“A partnership model to effectively engage the research community in agenda-setting is the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). With support from the National Science Foundation, the CCC allows the computer science community to establish a vision for the field and quickly mobilize the community to pursue “big ideas.” Could this type of consortium work for the nanotechnology research community?”

For example, the RFA for NCER’s Education Technology program (RFA CDFA 84.305a) states:

To support research on education technology tools that are designed to provide or support instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, or science (including pre-reading, pre-writing, early mathematics, and early science) or to provide professional development for teachers related to instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, or science. The Institute intends to contribute to improvement of reading, writing, mathematics, and science learning by (1) developing innovative education technology tools intended to improve reading, writing, mathematics, science, or general study skills; (2) evaluating fully developed education technology tools intended to improve reading, writing, mathematics, science, or general study skills through efficacy or replication trials; (3) evaluating the effectiveness of fully developed education technology tools intended to improve reading, writing, mathematics, science, or general study skills that are implemented at scale; and (4) developing and/or validating assessments that use education technology and that can be used in instructional settings.

The long-term outcome of this program will be an array of education technology tools that have been documented to be effective for improving reading, writing, mathematics, and science achievement.

The Education Technology program — like all programs under the Education Research Grant Programs — accepts applications twice a year.

For more information about these and other funding opportunities through NCER, check out the center’s FY 2010 RFAs — http://ies.ed.gov/funding/10rfas.asp — and submit a proposal if your research is appropriately aligned.

(Contributed by Chase Hensel, CRA/CCC Tisdale Fellow)

In collaboration with the PLDI organizing commitee, the CCC is happy to announce the winners of the FIT session:

1) Outfoxing the Mammoths, by Marek Olszewski and Saman Amarasinghe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;

2) Resource-Based Programming in Plaid, by Jonathan Aldrich, Carnegie Mellon University; and

3) Dualities in Programming Languages, by Martin Hirzel and Priya Nagpurkar.

These three were selected based on an online poll of registered participants of PLDI. Olszewski, Aldrich, and Hirzel will each receive travel grants. Their presentations and papers can be found on the FIT Web page.

Many thanks to the PLDI community! And please check out the presentations and comment about them below.

(Contributed by Frans Kaashoek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Specifically, Gabriel started by highlighting five key changes that have occurred at DARPA in the past year:

- “Go/no-go” is gone.

- Contracting has been simplified. The process is as clear, simple, and fast as the law allows.

- More realistic conflict of interest rules have been applied to people coming to work at DARPA.

- Program managers are once again managing programs.

- Program managers have been reeducated about the need to consider basic research as a critical element of their programs.

He further reeled off three directions moving forward:

- Manufacturing. “One of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is a decline in our ability to make things,” he said. “Americans consume more goods today than ever before – and yet we are less likely to be employed in manufacturing than we have been at any time in the past 100 years. [But] to innovate, we must make. It’s hard to build and field systems needed to protect the nation with a service economy.” Gabriel stated that DARPA is identifying and building on the fundamental challenges in making things.

- Edge-finding. “We often talk of globalization as boundless,” he said. “But sociologists will tell you that as long as there are humans involved there are boundaries. In the cyberworld, our inability to define the edges is a world of peril. This is one of the most technically challenging tasks of our time.” Gabriel challenged us to understand the following: What are the edges of truth in this environment? How do we assess them? How are they relevant?

- Cyber. “In 2010 and 2011, DARPA will invest over $300M in cyber-enabled initiatives,” Gabriel advised. “DARPA-developed technologies are already prevalent in both government and commercial venues. For example, DARPA technology protects DARPA servers again denial-of-service attacks.” DARPA is pursuing several new initiatives, including clean-slate technology on adaptive posts for resilience; safer computing that seeks to create assured confrontations on un-trusted hardware without the traditional performance sacrifices; etc.

Finally, Gabriel called on the computing research community to help by getting to work:

So today, I’d like to call you to action. [It’s] a call to return to the core values of the agency. A call to service. And a call to collectively reach for something bigger – more expansive – and more enduring. This is the time to dig deep and go to the edge – to find the nerve together.

At DARPA, we say you can’t lose your nerve.

The deputy director’s talk underscores the dramatic evolution of DARPA that we have witnessed in just the past year.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

The Principles course comes in response to the observation that the current offerings at most high schools are not appealing to many students.  These courses are either on computing literacy (e.g. using word processors and spreadsheets) or are traditional computer programming courses.  The former is largely vocational and the latter is perceived by many students as being dry, irrelevant, and requiring previous background.

In 2008, approximately 15,000 high school students took the AP Computer Science whereas approximately 7 times as many students took AP Statistics, 10 times as many took AP Biology, and 15 times as many took AP Calculus AB.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of students arriving at college and indicating an intention to major in a computing discipline is only a few percent and only 0.3% for women.

One aspect of this initiative is to add 10,000 new computer science high school teachers in 10,000 schools in the United States by 2015.

To learn more about the rationale, design, and implementation of the new course
go to www.csprinciples.org.  To participate in the online community for this initiative go to www.computingportal.org/cs10k.

The hearing began with a session on “Science, Technology, and Diplomacy” that featured the three founding members of the Science Envoys program – Bruce Alberts, Elias Zerhouni, and Ahmed Zewail – speaking candidly about their experiences as part of this new diplomatic effort, which places U.S. scientists in foreign nations to promote international relations. The three envoys shared insights they had gleaned while trying to improve diplomatic relations with Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Turkey, and the U.A.E.

A prevailing sentiment was the urgent need for a “focus on capacity building.” Instead of taking technologies to foreign nations, we need to teach these nations to teach themselves, the envoys reported. Further, they commented that, while STEM education is lacking in the U.S., it is even worse in developing nations. The world currently has an estimated shortage of 10 million teachers, and the science education per capita continues to decrease each year.

Each envoy reported receiving surprisingly warm receptions as a science diplomat – and felt the program should be expanded. The envoys also argued that the role of the “State Department scientist” could not likely be salvaged from its current status as “career-ending.” Instead, they urged science agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, to adopt rotational programs to send experts to various foreign embassies for short periods of time.

All in all, the session presented hope that Science Envoys could be an effective tool in diplomacy in the future.

Later in the day, PCAST heard updates from two previously commissioned efforts:

- A panel on health information technology reported the completion of a draft report (to be made available to the public soon, following a final round of edits) that calls for strengthening the role of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT within the Dept. of Health & Human Services – primarily by advocating and promulgating standards for exchange and privacy of secure electronic health information – in an attempt to improve quality and safety of healthcare, while simultaneously reducing cost. Unfortunately, it appears the report will be fairly narrow in focus, specifically discussing only electronic medical records (EMRs) – and not HIT broadly.

- PCAST members evaluating STEM education described the hope of new technology in advancing education – including the creation of deeply digital materials (e.g., interactive simulations, videos, built-in tutors, etc.) that (a) are increasingly adaptive to what a student is learning, (b) assist in ongoing and cumulative assessments of students, and (c) provide professional development support to teachers; etc. The subcommittee co-chairs, Eric Lander and Jim Gates, signaled very clearly that these issues would be part of the final report – which may be ready by the September PCAST meeting. Lander and Gates again solicited feedback from the public about Ed Tech.

Please view an archived webcast of the hearing (see the PCAST website), and as always comments are greatly appreciated below.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director, & Chase Hensel, CRA/CCC Tisdale Fellow)

Imbued with boundless patience and ability to recall facts, robots hold promise as effective teachers in high-repetition scenarios such as language class autism therapy. Teams from UCSD, MIT, UConn, etc., are field-testing teaching robots for a variety of uses. The results of these tests have been positive and the future use of robots in the classroom seems likely.

The article also discusses the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence — teaching machines to teach themselves, in the spirit of infant children. It perhaps overstates that we can obtain this Holy Grail in the near future; there’s considerable research and innovation that must come first.

Please check out the feature, and its associated media — the video on Robotic Teaching is particularly exciting.

- Learning to Read People; and

- A timeline detailing the history of Artificial Intelligence.

Share your thoughts — especially those on the future of AI as the article describes it — below.

(Contributed by Chase Hensel, CRA/CCC Tisdale Fellow, & Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

Peter Lee

In joining Microsoft Research, Peter departs DARPA, where he has been the
Director of the agency’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office
(TCTO) for the past year. There Peter has

challenged conventional Department of Defense (DoD) approaches to computer science research by infusing new energy into [DARPA]’s relationships with academia and industry and reinforcing the agency’s unique role at the intersection of research and application.

Today, TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of
rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas such as social media,
synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and networking, as well as
employing a diverse range of innovation strategies including broad community programs, competitions/challenges, and crowd sourcing.

One of the highlights of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge, which mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that made an impact on thinking throughout the DoD.

For the past year, we’ve had one of our very best in a leadership position
at DARPA, and we thank Peter for his outstanding service and
wish him the best as he transitions into his new role.

In particular, the article highlights Paro — a robotic baby harp seal — used in nursing homes as a therapeutic aid for the elderly. Paro uses 14 different sensors, two microprocessors, and a whole slew of AI algorithms to illicit compassionate responses from users and convincingly behave as a real-life animal. The Paro robot is used to help patients suffering with dementia and provide comfort in times of distress.

Harmon goes on to talk about other synthetic companions, which use artificial intelligence to interact with people, inducing behavioral changes. She describes an AI device that can help with weight loss and another that can prevent relapses into addiction.

Interestingly, Harmon also delves into the philosophical concerns surrounding these types of artificial companions and posits that technology is currently moving faster than the philosophy around it.

Definitely check out the feature in the NY Times Magazine, as well as the media that accompany it:

- A video of a patient interacting with Paro; and

- A timeline detailing the history of robotics.

And be sure to post your thoughts below!

(Contributed by Chase Hensel, CRA/CCC Tisdale Fellow)

Recent technological and societal trends

• Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility
• Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud
• Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!), and from the creation of all information in digital form – has led to a torrent of data which must be transferred, stored, and mined:  “data to knowledge to action”
• Social computing – the way people interact has been transformed; the data we have from and about people is transforming
• All transactions (from purchasing to banking to voting to health) are online, creating the need for dramatic improvements in privacy and security
• Cybercrime
• The end of single-processor performance increases, and thus the need for parallelism to increase performance in operating systems and productivity applications, not just high-end applications; also power issues
• Asymmetric threats, need for surveillance, reconnaissance
• Globalization – of innovation, of consumption, of workforce
• Pressing national and global challenges:  climate change, education, energy / sustainability, health care (these replace the cold war)

What’s on your list?  Please post below!

Historically, the computing industry has been driven by a set of exponential increases in single-thread performance. The ubiquity of multi-cores and the fact that much of the IT industry is relying on main-streaming parallel processing for survival is a truly seismic event. At the same time, there remains a huge gap between the theoretical limits of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and what processors actually attain. Novel techniques to push ILP further in the familiar sequential execution model may yet to be invented. In this environment, one wonders if this is as good as it gets for ILP. Is ILP research over? Should it be? What are the truly new ideas and insights that can propel another three decades of exponential performance growth? How should ILP research be funded, performed and evaluated?

The wheels have come off the exponential track! – This Call for Position Papers is for the second of the two workshops and focuses on “Instruction Level Parallelism”; the first workshop focused on “Failure is Not an Option: Popular Parallel Programming”. For this second workshop, members of the computer architecture community are invited to submit a 1-page position paper outlining their thoughts on ILP research.

Some questions a submitter may wish to address are:

• Is there anything left to do with ILP research?

• Should funding agencies and industry support it?

• Should computer architecture conferences embrace it?

• What are the top 5 constraints on ILP in current microprocessors?

• What are the key new ideas and fruitful areas to explore in ILP?

• What is the role of re-configurability and heterogeneity in ILP?

• How to effectively support continuous run-time optimization in single-threaded systems?

Potential contributors are encouraged to be brief, and keep the following in mind:

• The position paper should not be about what you are working on currently; it should be about a vision for computer architectures available 10-15 years from now.

• There is no need to address all of the above questions. Addressing one or a few, or even others the submitter deems relevant is fine.

• Should computer architecture conferences embrace it?

• Keep the topic of ILP central.

• The steering committee will select the workshop invitees based on the responses. The committee is looking for a wide range of insightful, contrarian and forward thinking views.

Submit a 1-page PDF file to acar@cs.uiuc.edu by 6pm PST, August 6th, 2010.

Computational thinking has the potential to change the types of questions considered by social and economic scientists. For example, Nash (and other) equilibria lie at the heart of theories about the behavior of economic agents. Computational thinking can help characterize the range and robustness of possible equilibria and markets for which the computation of equilibria is intractable. Theories of strategic learning by computational agents, studied both in economics and computer science, can shed light on the dynamics of how agents arrive at equilibria. Theories of the spread of contagion or gossip in networks can help explain and contain the chain reactions that can arise. Social/behavioral/economic and computer scientists can jointly study the dynamic functioning and evolution of social and economic networks with mutual benefit to both fields of study. Some important examples of such systems are recommender systems, voting systems, and reputation management systems.

This new program came out of a workshop held last September at Cornell University that was well attended by computer scientists and economists alike. The report from the workshop provides an excellent introduction to this research area.

(Contributed by Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University)

The history of these assessments goes back to the Brooks/Sutherland National Academies study in 1995, and includes several reviews by the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (in particular the landmark 1999 PITAC report), and most recently a 2007 assessment by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).  The impact of these assessments on the direction of the NITRD program has been significant.

The  White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has convened a working group to conduct a new assessment, under the auspices of PCAST.  The assessment is to be carried out this summer.

Ed Lazowska (University of Washington, and chair of the Computing Community Consortium) co-chairs the working group, along with PCAST member David Shaw (D.E. Shaw Research).  Other members of the working group are Francine Berman (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Stephen Brobst (Teradata Corporation), Randal Bryant (Carnegie Mellon University), Mark Dean (IBM Research), Deborah Estrin (UCLA), Ed Felten (Princeton University), Susan Graham (UC Berkeley), Bill Gropp (University of Illinois), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Kurtz (Good Harbor Consulting), and Bob Sproull (Sun Labs).

