Computer Scientists Preview Internet of the 21st Century

Within the next decade, the World Wide Web will be truly worldwide. Billions of people spanning the globe will be using the Internet to shop, bank, monitor their health, make travel plans, keep in touch with family and friends and much more. Information will travel in petabits-per-second, the speed at which data equal to six times the 20 trillion bytes in the entire Library of Congress can be transmitted.

And it won't be necessary to sit at a computer desk to do any of it.

"Up to now, the Internet has been a sit-down kind of technology," said Professor Mario Gerla at the daylong symposium. "We're now developing the software and services that will enable access from anywhere -- a store, an airline flight, a pocket radio you're carrying as you walk down the street."

Each of us will move through the world in what Gerla calls a "personal bubble," with cell phone, headset, Palmtop-type device, laptop computer and other devices all interconnected wirelessly and functioning as an integrated whole.

These developments will pose new challenges, preeminent among them, the need for enhanced computer security, said Adjunct Professor Peter Reiher, an authority in this arena.

"When we built the Internet infrastructure, we pretty much assumed everyone would cooperate," Reiher said. "For the most part, this was true. Nothing very bad has happened. But as the 21st century approaches, viruses are getting more malicious, and we've seen increasing vandalism in the form of things like distributed denial of service attacks. The worst possibilities haven't happened yet."

Research is already underway to build security into the Internet's infrastructure, Reiher said, to thwart hacker attacks and filter out unsolicited e-mail and other "junk."

The explosive growth of e-commerce also poses a challenge to researchers, noted guest speaker Stuart I. Feldman, director of the IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce.

Computer scientists are in a race to keep ahead of the fast-paced technology curve with the development of new software that is vital to e-business. The period of time between software development and its implementation is becoming increasingly short.

"There's a real small time frame between, 'Eee-hah! I can do it!' and 'Who cares? My 10-year-old nephew is doing that as a school project,' " Feldman said.

On the health front, said Associate Professor Rajive Bagrodia, researchers are working on a project called the Nomadic Healer with the UCLA Medical Center that will give physicians 24-hour interaction with colleagues and access to electronic patient records via the Internet from any location. Faced with a medical emergency, a doctor could order tests for his or her patient and review the results via the Internet from anywhere - a restaurant, the beach, a movie theater.

If all goes well with this research, Bagrodia said, the Nomadic Healer or a system much like it will be available when UCLA's new medical center opens in 2004.