http://planetaryskin.org/THE PLANETARY SKIN INSTITUTE - Nasa - Cisco.http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/02/planetary-skin-institute-nasa-cisco.htmlField McConnell & David Hawkins - 9-11 was a Fabian Society job.http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/02/9-11-was-fabian-society-job.htmlOverviewAt a number of recent international meetings, public and private sector leaders agreed that in addition to appropriate target setting (eg. that follow the evolving science) and predictable large-scale financing, meeting the challenges of climate change will require the creation of transparent and trusted mechanisms for monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) and of decision-support capabilities to enable both mitigation and adaptation execution programs to address the climate change challenge. The essential preconditions to effective agreements in climate change are the trust and transparency that come from reliable and auditable measurement. We can’t manage what we can’t measure.
The transition to a low carbon economy will require a vast array of small and large decisions made by a range of governments, corporations, communities and other stakeholders. But currently they are forced to make these with only very partial information. To unlock reliable, scaleable, open participatory mechanisms to achieve trust and informed decision making we need to pool the assets and capabilities of researchers in public and private sectors, leading space agencies, NGOs, think tanks, academia and international scientific institutions. No single institution has the capabilities, assets or knowhow to complete the R&D program required on its own– national and international cross-sectoral collaborations are key.
Complex Water, Food, Energy and Integrated Land Use Systems
* Land-Use and Terrestrial Carbon Sink Management
* Food Security
* Fuel, Food, Fibre and Feed Land Competition
* Adaptive Water Management
* Securing biodiversity
Complex Energy Systems
Our R&D portfolio in this domain will focus on :
* Adaptive end-to-end energy systems
* Integrated ‘energy-mobility-built environment’ virtual ecosystems
* GHG monitoring and environmental market enablement
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Planetary System-Wide Transitions
Our R&D portfolio in this domain will focus on :
* Planetary Boundaries and
* Climate Threshholds
* Disease vectors and Pandemics
* Urban-Rural-Ocean transitions
* Major Dislocations
CiscoIn researching and developing the Planetary Skin with NASA, Cisco has been driven by the belief that the Internet is reaching its next turning point. The history of computer science has been described as a search for “what can be (efficiently) automated”. The fundamental challenge today is to look beyond this and find the best way to manage the relationship between what can be efficiently automated and what cannot – i.e. human judgments and interactions, especially across organizations and sectoral boundaries. The scale, diversity and location of the people, sensors, assets, machines, etc that will drive this phase of development requires a new set of capabilities both in and on the network. Nothing shows this more clearly than the Planetary Skin.
The Planetary Skin is a unique R&D program that will help shape the architectures, foundational technologies, tools and strategies that this next generation of the Internet will require. This fact has recently been recognized by Tim O’Reilly, originator of the phrase “Web 2.0” who, at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, identified two themes he sees as key for the future of the Internet. First, he said, sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and second, Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.
This is the Internet that requires highly distributed and collaborative geospatial, analytical, visual, and immersive decision support platforms that aggregate other subsystems using open standards i.e. the platform of platforms.
We require a platform of platforms that integrates legacy environments, yet also provisions distributed services able to traverse firewalls, automate event management, and tap into highly distributed unified computing and scientific modeling services and utilities, as well as handling the geospatial oriented networking demands of zettabytes of data. These requirements today are only addressed in a limited way, more often in proprietary approaches in specialized settings, behind firewalls, and in client/server silos that prevent us from extracting cognitive meaning.
The key characteristic of the future of the internet though will not be technological. Rather, the future of the internet will be defined by the way it enables a loosely integrated and constantly changing fabric of communication, collaboration, tele-immersion, and data services to enhance the decision-making processes of the human network.
KEY PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
The PSI’s program’s activities will take place in seven regional hubs across the world, in several phases. The key products of PSI will focus on:
* Undertaking rapid prototyping projects that demonstrate value to decision-makers coordinated through global network, governance, outreach and R&D agenda
* Providing unique global data sets and modeling outputs through PSI's open climate change decision support cloud infrastructure
* Hosting the Global Climate Solutions Exchange for the benefit of policymakers, businesses and communities globally to jumpstart execution towards a low carbon economy
* Development of the roadmaps and business plans for the public-private partnerships to enable replication and scaling of the Planetary Skin platforms
* Facilitating the transition of prototypes into operation through both open source/innovation and venturing
