The descendants of the Personal Digital Assistant are increasingly powerful and sophisticated mobile devices, with rapidly evolving and continuous awareness (of location, orientation, peers). Combined with ubiquitous connectivity, social networks, and embedded multimedia, our PDA has the potential to amplify thoughts, actions as well as personal information and errors, globally. In software and devices we understand the importance of protection and compartmentalization due to natural or induced errors, and we invest in ever-increasing capabilities for cyber attack prevention, detection, and containment. As the human and device become more and more closely linked, it will be crucial to extend and expand these concepts to include and anticipate human decisions and their impact on the systems and the people they represent.

Charlie Catlett is Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. He is also Director of Argonne’s Computing and Information Systems Division, and a Senior Fellow at the Argonne / University of Chicago Computation Institute. His current focus areas include cyber security and transformation of information infrastructure.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985 and his early work there included participation on the team that deployed and managed the NSFNet. In the early 1990’s Catlett participated in the DARPA/NSF Gigabit Testbeds Initiative, coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Catlett was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (GGF, now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 through 2004. During this same period he designed and deployed one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use – I-WIRE, funded by the State of Illinois.

He has been involved in Grid (distributed) computing since the early 1990s, when he co-authored (with Larry Smarr) a seminal paper “Metacomputing” in the Communications of the ACM, which outlined many of the high-level goals of what is today called Grid computing.