Theme Chair: Jack Smith, Defence R&D Canada
As ICT has evolved toward a degree of early maturity - where essentially it has demonstrated a capacity for efficient self contained management of many organized and intelligent functions, and an ability to create its own economics and growth dynamics, it also is now becoming apparent that ICT will begin to merge into the non self contained background of ubiquitous applications - mainly through convergence with other emergent platforms such as bio, nano, cogno, eco and collaborative design systems whose capacities for innovation are only now starting to be revealed.

Indeed - the many themes of this Conference suggest that Convergence may be a meta theme because of its broad reach and deep consequences. Just as other general purpose technologies through history (e.g. printing, steam power, internal combustion motors, electricity) - or perhaps more correctly - technology platforms - have penetrated everyday life to the point that they become so normalized that they are almost assumed to always be available and reliable, ICT is now poised to create a very intense period of innovation through convergence.

Theme Chair: Christian Couturier, Director General – National Research Council Institute for Information Technology, Canada
In the Knowledge Economy, the health care paradigm is shifting so far as to be an inversion. In the Industrial Age the focus was on medicine (the discipline), hence professional care was encouraged, pushing up the cost with its emphasis on the most expensive level of care (primary, secondary and tertiary care). Through access to information, the model in this age will be inverted: the emphasis is on the individual's health and wellness, on individual self-care, friends and family and self help networks and only then do professionals come into play through evolving roles such as facilitators (i.e. a nutritionist or a nurse practitioner for example) then as partners (family physicians) and finally as authorities. Hence Information Technology will play an increasingly important role in every aspect of Health and Wellness (curative and preventative medicine alike). Examples of IT usages go from back-office (Management Information Systems i.e. billing and one-patient-one-record) to medical devices (Equipment Health Monitoring, Imaging and Modeling, etc.) as well as from Diagnostics and Population Health (Medical records text mining for improved diagnostics or public safety) to Tele-Health (home-care delivered via Internet and broadband technologies with remote sensing technologies) and from Clinical (Molecular Diagnostics Tools i.e. omics) to Pharma (Reduction of the development cycle of new life sciences technologies i.e. drugs) - and all of it integrated (i.e interoperability) and secure. What pitfalls and challenges need to be considered (e.g. data management policies, legacy environments, system-to-system integration and reliability, testing); Privacy legislation updates on current implementation achievements and challenges; social and ethical implications of the use of BodyNets (brain computer interactions; assistive technologies).

Theme Chair: Phillip Long, MIT - USA and University of Queensland - Australia
"Teachers - leave the kids alone!" From school to the virtual classroom, eLearning is fueling one of the most radical revolutions in education, replacing the traditional teacher-driven supervised learning environment by the learning focused student-driven environment leveraging web-based individualized content. By 2020 almost all the knowledge will be available on-line. Several issues arise, which need to be addressed if we want to unleash the power of eLearning: what is the role of the school as place for learning? Is learning to be regarded as a universal right and accessible irrespective of geography with open educational resources accessible to everyone from everywhere? Will the discovery of knowledge be self-directed, dictated strictly by individual interest, or will new forms learner focused, mentor guided frameworks emerge from hybrid environments yet to be developed? What can governments do to sponsor such efforts? How can public-private partnerships foster new learning architectures?"

Theme Chair: Neel Sundaresan, Sr. Director and Head, eBay Research Labs
eCommerce, which coincided with the emergence of the internet infrastructure and applications less than 20 years ago, has led changes with surprisingly successful models that were counter-intuitive to the methods of the past or expectations of the future. The roaring successes defined by eCommerce companies like eBay, Amazon, and Google and others who broke the traditional models for commerce and monetization have been repeated examples of this. The "Long tail" phenomenon defined by the success of large number of instances of small things - whether be it people, products, or properties, has been fundamental to this. P2P, Social Networks, Blogs have only fuelled this. These successes were only confirmed by emergence of the People Web aka Web 2.0 in the past couple of years. The future only gets interesting from here as we dare to solve problems that were unsolvable at the scale we are seeing before in terms of infrastructure, platforms, data, and applications, with participatory resources like people and computing. At the same time the governing bodies, wanting to enable and, at the same time, manage this phenomenon, have introduced variables such as the internet tax, privacy and piracy laws. The theme on eCommerce will look at how technology, people, and governments will interact and compete at the same time to define the nature of eCommerce of the future.