Members of the research community are invited to provide input to working group members regarding the nation’s IT R&D portfolio.

“And while we provide students from around the world visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities, our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or power a new industry right here in the United States. Instead of training entrepreneurs to create jobs on our shores, we train our competition.”

Read the full text here.

(Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)

In the second in a fascinating series of articles titled “Smarter Than You Think” being published by The New York Times Magazine this summer, writers Steve Lohr and John Markoff illustrate how artificial intelligence is transforming how we answer questions, complete simple tasks, and assist one another.

This Sunday’s story highlights the work of Eric Horvitz, a member of the CCC Council, whose team at Microsoft Research has developed a “medical avatar” that can understand speech, recognize symptoms of pediatric conditions, and reason according to simple rules. The avatar is able to interface with real-life patients and make initial diagnoses of their ailments, much as any medical assistant would. All the while, it’s piquing the curiosity and earning the trust of the children it’s serving — a future generation of computer users.

Eric’s team is also working on a related class of “digital assistants”; visitors to his office are greeted by an avatar who knows all about his schedule and meeting habits. And as The Times‘ story emphasizes, these technologies and others like it are affecting many facets of our daily lives, from in-car GPS navigation systems to iPhone apps, from telemarketers to product manufacturers’ support centers, etc.

I encourage you to read this outstanding feature in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine — and to explore the terrific interactive multimedia accompanying it:

- The medical avatar in action;

- How the medical avatar could change future visits to the doctor; and

- A timeline detailing how far we’ve come in natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, etc.

And you can learn more about Eric’s work on his website: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, Director, CCC)

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contains an incredibly fascinating expose about “Watson,” an advanced “question answering” machine that IBM researchers have been busy developing for the past half-decade.  The story provides a step-by-step account of the challenges and research advances underlying Watson’s development — including a detailed description of how Watson works today.  It chronicles early wins — and, notably, losses — for the supercomputer versus real-life former Jeopardy! contests.  And it describes ways in which natural language processing and data mining advances enabled by Watson’s development could be extended to other fields, like healthcare, e-government, and transportation.

This Sunday’s story is a must-read — and it’s just the first in a series titled “Smarter Than You Think” the NY Times is publishing this summer, describing recent advances in AI and robotics, and the potential impact of this work on society.

And don’t forget to try your luck against Watson in a simulated New York Times Web interactive.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, Director, CCC)

We are looking for your great ideas for how advances in computer and information science and engineering can transform the nature and conduct of healthcare and wellness as we know it today.

(Contributed by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for NSF/CISE)

A multitude of factors — poor diet habits, stressful lifestyles, aging populations, etc. — is causing chronic diseases like cancer and arthritis to soar, and our twentieth century healthcare delivery infrastructure is simply not designed to handle the surge in these types of ailments. We need far better ways to mine huge volumes of patient data from multiple sources, and to effectively present the critical pieces of information to the right person at the right time to help yield the right decision, all the while ensuring privacy and security. We need ways to improve process flows, to create feedback loops, to establish care “control rooms,” etc. We need ways to monitor (sense) and assist patients’ health, activities, and behaviors in their homes, offices, and churches. We need an entirely new social infrastructure, one that builds off of today’s “connected” world and incentivizes integration and adoption of new technologies, a belief in wellness management (“prevention is better than a cure”), and the role and persuasive effects of one’s social network. And we need to do all of this work in the context of the incredibly complex organizational structures, payment plans, policies, and regulations underlying the healthcare enterprise. Health information technology is not just about electronic medical records (EMRs), in which the Federal government has invested significant resources over the past year (see ongoing programs); it’s also about robotic surgery, telemedicine, home monitoring, Health 2.0, and much more.

But we can’t revolutionize care delivery overnight. To achieve a safe, effective, reliable, and far less expensive system five, 10, or 15 years into the future, we need groundbreaking research now in areas like data management, data mining/machine learning, human-computer interaction, modeling and simulation, software engineering, reliability engineering, process engineering, sociotechnical systems, etc. Yet, to date, Federal investment in health IT research has largely been fragmented.

As we’ve articulated in the white paper, the recent passage of healthcare legislation makes a broad research initiative in this space incredibly timely. There is no better time like the present — and, frankly, with chronic disease on the rise, doctors and hospitals increasingly overburdened, and friends and families lost in an abyss of uncertainty about their loved ones’ conditions and care options, we can’t afford to delay any longer.

As a community, we are calling for a large-scale, comprehensive, coordinated, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary basic research investment by the Federal government. We believe this investment must involve computer scientists, but it should also include allied areas of systems engineering and the social sciences. As these areas are core constituencies of the National Science Foundation, the agency must be heavily involved. (Indeed, NSF’s CISE Directorate just announced a Smart Health and Wellbeing Program for FY 11, which “aims to facilitate large-scale discoveries that yield long-term, transformative impact in how we treat illness and maintain our health”: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10575/nsf10575.htm.)

The work can’t proceed without medical practitioners either, as they need to inform the technologies as they are being developed — and consequently the National Institutes of Health, the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research, must be at the table as well. And there are a whole host of other Federal agencies that should be consulted: the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), which have invested billions in developing and deploying EMRs around the country; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the nation’s public health agency; and the Food and Drug Administration, which must regulate technologies emerging from our nation’s research labs and arriving in hospitals and clinics.

Let’s do something big in health IT today — so that we can enhance the quality and length of life tomorrow. It’s critical for our society, for our economy, and for our success and prosperity as a nation. For more, I encourage you to review the CCC-led white paper.

Computing is a “general purpose” phenomenon.  It can be applied to many things, which brings heterogeneous communities to the discussion.  The computing research field has porous boundaries, making it an intellectual watering hole.  This offers stimulation and excitement, but it can cause problems.  People from different fields follow different conventions for doing or explaining their work.  Philipe van Parijs has addressed this as Clarity and Charity¹.  Here is the gist as I learned it.

When you are trying to make sense of new things, you shouldn’t assume that it’s entirely up to the authors to have those things make sense to you.  Authors should make things clear to the reader, but this is hard to do when writing for people from different fields.  The reader can and should help out.  A frustrated reader has usually invested a lot to understand the work already, but it is often worth investing a bit more to find out what the author “must be saying.”  The smart reader closes the gap between the author’s explanation and his or her understanding. Expect clarity, but when things are unclear, try some charity.  It’s a cost-effective strategy.

¹Philipe van Parijs, Evolutionary Explanations in the Social Sciences: An Emerging Paradigm, Totawa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981, pp. xiii-xiv (online version through Google Books).

(Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)

“CCC has played an important role in identifying and promoting exciting “visions” for the future of Information Technology (IT) research — ideas that have the potential to attract the best and brightest to the field, drive economic growth, and address national challenges in areas such as health, energy, and education …

“These papers and workshop reports have had a clear influence on Administration budget and recruiting decisions and have already sparked collaborations between government, industry, and academia. The agility and flexibility of the CCC is particularly important for a field like IT, which changes rapidly and has such a profound impact on science and engineering, the economy, and our society.”

Read the entire post here.

It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual summit took place last Tuesday through Thursday in Portland, OR. Hundreds of people dedicated to increasing the number of women in the IT field packed Portland’s Hotel Monaco and Intel’s Jones Farm campus to experience a stimulating three days of conversation and presentations on the state of women in information technology in education (K-12 and higher ed), industry, and government.

For those not familiar with NCWIT, it is a non-profit coalition of organizations whose goal is to increase women’s participation in information technology. It is concerned with all sectors, and its member organizations are are organized into four “Alliances”:

The Academic Alliance (post-secondary education organizations),
the K-12 Alliance,
the Entrepreneurial Alliance,
and the Workforce Alliance.

With the help of its member organizations and its Social Science Advisory Board, NCWIT develops and promotes techniques proven to increase women’s participation in IT.

This year, one of the prominent themes of the summit was bias, both explicit and implicit, and its effects on women. The Academic Alliance (AA) meeting began with a fascinating talk from Dr. Bernice Sandler, considered “The Godmother of Title IX”.  In her talk, Dr. Sandler provided numerous practical tips for recognizing and responding to sexual harassment and other forms of more subtle bias.

In the keynote talk on Wednesday morning, Brian Nosek gave us a fascinating look at implicit bias in which he described the Implicit Association Test, a psychological instrument for measuring implicit bias. He presented research that shows that most people in the US, both men and women, tend to implicitly associate “male” with “science” and “female” with “arts and humanities.” In addition, this bias is correlated with female’s lower self-confidence and indeed lower performance in mathematics. You can read more about this research and take the implicit association test yourself here.

The resources table also featured one of its newest Promising Practices: How to avoid unintended gender bias in letters of recommendation.

Of course there were many other exciting panels, talks and discussions–including a panel about the state of computing in Washington DC in which Cameron Wilson, ACM’s director of public policy, implored the community to stop reinventing
new terms for the same concept (Computing, Computational Thinking, Computer Science, etc) because we’re confusing the very people on the Hill that we need to be advocating for our interests.

I’ll focus on only one more highlight: the summit reception at the Eco Trust Natural Capital Center.  There, NCWIT honored about a dozen local high schoolers who had received the brand new Portland Metro NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. It seems clear that we have some great talent coming through the pipeline.

And finally, who could forget the guest of honor: Computer Engineer Barbie, who in her infinite fashion wisdom tells us that “C# is the new pink.”

Sound like fun? Well, then I’ll close with a short advertisement. I am assuming that many of you reading this blog post are from higher ed. If you are not yet part of the NCWIT Academic Alliance, please consider joining. All you need to join is a commitment to working torwards a  change that will postively impact women at your institution.

For more information, please contact the AA program manager Kim Kalahar or the AA Co-chairs: Nancy Amato (Texas A&M), Maureen Biggers (Indiana University), or Andrew Williams (Spelman College).

Broad agenda-setting

During the transition period to the Obama administration, we had the opportunity to feed a number of “white papers” into the transition team’s planning process.  Thanks to the receptiveness of the incoming administration, these white papers had impact far beyond what we had dared to imagine.

Our approach was to focus on the fact that fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering are essential to meeting the nation’s challenges and achieving the nation’s priorities.  America’s energy future, from transportation to the smart grid, depends essentially on fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering.  Ditto for the transformation of health care.  Ditto for the future of education.  Ditto for 21st century data-driven discovery — “eScience” — which will be transformational, ubiquitous, and driven by fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering.

This approach does not position our field a “tool” of other fields, because it is not about applying today’s technology.  Rather, it focuses on the fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering that will be necessary to meet the nation’s challenges and achieve the nation’s priorities.

This work was done pro bono by a small number of people.  (Committees produce consensus; leaders produce visions.)  And it was carried out as what computer architects would call “speculative execution” — effort devoted in the belief that it might prove to be useful.  (If you wait until someone asks you for something, it’s too late — you need to have it ready!)

Focused agenda-setting

The CCC funds workshops initiated by members of sub-fields who want to chart a future direction.  Some of these have been hugely influential.

A great example is a robotics effort led by Henrik Christensen (Georgia Tech), Vijay Kumar (Penn), Matt Mason (CMU), and others.  This broad community effort, carried out over a period of 18 months, yielded a coherent direction for fundamental research in robotics, a set of “research roadmaps” for the field, and a white paper that is likely to result in a significant federal research initiative during the next fiscal year.

Computing Innovation Fellows

During the 2008-09 academic year it became clear that, due to the economic downturn, many extremely strong Ph.D. graduates would “exit the research game” due to lack of employment opportunities at universities and industrial research labs — sacrificing the nation’s investment in their education, and jeopardizing the nation’s future competitiveness.

Computer science had never had a broad-based coordinated postdoc program, but the Computing Community Consortium, working closely with NSF, was able to establish the Computing Innovation Fellows Project in remarkably short order — from concept to awards in less than six months.  It was NSF’s confidence in CCC as a “proxy” for the computing research community that made this possible.

The CIFellows Project had several unique aspects that we expect to have broad impact.  The first was the “max 2 rule” — at most two awardees were allowed to come from, or go to, any one institution.  (The goal was to establish persistent interactions between diverse institutions.)  The second was an ordering of the holistic quality assessment of candidates:  at each iteration (as the field was reduced from 500+ proposals to 60 awards), members of under-represented groups (women, minorities, particular research areas, etc.) were discussed first.  When the dust had settled, 42% of CIFellows awardees were women!  (To be clear:  gender only influenced the order of discussion!)

Summary

There’s lots more to say, but this is getting long for a blog post.  The bottom line is that a group of community-oriented research leaders can have a profound effect, given the endorsement (confidence and good will) of the research community, and the right environment in Washington.

There are many, many ways in which you can participate.  See the CCC web page for ideas!

First, I can’t believe that there weren’t more comments on John King’s terrific post,  “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  This is serious business.  And it’s not “new news” — CISE has had the lowest average proposal scores in NSF for years.  We are killing ourselves in a misguided effort to show how smart we are.  (The number of “highly ranked proposals” that can’t be funded is, quite naturally, a criterion argued within NSF for the allocation of funds among Directorates.)  For god’s sake!

Second, the NSF Graduate Fellowship awardees have recently been announced.  Did you know that the number of fellowships awarded to each field is related to the number of applicants from that field?  And did you know that CISE has dramatically fewer applicants than other fields of comparable size?  Once again, we are killing ourselves.  Get with it!!

