In the January issue of Computer

The continued exponential growth of computational power and data-generation sources is giving rise to a new era in information processing: data-intensive computing. In this annual Outlook issue, we examine the challenges posed by this changing paradigm, featuring articles on grid-computing infrastructures; advances in biochemical computation; and sensor networks monitoring environments, systems, and complex interactions in a range of applications such as healthcare, fitness, and entertainment. We also look at the 24-hour knowledge factory for software development and revisit the professional and ethical dilemmas in software engineering.