Theme Chair: Ebon Fisher, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA
As much as the "art world" and the "religion worlds" would like to claim authority on the domains of aesthetics, spirituality and ethics, the anthropological reality is that we are no longer organizing our mental lives as devotedly around such domains as we used to. Film, radio, television, cell phones, computer games, locative media and the internet have all, in one way or another, collapsed the local into the international, creating a blur of perceptions, dreams and social mores which are increasingly difficult to pin down, refine and pass judgement on. The emerging, planet-wide, multi-ethnic and multi-class eNetworked discourse has upended all the verities. The continuous re-wiring of art, media and ethics poses many critical questions about how to educate our young and ourselves to find a sense of grace, beauty and ethical bearing.

Theme Chair: Andres Sousa-Poza, USA
In the 1st century AD, Heron of Alexandria invented the Aeolipile; the first steam turbine; a technology that was not recognized for what it was or what it could do due to the prevailing dispositions; not unlike modern information communication technologies (ICT). It took visionaries such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon in the 13th century to set the stage for the modern scientific age and consequently the industrial era for Heron-s invention to fulfill its true potential.

We presently face mounting anxiety caused by the perceived increases in complexity and uncertainty. This anxiety is a result of having pushed our existing paradigms to their fundamental limits. These paradigms, that were so adequate in dealing with the industrial advances of the last two centuries, are incapable of dealing with the non-monotonic condition that we now face. Our Achilles Heel may be the knowledge-based society that we so strive for; embedding the ideologies that are at the root of the paradoxes that we face. Paradoxes in which increases in knowledge do not yield greater understanding, and more information does not yield improved communication. A revolution is necessary to establish a new paradigm that liberates the potential of modern information communication technologies.

The Approaching Reality Theme will focus on the use of -Environments- in all of their forms (decision spaces, C2 battlelabs, training labs, exercises, DSS, ESS, Knowledge Management Systems, etc.) to gain an understanding of the epistemic, ontological and methodological principles that will effectively allow us to deal with and leverage existing ICT.

Theme Chair: Tim Rosenberg, President and CEO White Wolf Security , USA
Co-Chair: Jack Smith, Defense R&D Canada
Current and future trends are pushing convergence across multiple domains. This convergence and its acceptance (sometimes blind, sometimes not) by consumers, producers and nation states has produced many positive results. However, as we continue to approach the technological singularity the unprecedented benefits of convergence is exposing its users to new and unforeseen risks. From the rise of global identity theft; to nation sponsored cyber attacks and the realities of combined warfare, the safety and security of a nation, its people and its place in the global market is becoming more difficult. Can governments successfully fulfill their obligation to protect? While not insurmountable, these complex and integrated security problems require complex and integrated solutions and novel approaches. Complex gaming offers an opportunity to model possibilities when partnered with a persistent environment inhabited and used by the global community. This environment allows us to harness the creativity of humanity for the betterment of global stability and security.

Theme Chair: Unho Choi, Executive Director, Korea Logistics Network Corp., Korea
Ubiquitous Technology allowing internet connection anytime, anywhere and by any device is now coming to old cities. A world where anyone can freely connect to computer networks regardless of time and place and obtain information they want, in other words, a futuristic state-of-the-art city only dreamed of in movies will become reality in world.

The Seamless service by connecting to the broadband network anytime and Anywhere ; Secure the infrastructure that is necessary for the construction of new cities such as Multifunctional Administrative City, Innovation City, Enterprise City

Theme Chair: Richard Somerville, USA
In the 21st century, humanity will decisively replace nature as the dominant agent of climate change. Mankind is inadvertently changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the sea, increasing the natural greenhouse effect, acidifyng the world ocean, and adding pollution particles that will lead to a dramatically altered future climate. Understanding, predicting and coping with this unprecedented threat to the global environment will be impossible without path-breaking advances in IT. These will include developing vastly more comprehensive numerical simulations of the climate system, deploying novel space-borne and in situ sensors to observe the changing climate, re-educating the global public and the political and business communities on the science and implications of climate change, and exploring pros and cons of alternative solutions. The ethical dimensions of climate change will pose extraordinary challenges and opportunities as mankind grapples with questions of climate equity among developed vs. developing nations, and assesses the rival claims of present vs. future generations. The prospect of intentional geoengineering of the Earth and a massive restructuring of the global energy system will demand IT tools to explore multi-dimensional future planetary scenarios.