Third, many of you are aware that Jeannette Wing will be leaving CISE on June 30, after a truly spectacular run as CISE AD that has led to a dramatic increase in the recognition of our field as a “player” and as central to advances across-the-board.  We’ll have more to say about that in a subsequent post.  You may not know, though, that Debbie Crawford also is leaving her role as Deputy AD.  Debbie, too, is a star — she has been an extraordinary contributor.  In addition, all three CISE Division Directors are nearing the ends of their IPA appointments – Sampath Kannan (CCF), Ty Znati (CNS), and Haym Hirsh (IIS).  Sampath, Ty, and Haym — like Jeannette and Debbie — are tough acts to follow.  For the past few years we have had some of our very best in leadership positions at CISE.  Nothing could be more important than continuing this trend.  It’s all about leadership.

This story contains a lesson about the ecology of review processes. Reviewers rate proposals to determine which proposals to support, but that’s not the only use for their ratings. Leaders of funding agencies do not allocate funding to fields by reading all the agency’s proposals and reviews. They use summary measures. One of these is “proposal pressure,” meaning the number of highly-rated proposals within a field that cannot be funded because the field’s budget is too small. A field with more highly-rated proposals than it can support is “under-funded.” Right?

We in the computing research field often eviscerate the proposals of our colleagues during proposal reviews. Why are we so fratricidal? Is it to demonstrate how tough we are? If so, we’re hurting ourselves. People from other fields are happy to have fratricidal computing researchers in competition for interdisciplinary grants because there will be more funding for everyone else!

There are two kinds of responsibility in proposal review. One separates good proposals from weak proposals to ensure that good proposals are funded. The other ensures that computing research holds its own in funding with other fields. The computing research field gets better when we criticize weak proposals and recommend improvements. The field does not get better when our criticisms of each other are so harsh that that computing researchers get less of the pie.

(Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)

This call follows a highly successful inaugural class of CIFellows for the 2009-10 academic year, in which 60 Ph.D. graduates are completing outstanding research and teaching enrichment experiences.  Six of these 2009-10 CIFellows have already received faculty appointments in part as a result of their CIFellowships, and many others are continuing in the program for a second year.

The CIFellows Project seeks to fund around 40 new positions starting during the 2010-11 academic year.  Applications are due very soon:  5 p.m. EDT on May 23, 2010.  Awards are expected to be announced by July 1, 2010.  Positions will commence in the fall.

Applications will be received beginning May 3, 2010, at http://cifellows.org.

Also:  Go to http://cifellows.org to advertise your interest in hosting a CIFellow at your organization.

Individuals who received (or will receive) Ph.D.s from U.S. institutions between May 1, 2009 and August 31, 2010 in computer science, computer engineering, information science, or a closely related field are eligible to apply.  Applicants must obtain commitments—including mentoring plans—from between one and three prospective hosts/mentors.  Hosts/mentors cannot be at the same institution as the one granting the Ph.D.  The CIFellows website (linked above) provides resources for both prospective applicants and host/mentors to announce their interests and availability.

- Greg Andrews, Chair of the CIFellows Steering Committee
- Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium Council
- Eric Grimson, Chair of the Computing Research Association
- Erwin Gianchandani, Director of the Computing Community Consortium & the CIFellows Project

The Visions conference was designed to highlight research visions for the future and consisted of invited plenaries and submitted talks. The plenaries were extremely well done.  Ross Anderson spoke about the integration of social issues and computing in the design of increasingly complex systems, using numerous examples from history and economic theory. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi explored frontiers in machine learning, Jon Kleinberg spoke about the future of social networks, and Barbara Liskov provided a very interesting retrospective on the work that lead to her Turing Award coupled with lessons from this work for the future.

The UKCRC Grand Challenges effort  has been underway since 2002; Sir Tony Hoare and Robin Milner (the conferences began with a very nice tribute to him) started the effort following Hoare’s attendance at CRA’s first grand challenges workshop. The UK effort has been considerably more structured than similar efforts in the US: there is a steering committee, a group of topics was selected, leadership committees were created, funding was obtained for activities and, over time, road maps for research in each area were developed. Status results were presented and the results have been mixed. Some areas, e.g., Dependable Systems Evolution, are seen as quite active and self-sustaining. Others, e.g., Ubiquitous Computing, seem to have faded with research still ongoing but not focused by the grand challenges effort. It is not clear whether the grand challenge model has generated any substantive additional research funding for the selected challenges.

The conference addressed the status of ongoing efforts as well as discussions about new ones including tele-health, IT & Global Climate Change and Computing for 9 Billion People. The steering committee will select which ones to advance;  finding a strong advocate will be a key selection criterion. Interestingly these more recent proposed grand challenges are definitely focused on societal problems rather than computing ones.

Both of these efforts are directly related to the activities of CCC in envisioning and promoting research futures in computing.

(Contributed by Andy Bernat, Executive Director of CRA)

The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there are voids, the suspended dust causes respiratory distress. Eric Rasmussen InSTEDD has many tales to tell of the similar Turkey earthquake.

China, by the way, does have at least one rescue robot. Bin tells me it was deployed to the mine collapse but could not be used because it wasn’t waterproof. (A gentle aside to manufacturers: d’uh!)

Aerial vehicles might be helpful for tactical operations and I can’t help thinking that an unmanned marine vehicle with an acoustic camera capable of penetrating turbid waters could provide more information about that crack in the big dam…

Bin was a participant in the NSF-JST-NIST workshop at Disaster City at the first of the month and we look forward to working with him and his group.

[This was written by Professor Robin Murphy at Texas A&M University and originally appeared on her  CRASAR research group  blog.]

This follows on the heels of Dr. Dugan’s impressive and heartening House Armed Services Committee testimony, blogged here, and a Computing Research News article by Lazowska and Patterson describing “New Directions at DARPA,” here.

Here’s my favorite paragraph from Dr. Dugan’s HASC testimony:

“Upon arrival at DARPA, we were determined to understand and repair the breach with universities. We discovered the following: Between 2001 and 2008, DARPA funding to US research university performers did decrease in real terms, by about half. But, as importantly, a noble and recent focus in the Agency on solving nearer term problems for the Department had resulted in some additional, perhaps unintended, consequences. The nature of the work changed, from multi-year commitments, to those with annual “go, no-go” decisions governing continued funding, which made it difficult for universities to commit to graduate students. A later stage focus resulted in more work done by universities as subs to prime contractors responsible for integration efforts, and the resulting flow-down of restrictions on the use of foreign nationals, export control, prepublication review, among others.  We assessed that we could address many of the concerns identified.”

Our community was vilified – and our integrity questioned – by the previous Director for asserting precisely these things.  (He famously distributed a chart showing that university funding was not decreasing … however, the chart had the backing spreadsheet attached, which showed that some key institutions, as well as the most recent year, had been omitted from the chart.)

It’s great to see these changes in direction!  Remember that we must respond, by re-engaging.

The name is the same, but the project is totally different, and totally right-headed.  Teams of top researchers are building a diverse suite of tools and technologies that will allow a broad range of networking research experiments to be carried out.  As an example, a set of research universities and research backbone networks are in the process of rolling out Stanford’s OpenFlow switches, which will allow novel low-level protocols to be run alongside TCP/IP.  More than 200 research leaders attended the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, held March 16-17 at Duke University.

The purpose of this post is to bring to your attention a new “Call for White Papers” for a GENI Experimenters Workshop to be held at Princeton University on June 29-30.  This is a great chance to get on board a train that is moving rapidly and in a really interesting direction.

In doing so, OSTP leads with CCC’s “Landmark Contributions by Students in Computer Science“:

“Students have contributed some of the most important advances in information and communications technologies—including data compression, interactive computer graphics, Ethernet, Berkeley Unix, the spreadsheet, public key cryptography, speech recognition, Mosaic, and Google.  Today, with the right kind of support, students can play the role of innovators again — by leading the way in the development of broadband applications. In the same way that Mosaic and Google drove demand for today’s Internet, new applications could drive demand for a gigabit/second Internet and 4G wireless.”

Read the proposed OSTP initiative and send comments to broadband@ostp.gov.

The Assistant Director for CISE leads a directorate comprised of three divisions: Computing and Communication Foundations; Computer and Network Systems; and Information and Intelligent Systems.  The CISE directorate is also a major contributor to NSF’s cyberinfrastructure investments through the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

The search committee will be headed by Dr. Susan Graham, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  The qualifications for the Assistant Director include: outstanding leadership; a deep sense of scholarship; a grasp of the issues facing the computer and information sciences in the areas of education and research; and the ability to serve effectively as a key member of the NSF management team.  The NSF is especially interested in identifying women, members of minority groups, and persons with disabilities for consideration. Recommendations of individuals from any sector – academic, industry, or government – are welcome.

Please send your recommendations by April 30, 2010, including any supporting information that you can provide, to the AD/CISE Search Committee via e-mail (cisesrch@lists.nsf.gov) or at the following address: National Science Foundation, Office of the Director, Suite 1205, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22230.

This announcement, with additional related documents about the search, are available here.

(This announcement is a slightly edited version of a solicitation letter from Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of NSF)

The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, established in August 2007, “recognizes personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field.”

ACM announcement here.  Wall Street Journal article here.

Congratulations Eric!

ACM announcement here.  Microsoft announcement (a wonderful profile of Chuck) here.  Terrific 6-minute interview on NPR’s All Things Considered here.

Congratulations Chuck, and thanks for being an inspiration to all of us!

To stimulate work in this area, the NRC is offering one or more monetary prizes for excellent contributed papers that address one or more of the questions of interest described in the section entitled “Questions of Interest” in the call for papers linked here.

“While the history of computing-related contributions to shaping our world is a compelling topic, future opportunities in computing—where the field might go and what problems it might tackle—are perhaps even more compelling. Whether it’s creating the future of networking, revolutionizing transportation, delivering personalized education, enabling the smart grid, empowering the developing world, improving health care, or driving advances in all fields of science and engineering—all national priorities—computing has key contributions to make and key roles to play.”

Read the full article here.

Statement like this are, of course, motherhood and apple pie. Computing architecture researchers have faced all of these challenges for years and there are numerous projects forging into the future to address them, among them the Department of Energy’s Exascale efforts and the nascient program from DARPA, the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing Program.

However there is a renewed need to build a community of computing architecture reseachers across the country to give an avenue to the large number of new people in the field to bring their ideas to the national stage.

The CCC sponsors workshops (http://www.cra.org/ccc/vision.php) to help researchers put together visions for research programs. Josep Torrellas of the University of Illinois and Mark Oskin of  the University of Washington recently held a workshop in San Diego on Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR), February 21-23, 2010. The theme of this first of two workshops was Failure is not an Option: Popular Parallel Programming. This is a follow-on to the Computing Research Association Workshop in 2005.  The workshop had representation from academia, industry and national laboratories.

Torrellas and Oskin asked of the workshop participants:

• What will computing platforms look like in 15 years?

• How will they impact the socio-human condition?

• What are the major research challenges that must be overcome to create these platforms?

And are synthesizing the discussion around two goals:

• Articulate an agenda and roadmap for computer architecture research to address the challenges above.

• Create excitement and community building for computer architecture research across academia, industry and national labs.

Workshop summaries and  proceedings will soon be available at
http://www.cra.org/ccc/acar.php.

Submitted by Bill Feiereisen for the Computing Community Consortium.

ARPA-E is a new office of the Department of Energy focused on extramural breakthrough research, in the DARPA tradition.

Watch Majumdar’s talk here. See white papers on the essential role of computing research here, here, and here.

Wing noted that NSF’s CISE and ENG Directorates fared particularly well in the President’s FY2011 budget request.  She attributed this to two factors:

• These fields drive innovation that creates jobs and increases America’s competitiveness.

• These fields are closely aligned with the Administration’s four science and technology budget priorities:

• Applying science and technology strategies to drive economic recovery, job creation, and economic growth;
• Promoting innovative energy technologies to reduce dependence on energy imports and mitigate the impact of climate change, while creating green jobs and new businesses;
• Applying biomedical science and information technology to help Americans live longer, healthier lives while reducing health care costs; and
• Assuring we have the technologies needed to protect our troops, citizens, and national interests, including those needed to verify arms control and nonproliferation agreements essential to our security.

Read the President’s science and technology budget priorities memorandum here. See the President’s FY2011 NSF budget request here.

• Andrei Broder, Yahoo!
• Irene Greif, IBM
• Bill Gropp, UIUC
• Laura Haas, IBM
• Mike Jordan, UC Berkeley
• Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
• Tom Mitchell, CMU
• Larry Peterson, Princeton
• Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
• Mark Wegman, IBM
• N.R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys (Foreign Associate)

Congratulations to these outstanding colleagues!  The NAE announcement may be viewed here.

The results are in!  “You voted!  We listened!!”  (Even if  “you” is a bot …)  The winner of the popular vote is … Computer Engineer Barbie!

The New York Times reports:  “Barbie has come a long way since 1992, when the blond bombshell of a doll was programmed to say, ‘Math class is tough.’  Barbie, whose various careers have taken her from aerobics instructor to supermodel to business executive, will next be a computer engineer, a career chosen by half a million Barbie fans.”  Read the full article here.

- Translation into other domains of software

- Software engineering practice

- Collaboration issues in FOSS

- Learning and education challenges/opportunities

- Evolution of products, projects, practices and processes

- Research infrastructures

A report from the workshop will be developed in the coming weeks and posted on the CCC Web site.

John L. King, CCC Council Liaison

John L. King, CCC Council liaison

Today’s discussion was structured around four perspectives on FOSS, with moderators, main presenters, and discussants:

Users/Producers: Moderator — Greg Madey (Notre Dame University); Main Presenter — Ralph Morelli (Trinity College); Discussants — Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation), John Wallin (George Mason University).

Human-Centered Computing: Moderator — Walt Scacchi (UC Irvine); Main Presenter: Chris Kelty (UCLA); Discussants — Charles Schweik (UMass Amherst), Chris Kelty (UCLA).

Social/Behavioral/Economic: Moderator — Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University); Main Presenter — Les Gasser of University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign; Discussants — Kalle Lyytinen (Case-Western), Shobha Chengalur-Smith (UC Irvine), Pat Wangstrum (IBM Research).

