Chapter Nine: What is next? Futuristic Thinking for Community Colleges

The times in which we live are marked by massive transformations; politically, socially, and scientifically, and on what feels like a daily basis. Our efforts to plan and forecast, even for periods as little as five years distant, have been predicated on the assumption that the current rate of progress will continue into impending periods. Author and inventor, Ray Kurzweil calls this the “Law of Accelerating Returns”. If we were to study a wide variety of technologies ranging from the electronic to the biological, via a multitude of gradations and measures, according to Kurzweil, we would find that our commonly held belief in a static rate of change is misguided. Change, progress, and advancement are occurring at an increasing rate

Soft eSkin:distributed touch sensing with harmonized energy and computing

Inspired by biology, significant advances have been made in the field of electronic skin (eSkin) or tactile skin. Many of these advances have come through mimicking the morphology of human skin and by distributing few touch sensors in an area. However, the complexity of human skin goes beyond mimicking few morphological features or using few sensors. For example, embedded computing (e.g. processing of tactile data at the point of contact) is centric to the human skin as some neuroscience studies show. Likewise, distributed cell or molecular energy is a key feature of human skin. The eSkin with such features, along with distributed and embedded sensors/electronics on soft substrates, is an interesting topic to explore. These features also make eSkin significantly different from conventional computing. For example, unlike conventional centralized computing enabled by miniaturized chips, the eSkin could be seen as a flexible and wearable large area computer with distributed sensors and harmonized energy. This paper discusses these advanced features in eSkin, particularly the distributed sensing harmoniously integrated with energy harvesters, storage devices and distributed computing to read and locally process the tactile sensory data. Rapid advances in neuromorphic hardware, flexible energy generation, energy-conscious electronics, flexible and printed electronics are also discussed. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Harmonizing energy-autonomous computing and intelligence’

The Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program: Funding Issues and Activities

This report discusses the High-Performance Computing and Communications Program Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-194), which was passed to enhance the effectiveness of the various high-performance computing programs. The HPCC Program has evolved over time and is now called the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, to better reflect its expanded mission