Theme Chair: Yaneer Bar-Yam, President New England Complex Systems Institute, USA
Co-Chair: Rene Doursat, Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris
The explosion in size and complexity of ICT systems in all domains of society (as exemplified in the themes of the IT Revolutions conference: healthcare, education, defense, business, energy & environment, etc.) has opened the door to entirely new forms of social organization characterized by a high degree of decentralization. Myriads of artifacts and humans, connected via computing hardware and software elements, exhibit self-organization and unpredictability that fundamentally challenge traditional systems engineering--based upon requirements and top-down management. The New Deal of the ICT age will be characterized by diverse and specialized eNetworked proactive participants (healthcare providers, patients, professors, teachers, students, politicians, soldiers, producers, users, consumers, etc.). This spontaneous trend has preceded our ability as designers to comprehend and control it, while also oppening new opportunities for exploiting the formidable potential of ICT advances. Therefore, we need to develop a sense of capability and security in the changing context. Instead of clinging to an inexorably disappearing totalistic control, we should focus on establishing conditions in which the wave of complexity can develop and evolve by endogenous and local control. At the core of this enterprise lie paradoxical questions: Can autonomy be planned? Can decentralization be controlled? Can evolution be designed? Can we expect specific characteristics from systems that we otherwise want to let free to assemble, and possibly invent, themselves? We welcome contributions to new integrated and multidisciplinary approaches to pervasive computing and communication environments able to address and harness complexity.

Theme Chair: Professor David Benyon, Napier University, Scotland, UK
In the next few years pervasive, adaptive and virtual reality technologies will provide incredibly realistic simulations of the real. At the same time concerns about terrorism, global warming and population growth will make travel and other real experiences more dangerous and expensive. As a result people-s experiences of places and other people, of history and culture will be increasingly mediated by technologies. In this theme position papers will be presented to stimulate discussion of the benefits and dangers that arise as we replace the real with simulated experiences. In particular we look at the issues of social interaction mediated by technologies and how to achieve a real sense of presence for distant people. Issues arising from interacting with virtual characters and issues of pervasive and adaptive technologies will also be presented.

Theme Chair: Mike Hollinshead, Facing-the-Future, Canada; and Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto, Canada
The ICT New Economy is the latest in a long line stretching back to the Middle Ages. Research on new economies in modern times has identified robust patterns that include multiple substitutions. They occur in primary energy and in social and organizational paradigms. The centre of the world economy shifts and there are revolutions in armaments and warfare and consequent geopolitical shifts.

The current new economy shifts are unusual in that they are being accompanied by a paradigm shift in Western science, a world view shift in the West, the passing of Western hegemony, a fundamental economic shift from pyrotechnology to biotechnology and climatic cooling. At the same time world population growth is slowing and the populations of important elements of the world economy face declining populations within a decade. No historical world economy has grown in the absence of population growth. To find analogues it is necessary to go back to the 17th and 14th centuries and neither is exact. We are in uncharted territory.

Consequently, the ICT New Economy is very unusual and will be very surpriseful. It is a watershed for meta transitions. It will not follow the standard pattern.

Theme Chair: DK Arvind, Director, Research Consortium in Speckled Computing, UK

Theme Chair: Jose Luis Martinez Lastra, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Current technological advances under the umbrella of the Web 2.0 have enabled an unprecedented level of interoperability and information exchange at the factory floor. These advances are leading to a redesign in the way factory automation systems are developed and built. Devices and machines will be able to discover each others with no previous knowledge on each other's type and collaborate towards the resolution of a common goal. These systems will be chaotic yet present a clear emergent behavior targeted at on-demand user's goals. They will use dynamic architectures allowing autonomous re/configuration of hardware and software structures, deploying software agents that can intelligently use web services in order to build adaptive systems. Technologies driving this major redesign are semantic web services (the resulting field of merging Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Semantics), embedded systems, and wireless sensor/actuator networks.

Theme Chair: Allan Syms, CEO Ant Nano, UK
There surely can be no greater paradox than nano is big. Without a doubt the creation of new materials and their nanoscale manipulation is heralding a new industrial revolution. From one perspective nanotechnology is a new science offering a bewildering array of new products and opportunities. From incorporating carbon nanotubes to make high performance sportswear, to creating nano surfaces for self cleaning glass, to new ways of delivering drugs and in the construction of microprocessors, nanotechnology approaches in a very dramatic and exciting manner. From another perspective, traditional giants in industry can argue that nanotechnology is just a fanciful way of describing what chemical manufacturing has been doing for hundreds of years and perhaps the biggest claim to being the fathers of nanotechnology could be argued by the IT industry itself. Isn't it strange that while nanotechnology is providing one of the greatest drivers for the creation of new high technology businesses - its roots lie deep within the heart of industry more often considered less able to innovate as they mature? And yet for all the potential benefits that nanotechnology has to better healthcare, improved and cost effective manufacturing and to faster and more powerful communications and data processing - mankind fears what it cannot see and understand. The social and ethical debate will be the ultimate paradox of all.