Software Engineering:  Moderator — Megan Squire (Elon University); Main Presenter Tony Wasserman (Carnegie-Mellon Silicon Valley); Discussants — Prem Devanbu (UC Davis),  Audris Mockus (AVAYA Labs).

The Twitter stream is #foss2010   Follow along!

John L. King, CCC Council liaison

If you know of a student has already made a special contribution in one of these areas, please nominate them!Nominations may REUSE existing materials such as videos, essays, articles, business plans, posters, presentations, photo essays or can be newly created.

• Nominations are due 1 March 2010.

Peter spoke on DARPA and TCTO at the University of Washington on February 2.  The talk is inspiring and informative.  Watch the streaming video here.

“What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of ‘Start-Up America.’

“Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts …

“And to reignite his youth movement, he should make sure every American kid knows about two programs that he has already endorsed.  The first is National Lab Day … [which] aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.”

My Japanese hosts at the International Rescue Systems institute are sanguine about the long delays in getting new technologies from the labs and into the hands of the responders, agencies, and the victims themselves. It takes time, they say.  They are patient; it took 5 years to rebuild Kobe with the resources of one of the great nations of the world.

During my visit this week and through out my meetings with industries and agencies over the years since 9-11, I have been repeatedly struck by the brilliance and potential of many innovations. Unmanned vehicles and sensors offer viewpoints that humans and dogs can’t provide. A dog can tell if a survivor is inside a collapse structure, but not whether it is safe for a rescuer to enter or how to best shore it up or remove rubble without causing further injuries. Wireless communications improve daily.

The field of social computing is a truly new vista- and if harnessed could not only help the victims help supply the responders with information but be more able to help themselves. I marvel at the ideas of Gloria Mark at UC Irvine and Leysia Palen at Colorado for crisis informatics. One of the lessons of the Kobe earthquake was that centralized, official response teams were insufficient and in the end, the volunteers from the survivors were what made the difference in rescuing people and putting out the fires.

I have also been struck by the price we pay as a society by not incorporating more computer science into engineering and business. Some of the most magnificently agile robots have been rejected or failed in the field because the designers had provided a poor human-machine interface- topics taught in computer science but generally neglected in other disciplines. Other innovations have fallen short because the designers did not understand the domain- how the responders actually work- and did not understand how to understand a domain- again something that computer science addresses daily in human-centric design methodologies.

And as can be seen from the news reports from Haiti, the  potential contributions of computer science to intelligent, distributed decision making are important too. There is always a tendency to try to make things more centralized, imposed more control and enforced coordination. And the ShadowBowl exercises run by Eric Rasmussen, now at InSTEDD, show that this just doesn’t work. There are too many agencies, NGOs, and emergent groups that may not even know about each other. A few years ago in an outbrief of a major international disaster, I overheard one agency complain bitterly about Doctors Without Borders, which is normally not equated with Satan. As an outsider, it was clear that both agencies had been doing their jobs but had no way of even knowing that the other agency was in the area or opportunistically coordinating activities. The cognitive sciences can help if they’re allowed.

Great progress is being made by viewing these events from what David Woods at Ohio State calls a polycentric viewpoint- that there will always be multiple centers of decision making and the decisions will change in scope and function over time. Rather than try to continue to dynamically create and maintain a top-down structure, embrace the distributed nature of incidents and create architectures that let the groups go about their business while minimizing conflicts, duplication of resources, etc.

I also believe it is also important for scientists to understand context and policy. The US teams sent to Haiti by FEMA can’t use ground robots because they aren’t approved yet. Military UAVs, so popular in Iraq and Afghanistan, must conform to FAA and FCC requirements to be used by civilians. I believe we must begin to educate our students on policy- what that means for funding and adoption and how to positively influence it. A bright star in this regard has been Henrik Christensen’s leadership through the CCC in creating the US Congressional Caucus on Robotics.

I continue to pray for the people of Haiti and the international response community, but I’m slipping in a few prayers for us to change the way we think about technology, computer science, and science education. I am not sanguine, I believe that we’re running out of time.-Prof. Robin R. Murphy, PhD Raytheon Professor of Computer Science & Engineering

• Environmentalist
• Surgeon
• Architect
• News Anchor
• Computer Engineer

Get out the vote! http://www.barbie.com/vote/

• Among the 10 major BLS occupational groups, the “Professional and related” category (which includes computer science occupations) is projected to grow by the largest percentage between now and 2018 — by 16.8%.  (The average growth projected across all occupations is 10.1%.)

• Focusing in on the “Professional and related” occupations, of the 8 occupational clusters that are included, “Computer and mathematical” occupations are projected to grow by the largest percentage between now and 2018 — by 22.2%.  In other words, “Computer and mathematical” occupations are the fastest growing occupational cluster within the fastest growing major occupational group.

• Looking at all science and engineering occupations — “Computer and mathematical,” “Architecture and engineering,” and “Life, physical, and social science” — computer science occupations are projected to be responsible for nearly 60% of all job growth between now and 2018.  The next largest contributor — all fields of Engineering combined — is projected to contribute 13.4% of total growth.  All of the life sciences combined:  5.6%.  All of the physical sciences combined:  3.1%.  In other words, among all occupations in all fields of science and engineering, computer science occupations are projected to account for nearly 60% of all job growth between now and 2018.

Forty years ago, in 1969, Neil Armstrong left footprints on the surface of the moon.  It was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Also in 1969, with much less fanfare and at much less expense, Len Kleinrock’s programmer Charley Kline sent the first message over ARPANET.  (The message was “lo” – the first two letters of “login.”  Then the system crashed.)

With forty years of hindsight, which of these events has had the greater impact?  Unless you’re really big into Tang and Velcro, the answer is clear.  From four computers in 1969, the Internet has grown to more than half a billion computers and more than a billion regular users, and is impacting every aspect of our lives.

“Exponentials R Us.”  That’s the magic of computer science.  It’s what differentiates us from all other fields.  (To the extent that other fields are experiencing exponentials, it’s because of computer science – for example, the sensor technology and computational power that are driving biotech.)   “Exponentials R Us” is the past, the present, and the future of computer science.  If you think you can have greater impact doing something else, you’ve got your head wedged.

With that as context – as the single most important message – here are a few things that have been particularly cool in the past decade …

So, what about the next ten years?  …  Here are a few things to watch …

Read the complete post here.

The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT.

Highlights of the workshop included plenary presentations by William Stead of Vanderbilt and Richard Bucholz of St. Louis University School of Medicine. Stead  argued that the “increasing complexity and amounts of biomedical information will overwhelm individual experts, leading to the need to move beyond expert-based medicine.”   (For more information see: Beyond Expert-based Practice, William W. Stead, M.D., and John M. Starmer, M.D.  http://courses.mbl.edu/mi/2009/pubs/Fall_Stead_Expert.pdf )

Bucholz, who is a computationally-savvy neurosurgeon and inventor of the StealthStation, a neurosurgical navigational system, described linking the cutting edge (literally) of neurosurgery and computing to create integrated realtime intra-operative delivery of information via navigational systems, images, 3D visualizations, EEG and other information sources.

Chris was particularly interested in the biomedical aspects of the workshop.  He says:
Healthcare and biomedical research have become increasingly intertwined with computing.  The status, goals, and impediments for 21st century biomedicine were well summarized in the 2004 NIH Roadmap. The Roadmap noted that computing has become absolutely essential to progress in biomedicine, stating:  “The success of computational biology is shown by the fact that computation has become integral and critical to modern biomedical research.”

However, the report also noted that both the substantial and substantive challenges biomedical researchers face in embracing and applying cutting-edge computing research, as well as those faced by computing researchers in understanding current and future biomedical computing needs, have inhibited biomedical research:  “Because computation is integral to biomedical research, its deficiencies have become significant limiters on the rate of progress of biomedical research.”

The productive synergies between these two fields can accelerate research in both, but only if we address these challenges through cooperative effort.  The agencies and the communities, in other words, must work together to enhance frontier or cutting edge research at the interface.  The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT.

Let’s hope that the healthcare, biomedical, and computing research communities  take this as a further opportunity to  overcome current roadblocks by moving across traditional disciplinary boundaries and truly engage computing and biomedical researchers.

Beth’s take-away was somewhat different.  She says:

I also attended the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop.  With so many obvious shortcomings in the current healthcare system, it is tempting to focus on near-term challenges.  In fact the discussions in the press and on Capitol Hill orient to current inefficiencies in the healthcare system as well as the poor health outcomes that stem from misaligned incentives.

However this workshop allowed space for the discussion of long term challenges that, when addressed, could also solve many short-term deficiencies.

As detailed in the NAS report, “Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions,” (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12572) current health IT is deployed as a transactional system instead of supporting workflow, decision making and collaboration.  Furthermore the practice of healthcare is dramatically shifting along a number of dimensions including:

• the overwhelming cost and impact of chronic disease (e.g. diabetes, heart disease, obesity)
• the abundance of information that is available but not utilized by health care practitioners (sensor data, research reports, population data)
• the advent of new diagnostic techniques, based on genomic data, that could enable disease diagnosis years before the disease is detectable by traditional means.

Many of the breakout groups at the workshop honed in on approaches for patient-centered care, chronic disease management and prevention, and distributed, collaborative care.  These approaches mirror the reality of healthcare now and for the foreseeable future.  They also call for deep and challenging computing research including:

• Ubiquitous computing technologies for chronic disease management, including technologies that enable behavior change
• Workflow and decision support systems that actively incorporate health outcome data
• Security and privacy models for distributed, patient-centered care
• Machine learning techniques to predict future health trends and treatment complications
• Organizational modeling and simulation to anticipate economic repercussions in future healthcare approaches

Contributed by Chris Johnson, Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah (www.sci.utah.edu) and Beth Mynatt, CCC Member and Director, GVU Center at Georgia Tech (www.gvu.gatech.edu)

Deadline:  December 11, 2009

What questions shape our intellectual future? What attracts the best and brightest minds of a new generation? What are the next big computing ideas – the ones that will define the future of computing, galvanize the very best students, and catalyze research investment and public support?

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.

The CCC is funded by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement with the Computing Research Association. The work of the CCC is carried out by an active and engaged Council, currently chaired by Ed Lazowska with Susan Graham as vice-chair, which reports to the CRA board. The members of the Council are appointed by CRA in consultation with NSF, with staggered 3 year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found at http://www.cra.org/ccc/.

We invite nominations (including self-nominations) for members to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (mailto:welg@csail.mit.edu) by December 11^th. Also serving on the nomination committee are Kathleen Fisher, Susan Graham and Jennifer Widom. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.

1.     Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.

2.     Research interests.

3.     Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).

4.     A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.

5.     A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. What the CCC Council needs is not famous people with lots of awards, but people with ideas, judgment, and the willingness to work.

The NSF has invested in a number of programs that seek to  re-envision K-12 and undergraduate computer science education.  A recent article by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE, summarizes the rationale, the challenges, and some of the specific initiatives.

We’re eager to hear your ideas on ways that computer science education could be improved, both at the K-12  and college level.  We’re also  interested in hearing your thoughts on how the importance of computer science might be more effectively communicated to a broad audience.

Metagenomics is a relatively new field that seeks to understand the
structure and function of the shockingly large number of microorganisms on
our planet.  New technologies permit us to now sequence samples taken from
their environment rather than only those that are cultivated in the lab. For
example, Craig Ventner’s Global Ocean Sampling Expedition has collected water throughout the world’s oceans, captured organisms, and sequenced their DNA. In the initial pilot study alone, nearly 150 new bacteria were discovered through this process.

The science and computing challenges are huge. A single gram of soil
contains approximately one trillion base pairs of DNA. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently compared over 100,000 bacterial gene sequences on the human skin and discovered a far larger number of different bacteria living on human skin than had been previously known (Science, May 28, 2009). Sequencing and making sense of these data introduces new computational problems, not merely slight extensions of existing ones.

The potential impacts of understanding these data are huge as well. In the
case of soil, microbial communities have an impact on carbon sequestration
and understanding them may help us with cleaning toxic waste. In our bodies,
microbial cells are estimated to outnumber our human cells by a factor of
ten to one and are important in protecting our skin, digestion, and much
more. Understanding these large microbial communities is therefore likely to
have a positive impact on human health. The NIH has launched the Human
Microbiome Project to support work in this field.

Complete DNA sequences of thousands of organisms are piling up in databases
because of the efficiency of DNA sequencing technologies. Most of this
remains unanalyzed for several reasons. We don’t yet know the right
biological questions to ask. We don’t have all the clever programs that
would actually ask these questions of the computer. And there is now so much
data that many questions totally overwhelm even existing high performance
computers.

Among the computational challenges in this field are the design of new
algorithms and cloud computing technologies. In the National Academies of
Science publication “The New Science of Metagenomics: Revealing the Secrets
of our Microbial Planet”, the authors conclude “What then, will metagenomics
have become, in 20 years? We believe that it too will be a concept-driven
computational science… We can expect, in 20 years, enormous advances on
three fronts – technical, computational, and biological – as well as a host
of specific applications.”

We encourage our community to explore and engage in this and other emerging
fields at the crossroads of biology and computation. This is one of the
exciting areas for 21st century computing.

Contributed by Bill Feiereisen with assistance from Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Informatics Europe was created five years ago as a European version of CRA (which is a North American association by charter). A recurring theme at this meeting was the concern that the European scientific research community still does not fully appreciate computing as an intellectually vibrant research discipline in its own right; instead the field is often viewed as an enabler of research in other disciplines. A number of discussions centered on ways in which the computing community can do a better job in explaining the field to others.

