PREFACE

I recently celebrated my 50th birthday 26 productive years after I received my Ph.D. On this important milestone, I reflected back on my life, as I could not help but find myself in total agreement with what both Aristotle and Einstein said: the more one learns or knows, the more one realizes how much he/she does not know. I always wanted to learn more, so over the years I have expanded my parallel processing expertise from heterogeneous computing (topic of my first book) to bio‐inspired and nanoscale integrated computing (topic of my second book). Expanding the application of both of these technologies further to medicine with an emphasis on their legal and ethical aspects is the main aim of this third book. This book is a product of the progression of my research, from undergraduate study until now.

In the early part of my research career and as a research student at the University of Southern California (USC), I concentrated on the design of efficient very‐large‐scale integration (VLSI) architectures and parallel algorithms, especially for image and signal processing. Such research focused on my development of fast algorithms for solving geometric problems on the Mesh‐of‐Trees architecture. These techniques have been applied to several other architectures, including bus‐based architectures and later on architectures such as the systolic reconfigurable mesh. Thirty years since their inception, these results are still showing their utility in the design of graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures.

Later, as part of my Ph.D., I focused my attention on applying my Mesh‐of‐Trees results to the area of optical computing. I produced the Optical Model of Computation (OMC) model, through which I was able to show the computational limits and the space–time tradeoffs for replacing electrical wires with free‐space optical beams in VLSI chips. Based on the model, I designed several generic electrooptical architectures, including the electrooptical crossbar design that includes a switching speed in the order of nanoseconds. This design was later extended to an architecture called “optical reconfigurable mesh” (ORM). Algorithms designed on ORM have a very fast running time because ORM comprises a reconfigurable mesh in addition to having both a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) and electrooptical interconnectivity. OMC is a well‐referenced model that has been shown to have superior performance compared to many other parallel and/or optical models. Based on OMC, the well‐known local memory parallel random access memory (PRAM) model was developed. Furthermore, variations of OMC were adopted by the industry in designing MEMS chips.

Soon after I graduated, I took a leading role in starting the heterogeneous computing field. I am the editor of the field’s first book, Heterogeneous Computing, and the cofounder of the IEEE Heterogeneous Computing Workshop. The book in conjunction with the workshop shaped the field and paved the path to today’s “cloud computing.” As one of the first paradigms for executing heterogeneous tasks on heterogeneous systems, I developed the Cluster‐M model. Prior models such as PRAM and LogP each had their limitations because they could not handle arbitrary systems or structures with heterogeneous computing nodes and interconnectivity. Cluster‐M mapping is still the fastest known algorithm for mapping arbitrary task graphs onto arbitrary system graphs.

For over a decade now, I have been focusing on the bio‐ and nanoapplications of my work. I am a founding series coeditor of “Nature‐Inspired Computing” for John Wiley & Sons and have edited the first book of this series, Bio‐inspired and Nanoscale Integrated Computing. This is truly a multidisciplinary topic that required a significant amount of training from several fields. Toward this multidisciplinary field, I have studied various techniques for designing nanoscale computing architectures where computations are subject to quantum effects. One of the most notable works I have produced in this area is a joint work with my colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The work was announced as a breakthrough result by numerous media outlets and was explained in many review articles worldwide. It involved the design of a set of highly interconnected multiprocessor chips with spin waves. These designs possess an unprecedented degree of interconnectivity that was not possible previously with electrical VLSI interconnects, because they can use frequency modulation to intercommunicate among nodes via atomic waves. Furthermore, the information is encoded into the phase of spin waves and is transferred through ferromagnetic buses without any charge transmission. The spins rotate as propagating waves, and as such, there is no particle (electron/hole) transport. This feature results in significantly lower power consumption as compared to other nanoscale architectures.

Extending nanoscale computing to cellular biology, I have studied applications of spin‐wave architectures for DNA sequence matching. I have shown that these designs have a superior algorithmic performance for such applications. Also, because they can operate at room temperature, they have a great potential to be used as part of miniature implantable devices for biomedical and bio‐imaging applications. I have been investigating efficient methods for designing injectable nanorobots that can be used for the detection and treatment of various diseases, especially cancer.

My most recent area of research has been in technology law. I am investigating how various forms of emerging technologies may be impacted by, and come into conflict with US and international policies and laws. For example, while pervasive (heterogeneous/ubiquitous) computing and nanotechnology are two technologies that are entirely different from each other, they both are seemingly invisible: one in terms of interconnectivity and the other in terms of size. Their overwhelming potential coupled with their peculiar nature can continuously magnify challenges to policies and laws that protect rights and property. Such challenges and related legal and ethical issues are discussed further as a chapter in this book, especially as applied to their applications in wireless computing for medicine.

This book contains 21 chapters presented in five parts. In Part 1, my students and I have presented an introduction to the book in the first chapter, and in the second chapter, we have given an introduction to the two wireless technologies used in the book: pervasive computing and nanocomputing.

In Part 2—Pervasive Wireless Computing in Medicine, there are seven chapters detailing pervasive computing for medicine. Authored by the leading scientist in the field, these chapters cover a wide range of topics such as pervasive computing in hospitals, diagnostic improvements: treatment and care, collaborative opportunistic sensing of human behavior with mobile phone, pervasive computing to support individuals with cognitive disabilities, wireless power for implantable devices, energy‐efficient physical activity detection in wireless body area networks, and Markov decision process for adaptive control of distributed body sensor networks.

Similarly, in Part 3—Nanoscale Wireless Computing in Medicine, there are seven chapters authored by leading scientists. These chapters all focus on the application of nanocomputing in medicine. The topics include an introduction to nanomedicine, nanomedicine using magneto‐electric nanoparticles, DNA computation in medicine, graphene‐based nanosystem for the detection of proteomic biomarkers of disease: implication in translational medicine, modeling brain disorders in silicon nanotechnologies, linking medical nanorobots to pervasive computing, and nanomedicine’s transversality: some implications of the nanomedical paradigm.

Finally, in Part 4—Ethical and Legal Aspects of Wireless Computing in Medicine, the ethical and legal aspects of wireless computing in medicine are presented in four chapters by leading scholars in this area. The topics include ethical challenges of ubiquitous health care, ethics of ubiquitous computing in health care, privacy protection of electronic healthcare records in e‐healthcare systems, and ethical, privacy, and intellectual property issues in nanomedicine. After this third section, we provide a brief conclusion in Part 5.

In addition to the two introductory chapters and the conclusion chapter, I have coauthored one of the chapters in Part 1 (“Wireless Power for Implantable Devices”), two of the chapters in Part 2 (“An Introduction to Nanomedicine and Nanomedicine Using Magneto‐electric Nanoparticles”), and one chapter in part 3 (“Ethical, Privacy, and Intellectual Property Issues in Nanomedicine”). Evidently, most of these chapters deal specifically with nanomedicine. I believe nanomedicine is one of this century’s most promising scientific fields in which we can soon expect to see many life‐altering advancements. Targeted delivery of drugs to cancer cells is already in animal‐testing stages with very impressive preliminary results. Furthermore, various techniques are currently being studied to develop nanorobots that can aid in both detection and treatment of cells.

I invite you to learn more about this exciting field by reading this book. You will see that the more you learn, the more you will realize how much there is yet to be learned and...