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Project Neuromancer
Jim Waldo, Tim Blackman, Jane Loizeaux,
Bob Sproull, Michael Warres, Ann Wollrath
May 24, 2007 - This is the summary report of the Neuromancer project, an investigation into the infrastructure needed to support large-scale, non-invasive medical sensing. The project tried to address the problems of dealing with very large amounts of data gathered and stored in a loosely-federated system that needed to grow and change in unpredictable ways that were not subject to centralized control.
The project explored a number of issues central to the questions of building scalable, long-lived systems. In particular, the project created approaches to identifying objects that move from one place in the network to another, and mechanisms for dealing with intermittently connected network participants. The project also developed a theory concerning access control within medical contexts that is different from standard security mechanisms designed for financial or military applications.
We ultimately decided to discontinue the project for a number of reasons that were both technical and sociological. The paper discusses these reasons, which range from difficulties in securing an environment in which code is moved from participant to participant to the economics of the medical industry in the United States.
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