Informatics Europe is working on a series of additional initiatives of value to its members. It is beginning data collection analogous to the CRA’s Taulbee Survey and there are discussions on overseeing the process of departmental evaluation. Evaluation is a major issue in Europe, where departments are regularly and systematically evaluated under national government authority. The fear among computing researchers is that the evaluation process will be defined by a non-computing body using irrelevant or inappropriate standards. Therefore, Informatics Europe hopes to develop its own evaluation process and a list of potential evaluators. There was considerable discussion of the possibility that the end result would be a European-wide ranking of departments, an outcome that is generally not favored.

Overall, it was an interesting meeting and, being held in Paris, the food was quite above the typical conference fare, including wine with lunch.  A further note – ACM chose this conference to announce the creation of ACM in Europe (http://dev.acm.org/test/europe/).

This report was contributed by Andrew Bernat, Executive Director of CRA.

While the technical program plainly illustrates the quality of the conference, what is more difficult to convey to those who did not attend is the positive energy and excitement that permeates the entire event.  Hundreds of students excitedly swarmed the Amazon.com booth to write code, with the hopes of being dubbed a “Ninja Coder.”  Students showcased t-shirts with the slogan “I code like a girl, and I’m proud of it!”  Throughout the halls, colleagues and friends hugged as they reunited.  And who can overlook the not one but two dance parties put on by the conference and its sponsors.  Hundreds of computer scientists on the dance floor, celebrating the fact that they are in a field where they get to do what they love every day.

As its name implies, the Grace Hopper Celebration is not simply a conference, but a celebration of the work that we do as computer scientists, and particularly as women computer scientists.   It’s a wonderful reminder to all of us—men and women, students and faculty, academics and those from industry—that we work in an exciting field at an exciting time.  It is clear from the conference that the women in the field are critical in driving this exciting field forward, both now and in the future.

This report was contributed by Dr. Christine Alvarado, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College.

Could prizes be useful to the broader computing community in advancing research?  The Clay Mathematics Institute established the Millenium Prizes in 2000, offering $1 million for the solutions to each of seven famous open problems, including the question of whether P=NP.  It’s hard to imagine that many researchers have decided to shape their research agendas based on the existence of this prize.  On the other hand, Wolfram Research sponsored a $25,000 prize, with a blue ribbon prize committee, to determine if a specific small (2 states and 3 symbols) Turing Machine is universal. The problem was solved (in the affirmative) in 2007 by a 20-year-old from Birmingham, England.

There is a rich history of prizes for technical innovation.  In the early 18th century, the British Parliament offered the Longitude Prize for a practical method of precisely determining a ship’s longitude, with different monetary amounts depending on the accuracy of the instrument.  The rules were changed during the course of the competition and the prize was never awarded.

More recently, there have been numerous technical prizes such as the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth’s surface.  Following on the success of the Ansari Prize, The X PRIZE Foundation has established several other major prizes for specific achievements that have “the potential to benefit humanity”.

Are there some major problems in computer science that could be incentivized by prizes – financial or otherwise?  What are the potential benefits and risks of this approach?  We’re eager to hear your thoughts.

Some good additional readings include the following:

• Two articles at Slate Magazine, one on the Netflix prize and one on the use of prizes for innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.
• A scholarly paper on the subject by Stephen Maurer and Suzanne Scotchmer.
• A report from the National Research Council on Innovation Inducement Prizes at the National Science Foundation.

The inspiring list in the attached PDF was compiled by the following individuals and their colleagues: Bill Bonvillian (MIT), Susan Graham (Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), Pat Lincoln (SRI), Fred Schneider (Cornell), and Victor Zue (MIT).

We solicit your suggestions for additional student contributions of comparable impact – add them as comments below and email them to Ed Lazowska.

Here’s the list!

The third meeting will likely be scheduled for late October, though draft vision/consensus documents are being crafted before this next meeting.  The meeting will held at IBM in Austin, Texas, and will engage leaders from funding agencies as part of the program.

Under the leadership of Beverly Woolf, head of the GROE initiative, the group discussed the results of the April workshop held in Tempe, Arizona, as well as the next steps for research involving the “road map” that came out of that workshop.

This meeting provided enthusiasm, support, and new ideas for the GROE initiative.  Results of the workshop will soon be reported on the CCC’s GROE initiative web site.

Under the CIFellows project – conceived of and implemented by CCC and CRA, and funded by a $15 million award from NSF – 60 extraordinary new Ph.D. graduates have been paired with 60 outstanding mentors for postdoctoral opportunities that advance the computing field.

The CIFellows project was conceived in February as a response to the current economic climate.  The goal is to keep outstanding Ph.D. graduates “in the research and education game” until the climate improves.  It is a huge tribute to NSF, CCC, CRA, the computing research community, and Peter Lee (who directs the project) that we were able to go from conception to sub-award in 5 months!

• Transition Team white papers (see them here)
• Library of Congress symposium (transparencies and videos here)
• Computing Innovation Fellows project (blog post here)
• NetSE Research Agenda (blog post here)

See the presentation here (pdf).

Over the past forty years, computer networks, and especially the Internet, have gone from research curiosity to fundamental infrastructure. However, this is no time to rest on the successes of the past. To meet society’s future requirements and expectations the Internet will need to be better: more secure, more accessible, more predictable and more reliable.

In 2008, the Computing Community Consortium charged the NetSE Council with developing a comprehensive research agenda that would support the development of a better Internet. The NetSE Research Agenda report summarizes the findings and recommendations of the NetSE Council.

The intended audiences for the report include members of the computing research community, funding agencies, and policymakers.  The report provides a framework or context within which various targeted research agendas can be moved forward by their communities.  The report is your document (literally hundreds have contributed to it in various ways), and it is a living document – comments are earnestly solicited, as indicated on CCC’s NetSE activity web page.

Read the full report here!

Many thanks to Ellen Zegura for seeing this activity through to a successful conclusion!

The website for submitting applications was taken down on schedule at midnight on June 9, and the reviewing process commenced two days later. We’ve been very busy reviewing ever since, assigning each application to multiple reviewers, to guarantee a minimum of three reviews for each awardee. We are targeting July 10 for completing the review and decision process.

The 526 applications come from 415 145 distinct colleges and universities and specify a total of 949 different applicant-mentor pairs. The mentors span 198 different universities, companies, and non-profits.

27% of the applicants declare themselves to be female and 62% male. 42% are US citizens and 5% are permanent residents. The two largest international groups are from China (15%) and India (14%). 6% of the applicants are members of an underrepresented racial/ethnic group.

We asked each applicant to specify his or her research subdiscipline. A quick tabulation of the responses is as follows:

• 21%: AI / Machine Learning / Robotics / Vision
• 2%: Communications/Signal Processing
• 3%: Computer Science Education / Educational Technology
• 6%: Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining
• 3%: Graphics / Visualization
• 7%: Hardware / Architecture
• 7%: HCI / CSCW
• 7%: Information Assurance / Security / Privacy / Cryptography
• 2%: Information Systems / Information Science
• 5%: Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing
• 9%: Networks / Operating Systems
• 3%: Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing
• 3%: Other (e.g., Quantum Computing, Synthetic Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Technology for the Developing World)
• 3%: Programming Languages / Compilers
• 8%: Scientific/Medical Informatics (includes Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Clinical Informatics, Public Health Informatics, Chemical Informatics)
• 2%: Social Computing / Social Informatics
• 2%: Software Engineering
• 0% (2): Technology Policy
• 6%: Theory / Algorithms

(It seems clear that a further subdivision of AI/ML/Robotics/Vision into separate areas would provide better information.)

The response by both prospective mentors and applicants far exceeds our expectations! The level of interest has been extremely gratifying, and we truly appreciate the cooperation of almost all of the mentors and recommenders in submitting their endorsements on time. The members of both the Selection Committee and Steering Committee have been working very, very hard on a completely volunteer basis. The CCC’s oversight is working well to ensure broad community input, notification and, ultimately, participation.

We’re all looking forward to making the final decisions, in about two weeks or so …

– Peter Lee and Ed Lazowska

Videos of the presentations (as well as slides) are now available on the symposium website.  See http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php for the complete agenda with individual links, or see our YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/computingresearch.

Talks at the Symposium included:

• Introductory Session
  • Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Changing the World”

• Session 1: The Internet and the World Wide Web
  • Alfred Spector (Google), “Why We’re Able to Google”
  • Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley), “The Magic of the ‘Cloud’: Supercomputers for Everybody, Everywhere”
  • Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University), “Human Computation”

• Session 2: Evolving Foundations
  • Barbara Liskov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Security of Online Information”
  • Daphne Koller (Stanford University), “Learning to Improve Our Lives”
  • Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University), “Global Information Networks”

• Session 3: The Transformation of the Sciences via Computation
  • Larry Smarr (UC San Diego), “Supercomputers and Supernetworks are Transforming Research”
  • Chris Johnson (University of Utah), “Computing and Visualizing the Future of Medicine”
  • Gene Myers (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), “Zooming In On Life”

• Session 4: Computing Everywhere!
  • Deborah Estrin (UCLA), “Sensing Everywhere!”
  • Pat Hanrahan (Stanford University), “Pixels Everywhere!”
  • Rodney Brooks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Robots Everywhere!”

In the 30+ year history of this award, only one computer scientist has been recognized.  A principal reason is we don’t nominate many people.  Let’s change that!  It’s too early to submit nominations, but it’s not too early to start thinking about who you’d be willing to nominate.

Information on the Waterman Award is on the NSF web here.

The Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project will fund as many as 60 such positions. Applications are due very soon: June 9, 2009. Awards are expected to be announced by July 10. Positions will commence in Autumn 2009.

Go to http://cifellows.org to apply to be a CIFellow.

Also: Go to http://cifellows.org to advertise your interest in hosting a CIFellow at your organization.

Individuals who complete the requirements for their PhD from a U.S. institution between May 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009 in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Science, or a closely related field are eligible to apply. Applicants must obtain commitments from between one and three prospective hosts/mentors. Hosts/mentors must not be at the same institution as the one granting the PhD. The CIFellows website provides resources for both prospective applicants and host/mentors to announce their interests and availability.

Complete information is available at http://cifellows.org. A poster that you may print and post is available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/poster/.

– Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium Council
– Peter Lee, Incoming Chair of the Computing Research Association

The Computing Community Consortium, working with a remarkable coalition of all the major groups involved in cyberinfrastructure for research and education, has been weighing in heavily on broadband strategy.  This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured this group’s position paper, “Unleashing Waves of Innovation.”

Our basic messages – consistent with the position advocated by Microsoft and others:

• Use an aggressive definition of broadband – 100 mbps – in order to be competitive with other nations.
• Focus the initiative on K-12 schools, higher education institutions, libraries, community centers, clinics, and hospitals:  reach a broad range of citizens, and the next generation of innovators and consumers.
• Recognize the historic role of the state and regional networks that grew out of the higher education community in reaching unserved and underserved regions.  In general, neither  telecommunications companies nor state agencies have provided effective leadership.

The recommendations in the “Unleashing” document were reached with remarkable unanimity among individuals and organizations representing a broad range of academic and infrastructure organizations.  The objective is to help shape the approach that will be adopted by the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture in allocating nearly $7 billion in broadband stimulus funds.  A similar task must be undertaken in each and every state – state governments will play a significant role in formulating and prioritizing proposals to Commerce and Agriculture for stimulus funds.

Read the “Unleashing” paper here.  Read the Chronicle article here.

- Ed Lazowska

http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php

Videos of all talks will be available soon.

Previous posts describing the symposium are available here and here.

Many thanks to our speakers for preparing and delivering such wonderful talks, and for making their materials available to the community at large.

Inspiration for the program came from a large number of responses from the computing research community to two November CCC blog posts — this was your symposium!

Each of the talks was superb.  Honestly, in 35 years in the field, I’ve never before spent a day with such uniformly high quality of content and presentation.  It was remarkable.  The videos of the 20-minute talks will be a great resource for all of us.

My introductory talk (pdf) provided a quick overview of the impact and promise of the field, as well as a peek at the day’s program.  I drew upon a recent New York Times article describing a Wharton School assessment of “the top innovations of the last 30 years” (more than half of which were direct results of computing research!) as well as a recent CSTB study “Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the IT R&D Ecosystem” (which described a day without information technology as “a day the Earth stood still”).

My closing remarks summarized both the content and the messages of the day-long symposium.  I won’t repeat Susan’s earlier summary of the content, but here are a few additional highlights:

• Alfred Spector commented that “Google did not arise through spontaneous generation in a garage in Palo Alto — it drew upon a broad set of computing research advances.”
• A number of the talks — Luis von Ahn‘s, Jon Kleinberg‘s, Rodney Brooks‘s, probably others — alluded to emerging “hybrid systems”:  humans + computers.
• Daphne Koller presented a terrific catalog of the successes of machine learning.
• Gene Myers asserted that “computation is the bottleneck in every [modern molecular biology] project” — a perfect bookend to Larry Smarr‘s session-leadoff talk on the transition to data-intensive science.
• Chris Johnson made it clear that in the past decade, modeling and visualization have become valuable tools in advanced surgical practice — M.D.’s are beating down his door to obtain access.
• Pat Hanrahan presented neat timelines of the transformation of all media — publishing, audio, photography, and video — from analog to digital.
• Rodney Brooks ended the technical sessions on a cautionary note:  The future of robotics is robots that operate in unstructured environments.  America has a wide lead now in this field.  But once, we led in manufacturing robotics, and we allowed that lead to slip away.  Will we allow that to happen again?

That’s a good jumping-off point for the messages of the day.  Here’s my list:

• Computing research truly has changed the world.
• A rich and complex ecology — involving government, academia, and industry — has made America the world leader.
• Research has laid the foundation — you can find federally-funded university-based research at the heart of essentially every billion-dollar sector of the IT industry.
• It consistently takes 10 or 15 years from “research breakthrough” to”billion-dollar sector.” So you need patience — there’s no such thing as “just-in-time research.”
• Often, “products” in IT are created by synthesizing multiple advances — unlike biomedicine, where a single patent can yield a blockbuster drug.
• Often, old ideas gain new life.  We’ve had recent breakthroughs in search and in machine learning, but each traces its roots back at least 40 years.
• While computing research often is motivated by a “strategic objective” — we see a practical value if the research succeeds — we’re often not very good at predicting what the greatest impact of our innovations will be.  Serendipity plays a huge role.  Any attempt to decide early-on what research is “important” is likely a losing proposition.
• While much of the exciting computing research today is interdisciplinary and collaborative, it’s important to have a balanced portfolio:  core + interdisciplinary, single-investigator + team, etc.

