Corporatek - Research

Building the Information Technology, Communications and Security Ecosystem through R&D...
At Corporatek Research, we view today's and tomorrow's Information Technology, Communications and Security (ICS) Ecosystem as a transdisciplinary, highly symbiotic system concept specifically that must be adapted to and constantly modulated around the environment and requirements of living in the information era.

The distinctness of this view of the ICS Ecosystem stems from the fact that it leverages the immense power of today’s information and telecommunications technologies, as a seamlessly integrated whole, to provide both the infrastructure and the superstructure for living and learning in the modern world.

More specifically, at Corporatek Research, we strongly believe that:

	The ICS Ecosystem must provide the complete Information Technology and Telecommunications infrastructure to perform all functions related to the application of these technologies such as networking and physical communications; but, as importantly,
	The ICS Ecosystem builds on this infrastructure to provide the superstructure of services and interactions required for living in the "post technology hype" era.

In other words, the infrastructure component of the ICS Ecosystem represents its physical layer while the superstructure represents its services layer.

Within the realm of this holistic vision of the ICS Ecosystem,: we also believe that the primary and most important challenge of a true ICS Ecosystem is to solve the dilemma of the “Present Future” that faces every planner of information systems today. The solution to this problem requires not only technical vision but a profound understanding of the economic, social and sometimes political factors that influence the evolution of Technology as well as a solid grasp of the parameterization of these factors.

Hence the mission of Corporatek Research:
An active participation in building and cleaning the Information Technology, Communications and Security Ecosystem through serious and highly directed R&D contributions.

Established in 1987, Corporatek Research is one of the major segments of the company's activities. Highly directed research and development work is conducted by the division in the following areas and domains:
	Cryptography and cryptophony
	Coding and compression theory and systems
	Object-oriented databases
	Real-time specialization of object-oriented models
	Wireless digital data communications
	Multiple access protocoles and congestion control mechanisms
	Wireless location systems
	Symbolic computing
	Grid computing
	Computing environments modeling
	Biometric devices modeling

In the near future most objects that we work with will be equipped with processors and embedded software to perform and control a multitude of tasks in our everyday environment. Many of these objects will be able to communicate with each other and to interact with the “environment” in carrying out the tasks they are designed for. With the internet (and its successors) sitting on top of communication networks of increasing flexibility and bandwidth, the result will be a massive networked infrastructure composed of highly diverse interconnected objects that should support the design and use of systems with a predictable and desirable behaviour.

The developments in information and communication technology are expected to enable the design of computational and information processing systems that are based entirely on the abundance of available infrastructure and processing power around us. These developments will lead to the enormous challenge of defining and exploiting dynamically configured systems of mobile entities that interact in novel ways with their environment to achieve or control their computational tasks.

The envisioned systems are highly dynamic: physical devices are mobile, connectivity and bandwidth are changing, computational processes and data can migrate, and applications come and go. The availability and responsiveness of the resources that are active in an application at any given point in time are unpredictable and difficult to control. The scale of the systems is expected to be extremely large, in number of components and, in some cases, in geographic area spanned. The design issues involved in the construction of systems that can be configured in such environments pose enormous challenges to computer science, calling for focused research on the foundational problems that need to be solved.

To harness the flexibility and power of rapidly evolving interacting systems, radically new foundational ideas and principles are required. This vision of the near future will require several serious research initiatives to develop the theoretical foundations needed to enable the design of these systems in the future and to cope with the many complex issues raised by their construction.

The goal of these initiatives as a whole is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively.

We believe that true and viable initiatives will concentrate on systems having the following characteristics:
	The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners.
	The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another.
	The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time.
	The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered.

As to the issues related to the design of such medium and large-scale systems of autonomous mobile entities, they can be formulated as follows (non exhaustive list):

Openness:
Sometimes one can make certain assumptions about the nature of the entities, for example because they have all been built using a given programming language. In a completely open system, such assumptions cannot be made. It is important to understand the nature of tradeoffs between openness and issues like security and trust.

Models of computation:
What is a suitable model of computation? What are the programming abstractions that “package” these models so as to enable ordinary programmers to construct reliable and robust applications?

Efficiency and computational limits:
The choice of a particular model of computation has implications for the notion of performance and efficiency and may lead to limitations on computational power.

Models of communication/interaction:
The characteristics of these systems will need a new and probably completely different way of dealing with co-ordination and network control than that investigated hitherto in the context of distributed computing. Novel assumptions may have to be made about the nature and/or quality of communication.

Algorithms:
Coping with faulty and dynamic components is a known challenge in the design of robust algorithms. The lack of uniformity in the systems to be designed leads to new problems.

Programming:
Well-engineered programming languages that provide direct but flexible support for building such systems need to be designed and implemented. Subsequently, many questions will arise in the development, analysis and transformation/optimization of programs in such languages.

System development:
What is an appropriate logic for specifying and reasoning about such concepts? How do you understand a computation when you have only a partial view of it and your collaborators also have only (different) partial views? How does one test such a system? How does one organize distributed development of software? How does one define safety criteria and which architectures will meet them?

Adaptability:
How can an entity adapt to the situation it finds itself in, given its lack of knowledge of the state of the computation and the configuration of the environment?

Security:
Networks are partitioned into administrative domains by firewalls and other security barriers. Movement of entities through security barriers should be possible under appropriate circumstances, without undermining the security of the facilities or the entities.

Resources:
How do entities become aware of the available resources and their cost? Should there be mechanisms for entities to secure resources temporarily?

Mission

Research Areas

A Vision of the Future