Talk:Project ideas

On behalf of cmbenner:

Some things I’d like to hear other opinions on: whether these are fledgling project ideas—or could inspire such—or just non-lecture specific musings, I’m not sure...

1. Provision of cybersecurity as a sort of market failure: how to create consumer demand? To properly give credit, Steve Maurer inspired me to think about this in an email exchange: if consumers can’t judge security for themselves, companies don’t have an incentive to provide it.

So many difficulties here: isn’t it difficult to judge how secure a piece of software is, even for computer scientists? And security depends not only on the software, but on its users as well -- how can you possibly measure that?

How to fix it? Independent labs like the Underwriters Labs if they can come up with ways to measure security may be a good idea, if you can get consumers to value their judgment, and act upon it with their dollars. Certify programmers, make their employment contingent on secure code? Make software companies culpable? A couple of billion-dollar lawsuits for security breaches might do the trick -- of course this could easily slow innovation to a crawl, if not stifle it entirely, if software companies were too scared to be sued for everything.

Another related issue: If Linux had absolutely the same number of vulnerabilities as Windows, which would be more secure? Probably Linux, for the reason that the bad guys get more for spending their time attacking Windows. "Security by obscurity" is not a valid security measure in and of itself, but it doesn't hurt. This seems to be an interesting angle since most of technology works the other way -- the more ubiquitous the technology, the “better” it is (it's much easier to share Word docs than WordPerfect ones).

2. Encouraging innovation: what does the open source model offer? Jumping off from the lectures on how to encourage innovation: It seems it’s often assumed that open source methods of collaborating, whether in software development or other areas, foster innovation. But, as the Economist argued a few months back [1], it’s unclear that open source methods can actually encourage genuine innovation: the article noted that the open source movement in software development hasn’t created anything new but rather equivalents of proprietary software (databases, operating systems…)

I suppose the answer to this question depends on how you define “innovation.”

And related: how might wikis contribute to the innovation process?

IT Outsourcing

[Damon May] Along the lines of a blurb I just wrote on the main discussion page, I think it'd be interesting to do a project on the current state of outsourcing in the IT industry, projections for the future, and the things that government and industry can and/or should do to stem the trend.

SMM: Hint: If you aren't already familiar with them, you should brush up on the economic argument that free trade always makes society richer -- the buzzwords are "comparative advantage" and "returns to trade." The material is not hard: Any intro econ book should have it. Of course, we've never taken free trade to the extreme of letting human beings flow freely back and forth across borders. Outsourcing blurs that distinction.

James Welle: I am interested in this as well. It would be interesting to look at history in other industries ( the auto industry for example ) and try to predict what may or may not happen to the US technology workforce due to outsourcing. It would like to look at other related issues such as unions as well and do an analysis of how this could benefit or harm the industry.

James Welle: I moved this discussion to the specific outsourcing page.

Universities and Cyberinfrastructure

[Joanna] As we are experiencing in this class, developments in IT can significantly alter how both education and research are carried out in universities. But significant hurdles exist in adopting new technologies in the university environment including financial limitations, resistance to change and a decentralized organizational model. I think an interesting project would be to look at how IT can change education and research, what has worked so far and what are the challenges of bringing new technologies into the university environment.

SMM: There's also the question of whether distance learning is a threat to traditional universities, whether they can compete if their professors put all their old lectures on the Web for free, etc.

Lecture 3 discussion: ELectronic voting for a billion people

http://slate.msn.com/id/2107388/

IT projects that span countries with different policies?

How about a topic about the issues you run into with having IT projects that cross global markets? For instance, Yahoo was strongly encouraged by France to stop selling Nazi goods ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1098466.stm ), and Google is constantly in the news about the filtering the Chinese government is supposedly doing to remove information that isn't acceptable, like on the Falun Dafa ( http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/006/ ). There's a ton of stuff in this area, including things you might not think of like the need to name certain countries "correctly", not draw borders in "contentious" ways, and to ship multiple language versions because certain countries don't allow, say, just an English version and no French version.

SMM: Good topic. You might want to take a look at Larry Lessig's book "CODE," which lays out the basics. Note that this is a traditional problem in the physical world -- think about how we supported Radio Free Europe to annoy the Russians and all the choice-of-law cases where a California consumers sue Pennsylvania manufacturers. One good way to think about the Web is to ask what, if anything, is different from physical space and whether the rules need to be different as a result.

More international topics

Walker Under the "North-South" topic fall many interesting subtopics concerning IT in an international context, but there are some that fall a bit outside the "developed world -- developing world" dichotomy that are also of interest...

• Profile of <nation>'s IT ecosystem: How does culture, level of development, political structure, broader industrial policy affect <nation>'s IT ecosystem. Of particular interest are the ways in which <nation>'s policies and practices differ from the United States, and if there is anything that can be learned or applied from <nation>'s model. Also of interest is <nation>'s ecosystem in relation to the broader global community(this aspect was partly touched upon in a post above "IT projects that span countries with different policies?" ). I am thinking that <nation> might be India or China, but also could be Germany, Japan, Britain, etc.

• IT in East Asia / IT in the EU / etc.: Similar to the subtopic above, but with a focus on the relationship between regional blocks of nations. The wars over standards and IP, for example, often break along regional lines. With respect to East Asia, there looks to be an interesting story to tell regarding the growing ties between China, Japan, and South Korea in IT... IPV6, mobiles, Linux; what are the implications for Open Source, and the broader structure of the software industry?

Iking Another idea in the international realm: should an emerging nation, still learning to feed, clothe and educate its citizens, focus significant resources on IT? The underlying question is how IT can benefit an emerging nation, as distinct from how we perceive its impact in developed nations, and whether the return - short and long term - justifies the expenditure of resources in the short term (considering that housing, education, health care, etc. all compete for those same resources).

Walker 18:45, 18 Oct 2004 (PDT) moving discussion to "IT Abroad" topic discussion page

Sources of additional project ideas

It would be good to see a bit more action on the course project wiki!

Here are some places to troll for ideas:

1. The USACM website: USACM (see the left-hand column)

2. The Aspray text

3. The course syllabus (note, for example, some topics at the bottom we're not getting to, or some topics we're including but giving short shrift to)

4. The ideas we have posted