The bottom line:  We have an extraordinary track record — America has an IT R&D ecosystem that again and again leads to massive transformations.  And the next ten years can be our golden age:  on March 25th we heard about some amazing recent accomplishments, and we heard from some extraordinary young people (as well as some extraordinary not-so-young people) who are driving the field forward.  The opportunities for impact are greater than they have ever been.  Go out and change the world!

– Ed Lazowska

I’ve just returned from the CCC-organized Symposium on “Computing Research that Changed the World.” (http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php) It was a marvelous experience. There were 12 wonderful 15-minute talks that highlighted major achievements in computing in the last 10-20 years, the research advances that enabled them, and the opportunities to move forward in the various fields in the years ahead.

In the morning, Al Spector outlined the technologies that enable us to google, Eric Brewer explained the emergence of the cloud, and Luis von Ahn showed us how captchas are being used to build accurate digital archives of corpuses such as the New York Times. Then Barbara Liskov explained the key ideas and challenges of security in distributed systems, Daphne Koller highlighted some of the myriad applications enabled or enhanced by machine learning, and Jon Kleinberg taught us about the science that underlies social networking and the ways in which those concepts are fueling new applications.

As if that weren’t enough, in the afternoon, Larry Smarr showed some of the major achievements (both scientific and technical) fostered by the nation’s investments in supercomputing for the research community, and highlighted the importance of huge amounts of data and ultra-high bandwidth networking for future progress, Chris Johnson showed us the rapid evolution of visualization techniques and the scientific understanding they have facilitated, and Gene Myers gave a fast summary of genome sequencing past and future and the opportunities to drive progress in molecular biology as a data-driven science. Then Deborah Estrin showed the wondrous new applications that are being enabled by the ubiquity of sensors, and the research challenges that must be met, Pat Hanrahan reminded us of the remarkable evolution of digital media from text to audio to video to photography to HDTV, and Rod Brooks gave us a great summary of the stunning advances in robotics.

The day was spellbinding. I never once opened my laptop. I was reluctant to tell speakers their time was running out when I moderated a session. I was reminded over and over how rich our field is and how fast it continues to evolve. Just as it was when I started out as a student, it’s an exciting time to be in computing.

Through the kind auspices of Congressman Bart Gordon, the symposium was held in the Members Room of the Library of Congress.

It’s a beautiful room, but relatively small, so attendance was limited. But it was a great crowd — some senior C.S. faculty, some junior faculty, key former and current NSF people from CISE, from other parts of the Foundation, and from the National Science Board (including current Director Arden Bement and former Director Erich Bloch), Congressional staffers, and a collection of colleagues from other greater Washington organizations. Congressmen Lipinski and Holt were able to join some of us for lunch.

The sessions in the Members Room were followed by a closing session (more like a reception) in the Madison Room. There were some really cool demos there. Ed Lazowska, who had made the opening remarks in the morning, gave a brilliant summary of the day, despite the challenge of talking in a cocktail party setting. Congressman Lipinski also spoke, and gave those not at lunch an opportunity to meet him.

The speakers did an outstanding job in making their talks accessible to that diverse audience. Consequently, these are great talks to share with student audiences, to show them what computing is really about. Those of you that checked might have noticed that there was no webcasting, but the talks and the discussions that followed were videotaped, and will appear on the CCC website soon. I strongly encourage you to take a look!

– Susan Graham

I finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston just before the City Archives collapsed in Cologne, Germany, on March 3. I soon found myself at my 11th disaster, but unlike Webb, the protagonist who must come to grips with the events that led him to a janitorial job cleaning up trauma sites, I was clear on why I was there standing in the rain. I was there in the hope that we could make a difference with technology — that we could enable the fire rescue teams to save a life, prevent a responder’s death, or even bring a family’s agonizing wait to closure. Or to help the structural engineers discover and document What Went Wrong. And, if not that, learn something for the next time.

We accomplished option C at least.

Let me offer this photograph as the spoiler alert for my personal blog (rescuerobotics.blogspot.com) which has details, history of robots for building collapses, and some pictures and video. In the picture, I’m on the right, down at the mid-level of the collapse (there were two more stories of flooded or damaged subway structure below us) with the Cologne Chief of the Fire Department, the head of special operations, and the safety officer (all wearing reflective bunker gear). The photo was snapped a few minutes after we had reached the conclusion that robots could not be used. In the photo we are chatting about the collapse, the dangers, the sequence of events that had led to the catastrophe and resulting challenges before clambering up the scaffolding to the safer street level.

Standing there in Germany, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the ways computing could be applied. Robots. Cyber-physical systems. Sensors to penetrate the rubble and algorithms to process and mine the data. Reliable and secure high bandwidth wireless networks. Optimal resource allocations and scheduling. Mapping and 3D surface reconstruction. Sketch-based and multi-modal interfaces to tablet PCs to make it easier for the experts to express their knowledge. Social networking to help the displaced residents figure out how to adapt, where their friends had been relocated to, what was really going on.

Looking again at the photograph brings me back to the The Mystic Arts. I was particularly touched as to how at the end of the novel Webb comes to view his work as a sacred duty. The disaster “lifecycle” of prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery is a lot like trauma work — it is infrequent, not well-funded or understood, very challenging, and ultimately inevitable.  Standing there in Germany, I glimpsed the journey ahead for the computing community as we, too, embrace the difficult and necessary, and make the field of emergency informatics our sacred duty as computing, well applied, can help erase all signs (and maybe the causes) of death.

– Robin Murphy is a Professor at Texas A&M University, and one of the newest members of the CCC Council. Previously, Robin’s robots also conducted search-and-rescue operations at the World Trade Center shortly after 9/11.

I think that this symposium is really important because with a new administration in Washington, we have people who appreciate the importance of fundamental research. If we increase the size of the funding pie, all of us will benefit. The best way to increase the size of the computing research part of the pie is to link advances in computing research to advances in other fields and the larger society.

That is what the March 25 symposium is about. With the cast of speakers we have lined up and the number of people from government agencies and Congress who will be attending, we have a great chance to make a difference. Check out the program; we had to keep the invitation list small due to the location, but all the talks will be recorded.

– Greg Andrews

It’s certainly exciting to see core computer science issues featured so prominently in the press! Indeed, this article has generated quite a bit of discussion in the research community. For example, while acknowledging that a new network architecture would certainly play an important role in improving security, Purdue’s Gene Spafford writes on his CERIAS blog, “Do we need a new Internet? Short answer: Almost certainly, no.” (Gene tells me that he will be interviewed on this topic on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, airing at 9:30am on Saturday, February 21.) UCSD’s Stefan Savage is largely in agreement, saying that “the network is by and large the smallest part of the security problem” and that “at a technical level the security problem is really an end-host issue, coupled with an interface issue — lots of power given to lots of different pieces of software whose couplings present opportunities to bad guys that aren’t anticipated, at a social level its a human factors issue.” The bottom line is that, outside of resource management (that is, controlling DDoS) and attribution/accountability, the main sources of security risk are at the end points — a key point missed in the NY Times article. Peter Freeman perhaps puts it most plainly:

To be succinct, although technical improvements are clearly needed, a large part of the security issue comes back to people, not technology. If we could figure out how to educate people so they don’t respond to pleas from Nigerians who need to transfer money or they don’t leave their passwords on post-its or never install the frequent security patches that are issued, we could make huge improvements immediately.

That’s not to say, however, that reinventing some aspects of networking isn’t an important research goal. Peter Freeman, while he was the director of NSF’s computer science (CISE) division, was instrumental in helping to launch the GENI Project in 2004, with the goal of developing an experimental platform for exploring truly reliable and higher capacity networks. For Freeman and others, new approaches to networking were deemed an important area for government investment because of the basic nature of the research problems involved.

Mounting a global-scale effort such as GENI has been a major challenge for the computing research community, perhaps similar to what the astronomy community goes through when it decides to develop large telescopes. But the initiative has already had several ripple effects. Guru Parulkar, who was the NSF program manager for GENI at the start, went to work with Nick McKeown and helped start the Clean Slate Project mentioned in the NY Times article. The GENI effort also put Princeton’s Larry Peterson in the middle of things, as the PlanetLab Consortium was one of the most influential early inspirations for GENI. And now, a much broader visioning effort in Network Science and Engineering, or NetSE, supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), is defining the critical research questions in a wide range of network-related areas.

As for GENI itself, significant progress on development of a prototype has been made, coordinated by a GENI Project Office (GPO) and involving a large number of academic researchers. BBN’s Chip Elliott says that a version of the testbed will be available for early testing in a matter of months, “which will allow researchers to investigate many core networking research questions, some of which are the thorniest questions for Network Science and Engineering, upon the earliest end-to-end prototype of GENI.” Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech professor and NetSE Council Chair, cites the importance of this development, saying “For me, the deep technical issues of security and privacy are at the heart of the GENI effort, and one of the main reasons for developing it.”

The demand for better security grows with the public’s dependence on computing and networking. As Chip Elliott states:

Would our lives improve if all aspects of the Internet were firmly bound to real-world personal and organizational identities? Might total public transparency reduce crime and misbehavior – in short, might less privacy lead directly to more security? Is privacy already a vanishing concern, fated to disappear in a few years without widespread regret?

Careful thinking will illuminate these issues — particularly if coupled to a vigorous program of experimentation.

This, in a nutshell, is what the NetSE and GENI initiatives aim to address.

– Peter Lee

The United States of America has steadily fallen further and further behind Asian and European nations with respect to broadband penetration and related services. This is impeding the development of new consumer applications (and related new industry and services) and limiting communications in an economy where knowledge exchange is vital in order to be to be a major player of the emerging , seamless and unobstructed global market. Reversing this trend may be of high interest to the incoming administration, but the viability of extending broadband is dependent on the deployment of new high bandwidth and high value applications that (a) will justify the investments required and (b) will contribute digital solutions to many of the key societal problems in this Energy-Climate Era (as recently identified by Thomas L. Friedman in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded) such as growing demand for ever scarcer energy supplies and natural energy, rapid and accelerating biodiversity loss, and disruptive climate change.

In 1997, Jaron Lanier, at the time the chief scientist of Advanced Networks and Services, started the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, as a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications over Internet2. We never capitalized on this initiative in United States. Instead, virtually all major advances in the commercial design and development of 3D multimedia input and output devices such as 3D stereo cameras, 3D displays, integrated solutions for the next generation of home entertainment systems were undertaken abroad. If we look at the corporate landscape of multimedia technology and its integrated multimedia solutions, they come mostly from Asia (e.g., NEC, Panasonic, Sony, FXPal, Samsung) and Europe (e.g., Phillips, Thomson). Swift action is needed to ensure American universities and industries seize the academic and business leadership of the next generation of tele-immersive systems, the 4D Immersive Holographic Spaces.

4D Immersive Holographic Spaces will be joint multi-view multimedia-rich spaces where people can immerse themselves in their physical full body size into a joint cyber-physical space with other people, and execute physical activities (e.g., physiotherapy rehabilitation), walk around people and observe detailed full-body social behaviors and communication cues of people in real-time, as if they were co-located in the same room, even though they are geographically distributed and thousands of miles apart. The impact of such systems would be dramatic, contributing to the increase of innovative economic opportunities, to the “green energy” efforts, and to the decrease of gap between regions of “have” and “have-not” experts. With respect to innovation leadership, venture capitalists will for the first time be able to interact with entrepreneurs located thousands of miles away as if they were next door. Our nation’s ability to find and grow new and emerging high-technology high-quality job-creating companies would extend to all regions of America. In health care, new services based on these cutting edge information systems could be delivered to our rural areas. A physiotherapist based in Washington would be able to provide rehabilitation assistance to multiple remote patients after heart-attack in neighboring regions and a wheelchair basketball coach in Illinois could inspire and train wheelchair children in Montana to play the sport. The children of the men and women of our armed forces would be able to explore the Amazon forest with their parents in a virtual world or simply learn basic values from their parents by bringing them together in their (virtual) home. All of these scenarios are dependent on the ability of 4D Immersive Holographic Spaces to deliver rich visible social cues and multi-view capture of human/group behaviors.

America can lead in the area of broadband information-rich immersive spaces if major investments are made to develop and build national tele-immersive infrastructures. We can then ensure US companies deliver innovative applications and services solutions with our academic institutions as key partners in addressing the research and development challenges. Advances in real-time computer vision, real-time computer graphics, integration of speech, vision and tactile sensory information, dynamic and task-dependent signal compression, and broadband wired and wireless networking with advanced stream-based and multi-view distributed and operating systems and architectures will be needed for the future tele-immersive systems. It is imperative that we move boldly and commit ourselves to this effort.

What is a “better Internet”? The current Internet has been a remarkable success, providing a platform for innovation that far exceeds its original vision as a research instrument. It is well documented that the Internet has transformed the lives of billions of people in areas as diverse as education, healthcare, entertainment and commerce. Yet many of these successes are threatened by the increasing sophistication of security attacks and the organizations that propagate them. A materially more secure Internet would be “better”. Further, billions of people remain untouched by the advantages of the Internet; Internet World Statistics puts worldwide average Internet penetration at about 22% in mid 2008. An Internet that affordably reaches the other 80% of the world population would be “better”.

