-ended tools to Augment our mental abilities. The 80‘s brought us the PC, but by the late 90’s software became brittle, bloated & buggy making End Users feel dumb & helpless.

At the turn of the century Open Source projects brought cheaper and more stable software to the desktop and web, but they were still based on old tools and didn't come close to letting ordinary End Users harness the full potential of their systems.

So an intrepid band from academia and industry realized that it was time to make a fresh start and gather up the best ideas of the last three decades that had been languishing in our labs and integrate them into a New End User Computing Platform.

Thus was born The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. — a New York State nonprofit corporation working to end your frustration and bring you a brighter future!

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About the Institute

The Institute for End User Computing is a regional gateway to the international research community with long term goals that make it one of the world's most ambitious technology integration research groups.

The Institute is also known as the IEUC.

We incorporated late in 2002 under the Not-For-Profit Corporation Law of New York State and we were subsequently recognized by The IRS as a 501(c)(3) Public Charity.

We are an all volunteer virtual organization combining strong ties to New York with a highly diverse network of colleagues throughout the US and overseas.

In the near and intermediate term, we are looking for ways to integrate and leverage existing research to minimize the most pain in using today's information technologies for the greatest number of people as quickly as possible, but make no mistake, everything we do is given direction and focus by our pursuit of an ultimate vision that can best be classified as ultra long term in scope.

That Quest is to engage in Research and Education initiatives to bring together the people and technologies needed to develop a new, secure, simple, supple, & sophisticated legacy free platform to make End User Computing an intuitive, enjoyable, and empowering experience for everyone.

To our minds there is no contradiction between our local and global interests, nor is there tension between our very concrete near term research and our lofty vision for far down the road. These dimensions are complimentary and promote strong synergies as we forge the future!

Thus as we pursue our Grand Challenge, our ongoing objectives remain:

1. To educate End Users in all disciplines about the full potential of information technology.

2. To encourage students of all backgrounds to go into computing by rekindling the excitement of the personal computing revolution.

3. To foster closer ties among individual researchers and research groups of all specializations so they can draw on each other’s work to better meet end user needs.

4. To conduct actual research and development addressing various facets of End User Computing like End User Programming, Multimodal Interfaces, and Universal Accessibility.

5. To look at questions of public policy, economics, innovation management, and technology transfer as they relate to the advancement of new technology platforms.

6. To demonstrate that meaningful research contributions can me made without high budget facilities by engaging Students & End Users in communities like ours as Research & Design Partners.

7. To ultimately develop and deploy (in the sense of making our designs freely available to the public) a simple, supple, secure, and sophisticated alternative to today’s buggy and brittle mainstream computing environments that will open the door for greater diversity and competition among technology providers of all sizes and business models.

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The Prehistory of The IEUC

The Institute for End User Computing grew out of The Continuity Project- a ten year long exercise in independent scholarship pursued by our Executive Director with a support of a wonderful Advisory Board, many of whom are now active in The IEUC.

Mr. Wasilko launched The Continuity Project when he observed during the course of his Law, Technology, and Management studies at Syracuse University, that current library catalog systems fail to adequately support interdisciplinary work. The issue was particularly acute for individuals coming from non-technical fields like law and management who are now routinely called upon to address technology-related concerns.

For the first five years of the project, he focused on background readings in Digital Libraries and their enabling technologies, discovering about thirty years of unfulfilled promises of rational technology integration that hadn't materialized despite the better than predicted enhancements of the substantive technologies flagged for integration.

Over the second five years, while continuing his background research and attending numerous academic conferences on a host of topics, he shifted his focus to trying to knit together publicly available implementations of those technology components to try and create a working prototype of "Continuity - An Extensible Intelligent Integrated Collaborative Catalog and Distributed Institutional Memory Archive".

Alas, this effort was plagued by abandoned support for key third party technologies that repeatedly sent development back to square one, and pervasive component-level incompatibilities among open source offerings that made any aggregate system far too unstable to be kludged together in the lab, let alone deployed in the real world.

This brought the participants in The Continuity Project to the realization that our dream library catalog was but one application of a much needed new End User Computing Platform, and that despite the great theoretical strides of The Continuity Project, a real organization with real funding and staffing would be needed to deliver on the dream.

Thus was born The Institute for End User Computing!

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Our Values

We value and respect the intelligence of all End Users and the communities they build, IT exists to serve them. Using IT should be an empowering experience through which the End User develops new skills and gains a sense of personal mastery. It should support community building, cooperative work, and organizational learning.

We are committed to doing The Right Thing in making both technological and business decisions, even if The Right Thing is not the Most Expedient. In terms of technology, this means designing systems to be simple, secure, supple, and sophisticated. We put people first and will weigh human factors, comprehensibility, and extensibility over efficiency whenever trade-offs are called for. Where there is no one clearly Right Way to do something, we will try to make the alternatives equally accessible and leave the Choice of which to adopt with the End User. In terms of business, this means avoiding exclusivity when “licensing technology in or out" from & to our colleagues and partners for use in developing our new environment.

