School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney

Speaker: Dr Charles Petrie, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, USA

Abstract:

Enterprises are now connected internally and externally to other
Enterprises via the Internet in ways that are increasingly difficult
to manage, especially as these interconnections become more dynamic.
Current methods of coordinating the effects of change as they
propagate through these networks of connections are not likely to
scale.  What is needed is a new paradigm for how the Internet supports
such coordination. Indeed, the Internet should and could provide
fundamental coordination functions that are missing today.  In this
talk, we describe how such a ``Coordinated Internet'' would work.

The key functionality of a Coordinated Internet would be that the
Internet actively watches what people do (analogous to search
completion on desktops today), correlates these activities, and
actively notifies people when and how their current tasks affect and
are affected by the activities of other people. This would be
accomplished by standard coordination functions implemented as a
common Internet layer that can be used as a utility by more
specialized applications.

Such a Coordinated Internet would revolutionize enterprise
management, for all enterprises, large and small, corporate and
personal. For example, static workflows would become obsolete for all
but the the most routine processes. Some solutions provide existence
proofs of such a coordination substrate, such as the Redux solution in
concurrent engineering, which we describe herein. However,
foundational research remains to be done in the new field of
Coordination Engineering in order to reach the goal of a future
Internet in which coordination functions are fundamental.

Biography:

Charles Petrie is a Senior Research Scientist working in the Stanford
CS Logic Group. His research topics are concurrent engineering,
enterprise management, and collective work.  Dr. Petrie was a Founding
Member of Technical Staff of the MCC AI Lab, Founding Editor-in-Chief
of IEEE Internet Computing, and Founding Executive Director of the
Stanford Networking Research Center. He is the Founding Chair of the
Semantic Web Services Challenge. He has also been a Consulting
Assistant Professor with the Stanford Center for Design Research.  He
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at
Austin.  A more complete biography is available at
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/%7Epetrie/bio.html