Beyond security and accessibility, there are other areas where limitations of the current Internet are significant. The Internet usually works pretty well, but every user has experienced inexplicable periods of degraded performance or outright non-function. The current Internet provides no visibility to end-users and shockingly little visibility to network managers and operators to support understanding, adapting to and fixing reliability problems. Such limitations require lay people spend their leisure time as network systems administrators and companies to spend heavily in network operations. Further, the lack of performance reliability prevents the Internet from advancing to become a truly dependable, critical infrastructure. Indeed, current societal reliance on the Internet for critical functions is disproportionate to our ability to deliver a high degree of dependability. A more predictable Internet would be “better”.

The Internet embeds societal values in ways that are often implicit and not well understood. For example, the Internet is “open”, usually intended to mean that anyone can join the network by implementing the public protocol IP. In principle, users can run any application on the Internet, without limitation imposed by the network protocols. Open networks promote organic growth, but suffer from a lack of mechanisms to vet or bar participation. Issues of trust and individual accountability are confusing. As the well-known cartoon says, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” An Internet that contains support for identity would be “better”.

The research community is poised to dramatically advance the agenda of building better networks through advances in both empirical design methodology and systematic design methodology. We have an approach to support large-scale and flexible experimentation based on programmability of devices and federation of multiple test-beds. We have a nascent mathematical framework for understanding architectural features and underlying principles. The time is right to advance and link both methodologies to realize better networks.

– Ellen Zegura

Back in early 2008, they began organizing four workshops, one each in four topical areas of robotics: manufacturing and logistics, healthcare and medical robotics, service robotics and emerging technologies.  More than 100 people attended these workshops, representing a mix of industry and academia.  Preliminary workshop reports were made available to the community, and an online discussion board provided a forum for further input.

A sampling of the four workshops’ findings:

• In manufacturing it is evident that the main applications so far have been large-scale production of entities such as cell phones and cars whereas small-scale production has received limited attention.  It is further evident that processes such as logistics and material handling have significant potential for use of robotics, but so far little attention has been devoted to such applications.  There is a need to consider new methods for easy programming of robots, and further integration of sensory information to enable robust and safe operations.  Less than 5% of all industrial robots today use sensors as part of the primary control system.
• Medical robots are today widely used for prostate surgery and are also gaining momentum for cardiac procedures and hip replacement.  The main motivations are faster recovery, improved quality and a reduced risk of any side effects.  The potential for medical robotics is very significant.  Related to healthcare there is also the use of robots for rehabilitation as it enables a higher degree of customization to individual patients and faster initiation of training.  In addition the engagement with robots is sometimes easier than interaction with humans due to privacy and scheduling considerations.  Wider adoption of healthcare robotics calls for new methods in machine learning, human robot interaction and flexible mechanisms for physical interaction with humans.
• Service robotics has two aspects: professional and domestic.  Professional robotics involves for example agriculture, forestry, mining and harbor automation. The number of people involves with agriculture and related industries is decreasing while the demand is increasing and there is a need to further automate the industry to remain competitive.  For domestic services there is a need to provide cleaning, surveillance, life sign monitoring, remote video, etc to assist people in their busy lives, but also to provide key functionality to enable people to remain in their homes as mobility and mental capabilities are reduced with age.  In service robotics it is characteristic that users have no or very limited training and the systems must be intuitive / easy to use.  In addition there is a need for flexible integration with existing technology (a scalable integration strategy). Finally there is a need for navigation and flexible perception to allow deployment in natural environments (e.g. homes).
• In emerging technologies that are several opportunities as sensing become ubiquitous, more flexible mechanisms are designed and new technologies such as nano become available.  The access to complex computing with a limited footprint allows deployment of AI in new settings.  The use of machine learning and new types of interfaces with a high degree of connectivity opens entirely new opportunities for use of robotics. Not to mentioned new actuation methods.

Robotics in general is characterized by a significant economic potential and has research opportunities across the entire spectrum from basic to applied.  There are clear short-term opportunities in areas such as medicine and manufacturing and at the same time there is a potential to create an entirely new industry for cognitively endowed robots with richer interaction with the world.

The workshop reports are nearly in their final form.  You can watch for them and other updates at http://www.us-robotics.us.

–Andrew McCallum

“Congress is now debating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in this package is over 10 billion dollars for science facilities, research, and instrumentation.

“The reason for this inclusion is simple: today’s research is tomorrow’s infrastructure.

“When our nation faces immediate challenges, the feasible solutions depend upon the ideas, resources, and designs that are “on the shelf,” ready to deploy …

“Increasingly, information technology is the cornerstone of America’s infrastructure. Today’s information technology research is a cornerstone of tomorrow’s infrastructure.”

Read the full editorial here.  A set of white papers describing the role of computing research in meeting the challenges of the 21st century is available here.

Today we’re asking members of our Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) — and anyone else with an interest in seeing fundamental research and research infrastructure budgets reflect their critical importance to the long-term health of U.S. economy and quality of life — to contact their representatives in Congress and urge their support for science funding in the nearly $900 billion stimulus bill now making its way through Congress…

…It is important that we generate letters from as many institutions as possible. Because the Senate has come out with sharply reduced numbers in their version of the bill, there will be temptation in the conference process to reduce or trade away big science increases for gains elsewhere in the bill. Significant participation rates in this effort will help keep the pressure on Members to continue to support science in the bill.

The full text of the CRAN Action Alert is available here, along with a sample letter.

This is an incredibly important time right now for our nation and for the future of science research. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.

What questions shape our intellectual future? What attracts the best and brightest minds of a new generation? What are the next big computing ideas – the ones that will define the future of computing, galvanize the very best students, and catalyze research investment and public support?

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.

The CCC is funded by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement with the Computing Research Association. The work of the CCC is carried out by an active and engaged Council, currently chaired by Ed Lazowska with Susan Graham as vice-chair, which reports to the CRA board. The members of the Council are appointed by CRA in consultation with NSF, with staggered 3 year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found at http://www.cra.org/ccc/.

We invite nominations (including self-nominations) for members to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson, Sarita Adve, or Andrew Chien by January 14th. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.

1. Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.
2. Research interests.
3. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).
4. A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.
5. A statement from the nominator or nominee of less than 1 page, supporting the nomination by describing the nominee’s ideas for, commitment to, accomplishments in, and potential future contributions to the missions of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. What the CCC Council needs is not famous people with lots of awards, but people with ideas, judgment, and the willingness to work.

Now, the full story:

The CCC’s mission is “to foster exciting new research visions in the computing community which attract support.” Looking back at what has transpired over the past year, community participation has been tremendous. Many dozens of people have stepped up to propose workshops, make presentations, write articles for this blog, and chip in with thoughtful feedback and ideas. It’s been productive and, well, fun.

Of course, the name of the game is to turn research visions into reality, and one of the core strategies for doing this is to “improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in our society”. This seems particularly important right now, as our nation makes a historic transition, hopefully ushering in a new era in the government’s approach to research support.

Without really knowing what kinds of results we would get, we put out a challenge to a small number of people to write very briefly (we asked for two pages) on “computing research initiatives for the 21st century.” What does the new government need to know about the value of computing research? What are some of the most promising and exciting research opportunities in the field? What computing capabilities are critical for the nation today and into the future?

Well, the response has been tremendous. A sample of what we received is now posted on the CCC web site at http://www.cra.org/ccc/initiatives. There are essays on the central role that computing research has in our economy, ideas for research/education infrastructure, “re-envisioning DARPA”, and proposals for research initiatives in personalized medicine, transportation, “big data” computing, computer architecture, networking, cyber-physical systems, and more. WIth this treasure trove of thoughtful inputs, we are now using available channels and the CRA and CCC’s resources to get these noticed by as many policymakers as possible.

We have been so heartened by the response that we are now talking about having a more organized process for soliciting and publishing these sorts of idea-pieces. Stay tuned here and on the CCC web site for more details, some time early in 2009. We’ll also be asking some of the authors of these writeups to post followup discussion pieces on this blog.

Again, thanks for all of your support and participation. 2009 is looking like a truly exciting year.

– Peter Lee and Ed Lazowska

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lLDNosedHk

It’s inspirational.

– Ed Lazowska

• The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today
• Search technology – Where once we filed, today we search
• Cluster computing
• The transformation of science via computation

In this post, we summarize just a sample of your additions (we have grabbed text from your posted comments, without a lot of editing, so this will be loose – “it’s the thoughts that count”) and invite your further comments – cleaning up these additions, or providing others.  Please let us hear from you!

Secure communication – the foundation of e-commerce

All of e-commerce relies on the results of computing research:  the Internet, the World Wide Web, cluster computing, parallel relational database systems, cryptography and algorithms for secure credit card transactions.  Here, we focus on the latter.  Without secure communication – for example, the ability to conduct a credit card transaction with an online merchant – there would be no e-commerce.  The complex of events (both theoretical advances and deployment of practical, useful software) that allow a user to type a credit card number into a web browser and be reasonably assured of its safety is a game-changer, making secure communication and secure commerce a reality for (potentially) all users of the Internet.  Without these artifacts, we would have no Amazon.com, no eBay, no thriving online pornography industry, …

Mobile computing and communication

Twenty years ago, computing was a desktop experience.  “Portable computers” were the size of a briefcase.  Communication was via 9600 baud telephone modem.  Contrast that to today:  2 pound laptops that fit in a mailing envelope, mobile phones with Web browsers that fit in a shirt pocket, and ubiquitous WiFi and 3G cellular at many millions of bits per second.   Clearly, mobile computing and communication – the untethered lifestyle – is a game-changer.

Expert systems become ubiquitous

Thousands of routine decisions daily are made by computer systems that have specialized knowledge of a problem area. In the past, rule changes at a central office – e.g., the IRS, or the headquarters for a corporation – were incorporated slowly into practice. With expert systems, the people making the decisions have the benefit of codified knowledge bases that reflect current policy and practices.

Research on expert systems began in the 1970′s with support from DARPA, the National Institutes of Heath, and NSF. Expert systems have subsequently become an essential part of the IT toolkit for every major company. Help desks, credit checking and equipment troubleshooting are examples of systems that have been replicated many times over and are routinely saving money for business and public institutions.

Expert systems technology is a game-changer.

Robotics in everyday life

Twenty years ago, robots appeared in artificial intelligence laboratories, automated assembly lines, and science fiction movies.  In recent years, iRobot Corporation has sold roughly 1,000,000 Roomba robotic home vacuum cleaners annually, and multiple robotic automobiles have completed the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, autonomously navigating a 150-mile desert course and a 60-mile urban course.  Robots have entered the mainstream of society, integrating a wide variety of Artificial Intelligence technologies such as computer vision, sensing, and planning.  This is a game-changer, and the best clearly is yet to come.

Digital media

Today, almost no one thinks of photography in any form other than digital.  The means by which we capture, edit, and share digital images are the result of multiple breakthroughs in computer science.

Similarly, digital compact disc audio – a breakthrough when it entered the mainstream only two dozen years ago – is going the way of the dinosaur, replaced by MP3 audio on personal devices such as iPods.

Our video entertainment is in digital form too – whether on a DVD, a personal video device, streaming media, or a video game.

Digital media is revolutionizing entertainment and the entertainment industry – a game-changer.

GPS, mapping, and navigation

GPS – the ability to pinpoint your position nearly anywhere on earth – is a marvel.  But even more amazing are the algorithms that provide navigation – available on the Web, and in $200 self-contained portable devices from Garmin, TomTom, and others.  GPS, mapping, and navigation are game-changers.

Collaborative filtering and recommender systems

Collaborative filtering and recommender systems dramatically altered how we think about computing applications by introducing the idea that the actions and preferences of other people could be a useful resource in computations intended to support someone else’s activities.  This is easily appreciated by a broad audience – anyone who has used Amazon.com’s “people who bought this also bought…” or other social features; a somewhat narrower audience will also appreciate that a major improvement in search engine performance occurred when they started taking into account link structures and then click behaviors.

There’s a clear  tie to computing research, both in work on algorithms for using data from other people, and in interfaces for collecting it and presenting predictions or recommendations.  The idea was first articulated in CACM and in the ACM CSCW and CHI conferences, and there are now thousands of papers about it.

A few additional ideas that were suggested

These need fleshing out or weeding out!  Our comments in [blue brackets] …

• Something related to applications of machine learning – the applications within computing (e.g., NLP, vision, graphics), to other sciences (with big data), to finance (credit card fraud, and dare I say Wall Street) abound [for sure - needs fleshing out]
• Something related to advances in software engineering, and the application of logic to analyzing both hardware and software designs and artifacts [the application of logic might work; we still have a "software crisis," though, and "there (still) is no silver bullet," so need to be careful with claims]
• Something related to scientific computing and large-scale computational science, simulations, etc. [we meant this to be covered by one of our original topics - "the transformation of science via computation"]
• Virtualization [can someone say "1960s"?]
• Network coding [would need to be painted larger]
• Compressed sampling/sensing [would need to be painted larger]
• Quantum computing [premature]
• Elliptic curve crypto [covered crypto under secure communication]
• Molecular computing [come see us in 10 years!]
• Randomized algorithms [would need to be painted larger - colored with applications]
• Theory of distributed computing: impossibility results, Byzantine generals [we meant to feature this under our "cluster computing" topic, which relies integrally on these algorithms; cluster computing is not a hardware breakthrough, it's a distributed algorithms breakthrough!]
• Wearable/ubiquitous/mobile computing [covered under mobile computing and communication, a new topic above]
• Sensor networks [tell me more]
• Human computation (Captchas, the ESP game, etc.) [maybe ...]
• Computational microeconomics: ad placement, automated mechanism design [sounds good - say more!]

Again, we invite your comments!  Let us hear from you!

– Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee

–

The CCC blog has published a couple of articles on the multi-core challenge, all emphasizing the difficulty of making parallel programming prevalent and, hence, the difficulty of leveraging multi-core systems in mass markets. The challenge is, indeed, significant and requires important investments in research and development; but, at UPCRC Illinois, we do not believe that the sky is falling.

