Our Ongoing Research Interests 2/7/12 — 1:24 EST

The Institute has very broad charter to establish End User Computing as an academic discipline in its own right by exploring enabling technologies, looking at their applications in the real world, and considering their socio-economic and public policy implications while working to increase the velocity of innovation by putting them into the hands of End Users like you!

What Is A Research Question?

A good research question is more than just a topic. It a subject of investigation that can be pursued over time and and which will narrow one's literature search, a spawn succession of testable hypotheses, and permit progress toward a tentative answer.

It need not prove tractable in the near term, as even a presumably impossible goal like Faster Than Light Travel can lead to new theoretical models, improvements in technique, and potential spin off insights and applications.

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Technical Questions

• How Can We Map Natural Language Expressions to Programming Language Concepts and Vice Versa?
• What Set of Orphaned Technologies Should Be Carried Forward In Future Systems?
• What Set of Enabling Technologies Holds the Most Promise to Radically Improve How Computers Are Used?
• How small can we make the core of our new platform?
• How Can We Graphically Support The Production of Grammatically and Semantically Valid Language Constructs?
• How can teams of strangers partition use social software to best partition development tasks?
• What Is The Best Security Model to Balance Fair Use and Piracy Prevention Concerns?

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Pedagogic, Social, and Economic Questions

• What Is the Best Way to Teach Students to Program and Reason Abstractly?
• Can System Design Make Computing More Inviting to the Disabled, Women, Minorities, and Citizens of the Developing World?
• How Can Advanced Computing Make Democracies More Accountable and Participatory?
• How Can We Create A Viable Component Software Marketplace that Fosters Technical Competition Among All Players?

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Non-Technical Research — Public Policy Analysis & Legal Innovation

Most of our work is by its nature highly technical, but an equally important aspect of our mission is to educate End Users about the ramifications of advanced computing technologies so that as a society we can make rational economic and political decisions about their use.

The Institute is strictly non-partisan and has no desire to wade into political waters.

Our only interest is in promoting an informed public in the heartfelt belief that when people take the time to understand the nature of our IT infrastructure, they can rationally debate such issues and reach a consensus that will redound to everyone's benefit.

To that end, we will, from time to time, draw on experts to look at the opportunities, potential pitfalls, and policy options that arise from very technologies.

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Some Brief Thoughts On The Economics of Accessibility

We have tremendous faith in the power of technology, particularly in its potential to open new doors of opportunity for the disabled. But we live in the real world and the undeniable truth is that all people to do not have the same physical and cognitive abilities. Accommodations that work for the some, won't work for others and the universe of possible accommodations is infinite.

When we create software systems and web content we want to make our work as widely available as possible, but in the real world we have to be cognizant of cost, time, and technological constraints. The web production environment is highly non-uniform on both the client and server sides making for a staggering number of permutations. Unlike the print world, one has dramatically less control over most of these factors.

Web Accessibility has come a long way in recent years, but clearly not far or fast enough from one's personal perspective if one has a disability. This has lead some advocates to call for dramatically expanding Web Accessibility legislation.

Doing so may certainly accelerate the deployment of accommodations vis-a-vis large governmental and corporate sites in the short term. Unquestionably it would represent an economic boon to lawyers and accessibility consultants and to those advocates and groups bringing law suits to enforce such legislation.

But we need to ask ourselves if it would lead to rational economic choices that would really maximize the accessibility of online content for all users.

Particularly with a recession looming, fear of accessibility law suits could lead to a contraction of the online sector as web masters might cancel rolling out new sites and services that hadn't been fully certified for use with assistive technology.

The uncertainty could prove crushing.

What disabilities does one need to accommodate and to what levels? Is it enough to work with some assistive technology? What if there are disabled plaintiffs who refuse or can't afford to use those solutions? Will advocates for those with cognitive limitations be able to challenge a site operator for the use of language at too high a reading level? How much money would be spent retooling sites that in practice aren't even being accessed by those with disabilities being accommodated? What are the responsibilities of the disabled if any to meet content providers half way by using the best assistive technology at their disposal?

Currently there is no way for a webmaster to know which if any resources on his or her site are proving problematic to disabled visitors. So a rational step would be to engineer some sort of voluntary technical mechanism to permit disabled visitors to transparently log their needs.

Of even more concern is the potential for political exploitation that would use any expanded accessibility mandate to attack sites based on their content as interest groups would race to line up disabled plaintiffs. Then they might attack video porn sites for insufficient captioning or demand that political groups take down some of their advocacy essays because they weren't written in sufficiently simple language.

