From the Editors: Whose Data Are These, Anyway?

Certainly the medical community, struggling with new HIPAA rules governing medical privacy, doesn’t seem to have managed to provoke an engagement from the computer-science and software-engineering research community. This is unfortunate for several reasons: our community has the ability to make a unique and valuable contribution to the discussion, and now is the time to resolve conceptual issues and design decisions so that the next generation of infrastructure can accommodate the emerging requirements.