and laptop computers—into the collaborative environment involves an ability to scale across different levels of resources and adapt to variable or unstable resources in a crisis. User-controlled adaptivity may be useful, allowing the user, for example, to select trade-offs between video image quality and frequency of image redrawing and between still and moving images; alternatively, there may be automated ways to optimize these decisions. These types of scalable collaborative applications are relevant not only in crisis management but also in other application domains, including distributed "collaboratories" for academic research and enterprise systems for business.

Although the workshop series ultimately focused on crisis management as a tool for uncovering valuable research areas in computing and communications, the steering committee and workshop participants spent time considering other application areas. These served both as additional input from which to identify research issues and as a means of testing the generality of conclusions based on crisis management. The following sections, drawn primarily from input at the workshops, highlight similarities and differences between these domains and crisis management, including specific research opportunities that, with respect to crisis management, are discussed further in Chapter 2. All of these areas have been addressed more thoroughly in other, focused reports. They are reviewed here briefly to provide a context for—and to examine their interdependence with—crisis management. Citations are provided to more extensive treatments.

The first two areas, digital libraries and electronic commerce, represent both end-user applications in themselves (e.g., educational use of libraries, consumer banking, and retail transactions) and infrastructural services that enable specific capabilities within other application areas. For example, crisis managers could turn to digital libraries for information discovery and retrieval tools or to electronic commerce for secure authentication and payment services in order to obtain proprietary information on an expedited basis.

The other two areas, manufacturing and health care, are applications that, like crisis management, may derive significant benefit from broadly distributed computing and communications technologies. Manufacturing and health care applications (other than emergency medicine) place less emphasis on urgent, ad hoc response than does crisis management, and so integration and other technical challenges can, in principle, be addressed in a less ad hoc manner. Nevertheless, these areas face many of the same challenges as crisis management for coping with complexity and diversity, integrating information and software resources, and adapting to user capabilities and needs.

The interconnected demand for and use of resources among application areas illustrate the potential for technological advances in one application area to benefit others. They also indicate the drawbacks in terms of lost flexibility of failing

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Overview and Summary (1-7)

Application Needs for Computing and Communications (8-54)

Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs (55-98)

Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application (99-138)

Bibliography (139-142)

Appendixes (143-144)

A Workshop Series on High Performance Computing and Communications (145-155)

B Background--HPCCI and NII (156-157)

C Acronyms and Abbreviations (158-160)