Likewise, some corporations might find that bringing such attacks against rivals would be an effective way to delay their introduction of competing products or to win government contracts.

In any case, the amount of money that could be expended pursuing legal cover if accessibility becomes a matter of regulation and litigation would represent a tax on web content creation and when you tax a resource, you get less of it.

Given the choice between budgeting significant resources to close caption web videos of public events in real time or to hire outside experts to validate that a novel animated user interface is sufficiently accessible to blind users, many if not most organizations may opt not to upload the web video and to stick to an old style static website without any interactive content. If such mandates extend to encompass writing style, sites might be written in ever more simplistic language with progressively less substance.

Do we really want to go down this road? Is it even Constitutional in the US? Clearly, 1st Amendment Freedom of Speech issues are at play.

Consider the outcome if Print Publishers were mandated to produce Audio editions of every text to accommodate blind readers and Braille editions for those who are both blind and deaf (not to mention the question of which level of braille to support). It is a safe bet that were this the case, there would be far fewer titles available for anyone to read.

What would happen if nothing could be sold unless everyone could use it? Would we even consider such absolutists' thinking in the physical world?

Might it not be wiser instead to develop better assistive technologies, have government reach out to put them in the hands of the disabled, use private organizations to work on standards and collaborate with commercial players like Google to provide an anonymous mechanism to let disabled users reflect their accommodation needs in web analytics reports.

Accessibility has both a technological and an economic dimension. Web masters, corporations, and even individual bloggers want to do The Right Thing. So we need to take a realistic and holistic view of the accessibility problem and put some market cues in place by providing a technological way for site operators to learn the needs of their actual and potential users. Otherwise, we run the risk of wreaking economic havoc at the worst of all possible times in a failed pursuit of our idealism.

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The National Security Agency's Data Mining Effort by John Brantley Halstead

It gives us the greatest pleasure to announce our publication of, The National Security Agency’s Data Mining Effort by John Brantley Halstead, the first in an ongoing series of Public Policy Analysis papers.

Abstract: Thanks to the personal sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, much of the current world terrorist activity occurs outside of the United States. Thanks to intelligence and law enforcement, we are currently able to prevent terrorism from within our borders. Unfortunately the tremendous result of terrorism occurring elsewhere has removed the reality of terrorism from some of the public’s thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. Because of intelligence, law enforcement, and the armed forces’ effectiveness, we are often insulated from a simple reality. The nation is currently conducting operations, while guarding most of our personal privacy, against an enemy who knows no national boundaries and is fanatically committed to the destruction of our nation.

The use of Data Mining by the National Security Agency to process communications logs and identify patterns of activity associated with the activities of terrorist networks may well be a key element in this ongoing success. However, it has proven highly controversial in the media and raises legitimate questions from privacy advocates. Fundamental to the NSA debate is an understanding of what data mining is and isn’t.

Given the timely nature of this topic and the lack of any appreciable substantive media coverage of the true nature of the technology behind this important public policy debate, we have invited a data mining expert, John Brantley Halstead of The United States Military Academy at West Point to prepare this Public Policy Analysis. In it you will find an approachable nonpartisan introduction to this key End User Computing Application along with an exploration of what questions the public should be asking as it evaluates the appropriateness of the use of this powerful tool in the Global War on Terror.

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Legal Innovation

Just as in the realm of software, there are several major Paradigms in the realm of Law. Foremost among them are Case Based Reasoning by Analogy in through the processes of litigation, Expert System like programmed responses derived from formal Legislation and Regulation, and mutually negotiated protocols for problem solving under the Law of Contracts. We find this last approach to be the most in accord with promoting technological innovation as it puts decision making in the hands of the effected parties and permits the alternate approaches to be employed simultaneously.

Witness the tremendous success of the Open Source Movement in transforming the computing landscape in recent years.

As we contemplate the design of a fine grained component architecture for The IEUC Baseline, we will explore the development of a new generation of licenses to cement the social compact under which the platform can give rise to a new information ecology in which End Users can all mix and match components from divergent sources — a goal not necessarily compatible with some of today's licensing models.

Likewise, as we noted elsewhere, there is a dark legal cloud eclipsing the Retro-Computing Movement which could be lifted with a suitable standard Retro-Computing License under which old ROMs could be release and perhaps even monetized to the mutual benefit of vendors and users alike.

Fortunately, the IEUC is rich in legal talent and well positioned in innovate in this area.

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Orphaned Technologies

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

— Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

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One of the most fascinating phenomena of End User Computing is the tenacity with which some End Users hang on to Orphaned Technologies.

