The Internet has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world, but it was not designed from the beginning as if it would be. What if you could redesign the Internet knowing what we know now?
As my colleague Carolyn Duffy Marsan points out in her excellent article this week on the future of the Internet, the National Science Foundation has been looking for answers to that question. The NSF for several years has been funding projects that look to design the Internet’s architecture as if they were doing so from scratch, as part of its Future Internet Design (FIND) program.
Recently, the NSF took that effort up a notch with its Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) program. This program acknowledges the far-reaching impact of the Internet and asks researchers to take that into consideration. It expects teams to bring together mathematicians, computer scientists, social and economic scientists, and engineers to focus on “developing the scientific foundations necessary to understand and reason about socio-technical networks.”
It’s an interesting approach, beyond simple network design, because it requires that any frameworks “explicitly incorporate human values at multiple levels and scale.” Proposals are also supposed to take into account the diverse ways people might use the Internet in the future, to support sound economic models and to promote social benefits.
Information is already available in mass quantities and in a highly distributed way. But the NSF is asking researchers to extrapolate that further and to figure out how to deal with moving that information and navigating through it in a better way. The NSF writes: “These new kinds of models, capabilities, and architectures in turn enable the exploration of new applications that provide information based on both content and context, and the improvement of existing classes of applications, such as gaming, virtual worlds, augmented reality and tele-presence.”
Ah, well, there you go. They’re looking to reinvent the Internet as a gaming platform. There’s an effort I can get behind.
