Ad Hoc Human Information Nets for Asymmetric Threat Surveillance

"Ad Hoc Human Information Nets (hereafter Humint Nets), consisting of humans, mobile computing technology such as laptops and PDAs, and possibly disposable sensors, present a significant opportunity for conducting asymmetric threat surveillance. The PDAhardware is gaining in maturity, and the economies of scale are already well-established. Therefore, the ability to deploy Humint Nets on a large scale can be achieved from both economic and technological perspectives. While the economics and hardware tomake Humint Nets work are both well-developed, the same cannot be said of the software on PDAs. In this proposal, we address the system software needs that must be addressed in order to make the vision of Humint Networks a realistic possibility. At thecore of the proposal are four areas we will explore as part of a feasibility study: distributed micro-databases; distributed query processing and power optimization; distributed services; and managing ad hoc information with XML on small devices. Todetermine feasibility, some lightweight prototyping will be done in each of the four areas, toward the ultimate goal of producing a report and set of requirements for a more comprehensive product development effort. The availability of lightweight database implementations will be a major boon to application development on handhelds. Environments such as the Palm presently provide limited support for databases.The use of distributed computing tech