Orphaned Technologies are solutions that once functioned in labs or in the wild (as commercial or free products), which are no longer being improved on or supported, and which often offered capabilities for which there may be no acceptable modern day substitutes.

Examples of orphaned technologies would include:

• IRDA Infrared File Transceivers on desktop systems which were once employed by personal data capture devices to synch their data with one's primary PC
• Voiceprint Biometric Based Audio Login under Apple's Mac OS 9
• The OpenDoc component software environment
• The Dylan Programming Language
• The Prograph Multiparadigm Visual Programming Language
• HyperCard
• The Newton Message Pad 2000
• The interactive Engines for Education CD-ROM
• The hardware based LISP Machine

(Ironically, while Apple Computer is often credited as being one of the most innovative players in the personal computing industry it is also notorious for abandoning countless promising enabling technologies which with just a bit more work or better marketing would have proven markedly superior to their modern counterparts, hence the predominance of its technologies in any discussion along these lines.)

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Captive Technologies

Captive Technologies are an interesting subset of Orphaned Technologies whose Intellectual Property Rights are controlled by an entity which:

• Doesn't offer them for sale.
• Asserts sweeping intellectual property rights in them to block third parties for developing similar technologies.
• Ostensibly claims to wish to market them but then prices them at a point where no rational business
  or consumer would purchase them.

An entity may employ one or more of these tactics and the line here can be somewhat blurry as what looks like a Captive Technology to an outsider might actually mask a top secret internal R&D thrust on the verge of producing a mass market success.

For example, since shortly after the Newton 2000's demise, Macintosh Rumor Sites have been forever speculating on the imminent arrival of a mid-sized tablet form factor device from Apple to serve as a business-class e-book reader and PDA replacement. It is unknowable outside Apple whether the long term absence of such a device reflects a conscious decision of Apple's management to abandon this market and just sit on its Newton technologies, since the failure to release a replacement product could be more a function of persistent engineering roadblocks that the company is secretly racing to circumvent.

There are two primary rational explanations for why so many promising technologies are held captive. Either they might threaten to disrupt one of their owner's successful ongoing business lines or, in the case of Patent Trolls, they are seen as points of leverage in disrupting a target's business in the hope of extorting payments from the target to avoid being sued by the captor since the costs of mounting a defense could destroy the profitability of the target regardless of the merits of the claim.

There is little, short of radical Intellectual Property Law Reform with a system of Mandatory Licenses and the outright elimination of all Software Patents, which could free these technologies.

In other cases, mostly with pure software, a holding company may acquire the Intellectual Property Rights to code written for a defunct platform, and then offer absurdly overpriced licenses for the right to try to get it running in an emulator with no guarantee of success. Since one wouldn't even know if it was possible to make such code work before having access to it, no rational economic analysis would lead a person to make that purchase.

Likewise a faculty member may develop a really innovative and potentially useful enabling technology under the assumption that its natural market should be a massive international mega-corp in some particular sector. This can lead him or her to refuse to release the technology for anything less than a single sale that guarantees instant riches. Meanwhile, the pursuit of such a jackpot forecloses the possibility of the technology's widespread use on a more modest scale.

In most instances, Orphaned and Captive Technologies represent a failure of rights holders to rationally try monetize their assets!

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Retro-Computing

Some otherwise Orphaned Technologies develop such a passionate following that their users refuse to let them die.

Retro-Computing is the maintenance, unauthorized upgrading, or emulation of orphaned vintage computing environments.

Thus old Infocom text adventure games find new life on Apple's latest iPod Touch and countless old operating systems have found new life using virtualization technology.

Unfortunately, these solutions often depend on the acquisition of a copy of the ROM chips from an orphaned system which casts a very dark legal cloud the enterprise as ethical users have great difficulty in finding legal copies of these critical files. Given the economics of litigation it is doubtful that we will ever see a definitive court holding on which circumstance under which making copies of ROMs for retro-computing purposes is a Fair Use outside a Library setting.

At the IEUC we are looking at how this problem could be addressed through a restricted licensing model that might be voluntarily adopted by developers (i.e. a standard Retro-Computing License under which one could freely duplicate old ROMs and discontinued programs for noncommercial use in emulators).

It is also our view that a fine grained software component architecture will open the door to new business models where an innovator can release a capability to the platform marketplace at large and then derive a revenue stream based on its subsequent usage without having to divine all of its potential applications beforehand.

A final possibility, is the assemblage of large aggregate user groups to pool their financial resources and perhaps working in the non-profit sector purchase and release to the public Intellectual Property Rights to some Orphaned and Captive Technologies.

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