Keynote 2

Summary form only given. This talk discusses research opportunities for MASCOTS participants due to a confluence of trends in applications, technology and theory. APPLICATIONS: Organizations around the world want to use information technology to support sustainability; for example, the G20 summit in June focused on water, food, energy and health security, and disaster mitigation. Systems that help sustainability are, perforce, socio-technical systems: they are cyber-physical systems that involve people at every stage. TECHNOLOGY: Sensors, tablet and phone computers, Cloud services, and petascale parallel computers are improving rapidly and getting cheaper. The cost-effectiveness of technology enables radically new approaches for critical applications. THEORY: Developments in applications of economics and game theory to information technology systems, machine learning, “big data” architectures, and performance modeling allow novel ways of solving applications that help all elements of society. This talk suggests that MASCOTS participants are ideally poised to make important research contributions in critical applications that exploit the trends in technology and theory.