Theme Chair: Peter Chapman, Canada
The value of the Internet stems from its ability to free the end user from the services defined by the service provider while allowing services defined by and for the end user. These services do not require, as is often believed, packet switching. Paradoxically we are in danger of replacing our well defined and well managed Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) architecture with a packet-switching architecture with less potential for the wide ranging future eNetworked applications. The paradox here is that in order to implement unmanaged packet switching we were forced to introduce buffering and store and forward in the network. It is the buffering and store and forward (which eliminated the need for end to end connectivity) - rather than the packet switching technology - what gave us the adaptable Internet that we use today. This fundamental mistake is due to an unfortunate and inaccurate association between the need for end to end availability and connectivity with TDM, including the associated inaccurate description of TDM as -circuit switched-. TDM does not require more end to end connectivity and availability than packet switching does. A closer look reveals that TDM has a number of advantages over packet switching when it comes to the requirements for the future eNetwork performance for real time applications, resilient connection and security / authentication.

Theme Chair: Wolfgang Gentzsch, Director At-Large, Board of Directors, Open Grid Forum, Germany
These days, the computing paradigm is shifting again, this time from silo-oriented to service-oriented architectures; from proprietary to open; from static to dynamic; from directly accessing local computers to accessing remote computing and application services. Currently, we are observing a transition towards virtualized resources in a dynamic, often distributed and shared, and fully automated environment. Soon, with new -- Grid and Cloud -- technologies and infrastructures available, we will enhance the Internet by seamlessly integrating computers, storage, sensors and sensor nets, digital experiments and instruments. And we will access these resources and services through our Web browser, remotely, securely, transparently! Just as another utility, from the wall socket. And this will again dramatically change the way we work, and we learn, and we live.

Theme Chair: Peter Palensky, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Artificial Intelligence, the big promise of the last millennium, has finally made its way into our daily lives. Cell phones with speech control, evolutionary computing in data mining or neural network optimized power grids proof its applicability in industrial environments. The original expectation of true intelligence and thinking machines lays still ahead of us. Researchers are, however, optimistic as never before. Combining new groundbreaking technology with new findings in psychology, linguistics, computer science and neurology brings us closer to the moment we - as individuals and as a society - should be prepared for: machine consciousness. Many fruitful applications (ambient assisted living, car safety support, etc.) stands opposed to the unknown social implications of complex and potentially intelligent environments. Information technology is the driving force and carries both the potential and the responsibility for this development. Future will happen, the question is how can we design it our way?

Theme Chair: Mihaela Uliery, University of New Brunswick, Canada
A major characteristic of eNetworked systems is that they cannot be a-priori defined - but rather emerge from the 'bottom-up' interactions between individual systems (and people). This clashes with the traditional systems engineering that approaches the design of organizational, systems and software blueprint 'with the end in mind', namely by a-priory defining the system and its performance requirements following a hierarchical, 'top-down' linear thinking. This creates a paradox (or tension) in our traditional systems thinking. Paradox is a questioning prevailing logic and assumptions embedded in design, analysis, and transformation of eNetworked systems that can drive our thinking to new levels. How do we answer questions such as: more system control requires less system control; system solutions are system problems; complex systems are also simple systems; or the more a system is understood the less it is understood. Contributions for new, integrated and multidisciplinary approaches to 'design by emergence' are called for the engineering of paradox in our eNetworked systems thinking

Theme Chair: Professor Elizabeth Chang, Australia
The disconnect between government, business sector and education providers is as common as the more familiar gap between business requirements and technology solutions, which in itself gains a novel dimension in cross-border settings. The general public from discrete societies formed self-organized communities and social networks have taken the lead to push the world from a traditional closed competitive environment to an open, loosely coupled, collaborative environment, where each organizations and individuals is proactive and responsive for its own benefit and profit. They create value by making connections through the pervasive use of the modern infrastructure and collaborative IT frameworks. However, at the government (the public sector), industry, business (the private sectors) and international institution level (semi-structured), the broad spectrum of the collaboration is not yet seen except heard. Reconciling strategies, policies and solutions in the extended, multi-national, multi-organization, multi-institution, multi-linkage industry R&D centres requires a deep understanding of information deliveries, social contract, self-organized digital ecosystems, coalitions, communities and cross fertilization benefit and their debate among government, business, academia, and technology stakeholders.
Contributions are called from all stakeholders involved to suggest ways to move forward in unleashing the power of ICT to global collaboration for government, business and education sectors, including mage trends in collaborative digital ecosystems, linkages between government, business and institutions, revolution in ICT Education, etc. The theme is seeking practical answers; solutions and debate about the paradox between the traditional disconnect world and the rocket speed of ICT world, and how to prepare our future generations to take the advantages of the values of the global collaboration in the 21 century.

Consumer multimedia devices, especially video and still cameras, are increasingly becoming the tools of choice to create potentially illegal content. At the same time, the need for scientific gathering and investigation of evidence at a crime scene calls for increasing use of digital techniques, raising questions of the veracity and completeness of evidence.