This large National SCience Foundation Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) is an umbrella grant for many CITRIS activities, and supports both fundamental work in the above listed CITRIS technologies (rows) and driving applications (columns), as well as synergies among them.
The driving applications include
(1) boosting efficiency of energy production and consumption, and
(2) saving lives and property and establishing emergency response IT infrastructure in the wake of disasters, among others.
The solutions to these applications have the common feature that they depend on highly-distributed, reliable, and secure information systems that can evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment, delivering networked information services and up-to-date sensor nnetwork data stores over ad-hoc, flexible, and fault tolerant networks that adapt to the people and organizations that need them.
We call such systems Societal-Scale Information Systems (SISs). An SIS must easily integrate devices, ranging from distributed ad-hoc sensors and actuators, to hand-held information appliances (such as PDAs), workstations, and room-sized cluster supercomputers at Network Operation Centers. Such devices must be connected by ad-hoc sensor nets, extranets, short-range wireless networks as well as by very high-bandwidth, long haul optical backbones.
Distributed data and services must be secure, reliable, and high-performance, even if part of the system is down, disconnected, under repair, or under (information) attack. The SIS must configure, install, diagnose, maintain, and improve its quality of service features, this applies especially to the vast numbers of sensors that will be cheap, widely dispersed, and even disposable. Finally, the SIS must allow vast quantities of data to be easily and reliably accessed, manipulated, interactively explored, disseminated, and used in a customized fashion by users, from expert to novice.