Likewise it means ensuring that the new infrastructure we develop is pro-competitive and provides a level playing field for both large and small entities wishing to build on it. Moreover, we will treat all third parties even handedly when engaging in related business ventures, regardless of whether or not any of these parties might have relationships with some of our personnel.

We are equally committed to education, research, technology integration, and ultimately to real world deployment. We view these objectives as being tightly interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Only by embracing the synergies among these areas can we unlock the full potential of End User Computing.

We deeply appreciate the contributions of our partners, funders, colleagues, and members of the public at large without whose support and input we could not serve the public good. In return, we commit ourselves to openness and above board conduct reflecting the highest standards of academic and managerial integrity.

We value the many ways that the diverse backgrounds of our people greatly enrich The Institute and we accordingly recognize that our personnel will have active outside lives often including commercial activities. This need not necessarily represent a conflict of interest and may in fact generate considerable benefits for all. Therefore, our people will undertake to clear potential conflicts of interest with The Institute in advance. The Institute will then evaluate their ethical implications on a case-by-case basis and make appropriate recommendations to help our personnel to make the most of such opportunities while avoiding the reality or appearance of impropriety.

We believe in the complimentary roles of the public, private, and non-profit sectors in bringing about a prosperous future for all. Government has an indispensable place in providing public goods, but a strong free market economy guided by the decisions of ordinary End Users is the best guarantee of healthy innovation. When citizens enjoy the benefits of freedom and recognize their collective responsibility to one another, it inspires them to form voluntary associations and nonpartisan not-for-profit enterprises like The Institute for End User Computing that embrace partners in all three sectors to fill in the gaps and provide for otherwise unmet societal needs.

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Why Our Work Matters To You

As an End User of computers and communication systems you know how crucial a role Information Technology plays in your life. Whether you are engaged in a profession, developing a business, defending your nation, serving in government, or working in the nonprofit sector, you know that your ability to advance your career, foster your organization's goals, and to prepare your family for the challenges of the future depends on how effectively you can use these tools.

Unless you are blessed with the patience of a Saint, you also know that today's End User Computing platforms like Windows, Unix, Linux, and the Mac OS can be extremely frustrating to use. Moreover, if you've ever lost work to a system crash, been bombarded with email viruses, or tricked into running malicious software, you have to realize that our tools are considerably less reliable and secure than they should be.

If you are the type who loves reading science and technology magazines like Wired, or who enjoys poking around on the Internet to see what the World's many outstanding Government, University, and Corporate Research Centers are up to, you probably find yourself lusting after all sorts of wonderful computing technologies that always seem to be perched on an ever receding horizon.

We at The Institute for End User Computing are tired of watching and waiting. We don't think that we can afford to keep rolling along with the status quo and asking people like you to put up with buggy antiquated computing technologies that waste your time, make you feel like an idiot, and prevent you from achieving your full potential. By their gratuitous complexity, lack of reliability, and failure to reflect the best ideas of the last three decades of research, today's End User systems exacerbate our technology divide, weigh down the global economy, and leave us open to cyber-attacks from our enemies.

As End Users of personal computing technology, it is not enough for us to rant about these issues. We need to take responsibility for rectifying them.

We know what needs to be done to address these problems, but we can't do it without your help. The Institute needs working capital and an endowment to guarantee our ability to take action. We need funds to organize conferences, disseminate research, and hire skilled technologists to develop A New Platform that will be designed to meet YOUR NEEDS.

Therefore, WE would ask you to consider supporting our mission. The next time your computer crashes or an application defies all logic and forces you to jump through hoops to work around a fundamental design defect that would never be tolerated in a car or television, remember that you CAN do something about it.

Contact Us Today to Join Our Quest!

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Representative References

These are just a few select entries from our bibliographic databases, much more complete coverage can be provided upon request.

Computer Science

Abelson, H., G. J. Sussman, et al. (1996). Structure and interpretation of computer programs. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press

Baase, S. (1978). Computer algorithms : introduction to design and analysis. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Applications

Arms, W. Y. (2000). Digital libraries. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Benedikt, M. (1991). Cyberspace : first steps. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Bradshaw, J. M. (1997). Software agents. Menlo Park, Calif; Cambridge, Mass., AAAI Press ; MIT Press.

Linguistics

Akmajian, A. (1995). Linguistics : an introduction to language and communication. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Akmajian, A. and F. Heny (1975). An introduction to the principles of transformational syntax. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Charniak, E. (1993). Statistical language learning. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Harris, M. D. (1985). Introduction to natural language processing. Reston, Va., Reston Pub. Co.

Steedman, M. (1996). Surface structure and interpretation. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Steedman, M. (2000). The syntactic process. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Programming Languages

Brodie, L. (1984). Thinking FORTH : a language and philosophy for solving problems. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall.

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