No abstract

Emerging technologies, defined as contemporary cutting-edge developments in various fields of technology, are generally associated with the potential for large impact on society. In a recent op-ed, “The coming Tech-led Boom” (Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2012), Mills and Ottino list three grand technological transformations — big data, smart manufacturing, and the wireless revolution — poised to transform this century as much as telephony and electricity did in the 20th century. This list is by no means comprehensive and most likely misses technologies that are not yet recognized, but may still carry an extreme impact — i.e., the so-called Black Swans, as defined by New York Times best-selling author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book, The Black Swan. Taleb cites the example of three recently implemented technologies that most impact our world today — the Internet, the computer, and the laser — and notes that all three were unplanned, unpredicted, and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after initial use. In this paper, we will examine several emerging technologies, present a methodology to create a breeding ground for potential Black Swans, and finally discuss the societal and ethical aspects of these technologies.

A proliferation of mobile smartphone platforms, including Android devices, has triggered a rise in mobile application development for a diverse set of situations. Testing of these smartphone applications can be exceptionally difficult, due to the challenges of orchestrating production-scale quantities of smartphones such as difficulty in managing thousands of sensory inputs to each individual smartphone device. This work presents the Android Tactical Application Assessment and Knowledge (ATAACK) Cloud, which utilizes a cloud computing environment to allow smartphone-based security, sensing, and social networking researchers to rapidly use model-based tools to provision experiments with a combination of 1,000+ emulated smartphone instances and tens of actual devices. The ATAACK Cloud provides a large-scale smartphone application research testbed.

A proliferation of mobile smartphone platforms, including Android devices, has triggered a rise in mobile application development for a diverse set of situations. Testing of these smartphone applications can be exceptionally difficult, due to the challenges of orchestrating production-scale quantities of smartphones such as difficulty in managing thousands of sensory inputs to each individual smartphone device. This work presents the Android Tactical Application Assessment and Knowledge (ATAACK) Cloud, which utilizes a cloud computing environment to allow smartphone-based security, sensing, and social networking researchers to rapidly use model-based tools to provision experiments with a combination of 1,000+ emulated smartphone instances and tens of actual devices. The ATAACK Cloud provides a large-scale smartphone application research testbed.