Connecting the Two Ends: Mobile Clouds
In 1959, the colorful and brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman, gave a seminal lecture to the American Physical Society entitled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he considered the implications of matter manipulation at the atomic scale – a vision of then future nanotechnology. In computing, we also have plenty of room at the bottom, paradoxically enabled by plenty of room at the top. I speak, of course, of the transformative power of our now ubiquitous mobile devices and rich sensor/actuator networks (smart dust) coupled with the capabilities of immense cloud data centers. These two extremes of the modern computing scale are reshaping our society in deep and profound ways.
