The explosion of information technologies has set in motion a virtual tidal wave of change that is in the process of profoundly affecting organizations and individuals in multiple dimensions.

Information has, until recently, been inseparable from command structures.

The selective dissemination of information has been used as a tool to define and shape the environment to ensure conforming behavior.

Transformation is fraught with both risks and opportunities because it will affect the nature of the information provided as well as the manner in which it is provided.

The full implications and consequences will not be clear for years to come.

We are not in a position to take the apparently safe and comfortable road.

We must design a strategy that identifies and anticipates negative repercussions and enables us to avoid those repercussions or minimize their impacts.

The dynamics of information dissemination have changed considerably in the latter half of this century. What was once a predominantly highly constrained and vertical information flow has evolved into a mix of vertical and horizontal flows.

The sheer volume of information received could frustrate the ability to quickly identify critical information for the decision at hand.

Better education and training are needed to develop the necessary skills to handle these information-rich situations.

Sophisticated presentations can obscure ... [with] a mixture of "fact" and inference.

When information is freely available, superiors tend to micromanage, and subordinates are likely to second guess.

Effective training must instill the judgment required to differentiate between sufficient and necessary or desirable information.

The unintended consequences of adopting information age technologies are 1) virtually ubiquitous, 2) complex enough to require more than one type of remedy, and 3) involve actions among various organizations that need to be closely linked or coordinated in order to be effective.

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)

The theme of the 15th CFP is

    PANOPTICON

We are particularly interested in receiving proposals that ask the hard questions about privacy and freedom in emerging surveillance societies, and challenging those assumptions.

In addition, other topics of interest include

Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved.

But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered.

There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing.

To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design.

Research under way at ORNL could lead to entirely new, highly energy-efficient ways of lighting buildings using the power of sunlight.

In addition to providing light, the technology would convert sunlight to electricity much more efficiently than conventional solar technologies.

This monograph presents a unique approach to "connecting the dots" in intelligence -- selecting and assembling disparate pieces of information to produce a general understanding of a threat.

The Internet is a loose amalgamation of independent service providers acting in their own self-interest.

We examine the implications of this economic reality on peering relationships. Specifically, we consider how the incentives of the providers might determine where they choose to interconnect with each other.

We consider a game where two selfish network providers must establish peering points between their respective network graphs, given knowledge of traffic conditions and a nearest-exit routing policy for out-going traffic, as well as costs based on congestion and peering connectivity.

We focus on the pairwise stability equilibrium concept and use a stochastic procedure to solve for the stochastically pairwise stable configurations. Stochastically stable networks are selected for their robustness to deviations in strategy and are therefore posited as the more likely networks to emerge in a dynamic setting.