Parallel programming, as currently practiced, is hard: Programs, especially shared memory programs, are prone to subtle, hard-to-find synchronization bugs and parallel performance is elusive. One can reach two possible conclusions from this situation: It is possible that parallel programming is inherently hard, in which case, indeed the sky is falling. An alternative view is that, intrinsically, parallel programming is not significantly harder than sequential programming; rather, it is hampered by the lack of adequate languages, tools and architectures.  In this alternative view, different practices, supported by the right infrastructure, can make parallel programming prevalent.

This alternative, optimistic view is based on many years of experience with parallel programming. While some concurrent code, e.g., OS code, is often hard to write and debug, there are many forms of parallelism that are relatively easy to master: Many parallel scientific codes are written by scientists with limited CS education; the time spent handling parallelism is a small fraction of the time spent developing a large parallel scientific code. Parallelism can be hidden behind an SQL interface and exploited by programmers with little difficulty. Many programmers develop GUI’s that are, in effect, parallel programs, using specialized frameworks. Parallelism can be exposed using scripted object systems such as Squeak Etoys in ways that enable young children to write parallel programs. These examples seem to indicate that it is not parallelism per se that is hard to handle; rather it is the unstructured, unconstrained interaction between concurrent threads that result in code that is hard to understand both from a correctness and performance view, hence hard to debug and tune.

The state-of-the-art in parallel programming is what sequential computing was several decades ago. A major reason for this situation is that parallel programming has been an art exercised by a group of experts whose small population did not justify major investments in programming environments aimed at making their life easier. This reason disappears as parallelism becomes available on all platforms. Furthermore, we can make faster progress now because we understand well the principles it takes to make programming easier — principles such as safety, encapsulation, modularity, or separation of concerns; we also have more experience in developing sophisticated IDE’s.

What will it take to bring these principles of computer science to parallel programming? It will require a broad based attack across the system stack. As has been said in these blogs, we need research in languages, compilers, runtime, libraries, tools, hardware … What has not been said explicitly is that none of these areas are likely to produce the silver bullet on their own. The solution that will work eventually will be one that brings together technologies from all these areas to bear on each other. However, we do not have the luxury of doing this via incremental and reactive changes over decades. The research truly needs to be interdisciplinary and the idea of co-design needs to be internalized. Unfortunately, the mainstream systems community has all but abandoned this mode of research in the last several years. Language researchers are locked into mechanisms that will only be supported by commodity hardware and hardware researchers are locked into a mode that requires supporting the lowest common denominator software. It is imperative that we break out of these shells and get the research community into a mindset that we are truly looking to define a new age of computing — a mindset that nurtures research where a clean system slate is an acceptable starting point.

The sky is not falling, but the ground is shifting rapidly. The multi-core challenge requires a concerted effort of academia and industry to generate new capabilities. We are confident that in the future, as in the past, new capabilities will breed new applications. Multi-core parallelism can be leveraged to develop human-centered consumer products that provide more intelligent and more intuitive interfaces through better graphics and vision, better speech and text processing and better modeling of the user and the environment.

The task of providing better performance is shifting from the hardware to the software. This is an exciting time for Computer Science.

Marc Snir
4323 Siebel Center, 201 N Goodwin, IL 61801
Tel (217) 244 6568
Web http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/snir

The workshop vastly exceeded my expectations – 8 hours of brainstorming about strategies and best practices, in four areas:

·     “Go Outside Your Box” – what strategies can we adopt to increase collaboration across subfields and with other fields?

·     “The World Needs Us” – how to contribute to the solution of societal “Grand Challenge” problems while simultaneously driving computing research forward.

·     “Breaking the Cycle” – can we change the reward structure to decrease incrementalism, encouraging long-range thinking?

·     “Serving the Community” – how can we further increase the culture of service to the research community and to the nation?

I’m sure others will blog on various aspects, and teams have formed to write up specific strategies and best practices.  But here are a few things that really struck me:

Computer science:  the ever-expanding sphere

A model of how our field evolves can help us make smart decisions.  Think of computer science as an ever-expanding sphere (this analogy is due to Alfred Spector; all graphics are due to Peter Lee).  We transform other fields and we change the world.  We do this not just through the application of computation, but through the introduction of computational thinking.  When we transform these fields, we make new discoveries about our own field that enlarge our “bag of tricks” – our ability to transform other fields.  So we constantly reinvent ourselves by reinventing others.

We’ve transformed circuit design, publishing, photography, communication, mechanical CAD, certain fields of science, …  We’re in the process of transforming biology, transportation, …  And we’re always transforming ourselves.  Computer science truly is an endless frontier.

What this means is that even when working inside the sphere, we’ve got to be looking outward.  And at the edges of the sphere, we’ve got to be embracing others, because that’s how we reinvent ourselves.

Computer science lives in Pasteur’s Quadrant

The vast majority of work in our field is motivated both by concerns of use and by a desire to evolve principles of enduring value.  If anything, we may be too much in Pasteur’s Quadrant – we may place too little value on research without obvious utility, and we may be too reluctant to reject as “not computer science” work that’s focused on applications where it may not be obvious that our own field will be advanced.  (Jim Gray had the stature and courage to pioneer our move into data-intensive eScience – today, the transformations this has stimulated “within the sphere” are obvious.)

Lots of the action is at the interfaces

This is true fractally – it’s true of the interfaces between computer science and other fields (the edges of the sphere), and it’s true of the interfaces between subfields of computer science.

We’ve got to produce students who are comfortable at these interfaces.  It’s increasingly difficult.  Stuart Russell observed that “Bohr drives Pasteur” – we need strength at the core, and the core is ever-expanding.  At the same time, students need to be able to make connections.  I’m concerned we’re making the wrong tradeoffs these days.  Students enter graduate school with records that look like promotion cases a decade ago!  We decrease course requirements to get students engaged in our own research as quickly as possible.  Our colloquia are half-empty because everyone’s too busy beavering away to attend.  These factors decrease breadth and agility within the sphere.  We don’t require minors, which would expose students to other fields – this decreases the ability to work at the edge of the sphere.  As a field, we should tackle these issues head-on.

Visions, incremental progress, and random walks

A research project needs to be hard enough to be interesting, and easy enough to be doable.   There needs to be a vision – a sense of where you and your colleagues are headed over a five-year or ten-year period.  And it needs to be tackled in what Alfred Spector calls “factorizable pieces.”

If there’s a vision, then a “factorizable piece” may appear incremental, but it’s headed somewhere important.  Without a vision, it’s part of a random walk.  It’s important to differentiate these!  A goal of the CCC “visioning workshop” process is to articulate some of these visions for our field.

Bob Sproull pointed us to a wonderful paper by Ivan Sutherland on the conduct of research – “Technology and Courage.”  Read it!

Onward

I’m sure others will blog on various aspects of the workshop.  Look in the mirror – is there a field you’d rather be part of?

– Ed Lazowska

• The advance needs to be “game changing,” in the sense of dramatically altering how we think about computing and its applications.
• The importance of the advance needs to be obvious and easily appreciated by a wide audience.
• There needs to be a clear tie to computing research (or to infrastructure initiatives that build upon research and were sponsored by computing research organizations).
• We’re particularly interested in highlighting the impact of federally-funded university-based research.

We’re focusing on work carried out in the past 20 years or so, in part because of the upcoming 20-year celebrations for the CISE directorate at NSF. Of course, lots of great fundamental research can take more than 20 years before the impact becomes obvious, but even in such cases there is usually continuing influences on more recent research that can be cited here.

To get your juices flowing, here are four game-changers that we definitely think belong on the list. Use these to think about others that belong on the list, or feel free to argue with our choices.

The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today

In 1988 — 20 years ago — ARPANET became NSFNET. At the time, there were only about 50,000 hosts spread across only about 150 networks. In 1989, CNRI connected MCImail to the Internet — the first “commercial use.” In 1992, NCSA Mosaic triggered the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. In 1995, full commercialization of the Internet was achieved, with roughly 6,000,000 hosts spread across roughly 50,000 networks. Today, there are more than half a billion Internet hosts, and an estimated 1.5 billion Internet users.

While many of the underlying technologies (digital packet switching, ARPANET, TCP/IP) predate the 20-year window, the transition from the relatively closed ARPANET to the totally open Internet and World Wide Web as we know them today falls squarely within that window. NSF-supported contributions included CSnet, NSFNET, and NCSA Mosaic.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are game-changers.

Where once we filed, today we search

The vast majority of the world’s information is available online today, and we find what we need — whether across the continent or on our own personal computer — by searching, rather than by organizing the information for later retrieval.

Research on the retrieval of unstructured information is based on decades of fundamental research in both computer science theory and AI. But the paradigm shift that is web crawling and indexing and desktop search is much more recent. It traces its roots to university projects such as WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, and the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative research which begat Google.

Search is a game-changer.

Cluster computing

At the risk of offending our many computer architect friends, we’re going to assert that cluster computing is the most significant advance in computer architecture in the past 20 years.

A decade ago, Jeff Bezos was featured in magazine advertisements for the DEC AlphaServer, because that’s what Amazon.com ran on — the biggest shared-memory multiprocessor that could be built. Similarly, the AltaVista search engine was designed to showcase the capabilities of big SMP’s with 64-bit addressing.

Today, this seems laughable. Companies such as Google and Amazon.com replicate and partition applications across clusters of tens of thousands of cheap commodity single-board computers, using a variety of software techniques to achieve reliability, availability, and scalability.

The notion of hardware “bricks” probably can be traced to Inktomi, a byproduct of the Berkeley Networks of Workstations project. The software techniques are drawn from several decades of research on distributed algorithms.

Cluster computing is a game-changer.

The transformation of science via computation

The traditional three legs of the scientific stool are theory, experimentation, and observation. In the past 20 years, computer simulation has joined these as a fundamental approach to science, driven largely by the NSF Supercomputer Centers and PACI programs. Entire branches of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and other fields have been transformed.

Today, a second transformation is underway — a transformation to data-centered eScience, which requires semi-automated discovery in enormous volumes of data using techniques such as data mining and machine learning, much of which is based on years of basic research in statistics, optimization theory, and algorithms.

Computational science is a game-changer.

Some non-inclusions

Quantum computing. There is huge potential here, but the impact hasn’t been felt yet.

Simultaneous multithreading. We claim that this, and many other important advances in computer architecture, are dominated by cluster computing. (Remember, we’re trying to be provocative here! Blame Dave Ditzel, who put this idea into Ed’s head.)

Your part goes here!

What’s your reaction to the four game-changers that we’ve identified? Do you agree that they belong on the list? If not, why not? If so, what do you think were the principal components of each — the key contributing research results?

Even more importantly, give us eight more! What are your nominees for game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years?

Give us your thoughts!

– Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee

These highlights are designed to provide easily digestible, compelling nuggets of computing research work. Members of Congress, the Administration, and funding agency managers and directors are some of the main audiences for these web pages. We believe the highlights should also prove to be useful for the entire research community. The highlights can be accessed directly, received by email, RSS feed, or even embedded in your own web page.

The current Computing Research Highlight of the Week describes a new algorithm from UCSD researchers that performs route computation in a way that may lead to major improvements in network efficiency. Check it out — it is punchy, informative, and makes good use of some simple graphics while at the same time providing links to the scientific publication and full press release.

So, please submit your own highlights! The response thus far has been very good, and we expect that many people outside of our community, including key decision makers, will make good use of the information.

• The Industrial Revolution of Data. Today’s world-wide web remains a staggering tribute to the typing abilities of the human race. But even with a growing global population, typists are not a scalable source of bit-production going forward. We are entering an era where the overwhelming majority of information will not be hand-crafted. It will be stamped out by machines: software logs, cameras, microphones, GPS transceivers, sensor networks, RFID readers, and so on. This is inevitable. It has already begun to change the computing marketplace: most organizations of size now realize they can afford to save and mine all their logs, and are looking for inexpensive ways to do so. The startup world has responded with a flurry of parallel database and data analytics companies.
• The Crisis of the Three C’s: Coders, Clouds and Cores. Meanwhile, it’s no news that software development is far, far too difficult. In his Turing Award talk a decade ago, Jim Gray identified radical improvements in programming among his 13 remaining long-term challenges for computing — alongside passing the Turing test and building Vannevar Bush’s Memex. What’s changed on this front since 1998 is the rapid rise of parallelism that my colleagues have been blogging about here. Cloud computing infrastructure, with its “shared-nothing” clusters of machines, demands parallel and distributed programs today. Manycore architectures will demand parallelism at a finer grain in the next few years. The pressing need for parallel software — and armies of fluent software developers to build it — raises both the difficulty and the stakes of the Grand Challenge that Jim Gray highlighted in 1998.

Given this background, what excites me these days is that the trend may bring some new solutions to the crisis, in a surprisingly organic way. 

For over twenty years, “Big Data” has been a sustained bright spot in parallel computing. SQL has been a successful, massively parallel programming language since the late 1980′s, when Teradata (a survivor that evaded Dave Patterson’s Rolls of the Dead) first commercialized parallel database research from projects like Gamma and Bubba. In recent years, SQL has been joined by Google’s MapReduce framework, which is bringing algorithmicists into massive data processing in a way that SQL never did. Both SQL and MapReduce will likely thrive, and may well converge: two parallel database startup companies recently announcedintegrated implementations of SQL and MapReduce. (Full disclosure: I advise Greenplum, one of those companies.)

SQL and MapReduce programmers do not think much about parallelism. Rather than trying to unravel an algorithm into separate threads, they focus on chopping up sets of input data into pieces, which get pumped through copies of a single sequential program running asynchronously on each processor. In parallel programming jargon, this kind of code is sometimes dismissively referred to as being “embarrassingly parallel”. But very often, the simplest ideas are the most fertile. Programmers “get” these approaches to parallelism. And remember: the Coders are part of the Crisis of the Three C’s, and the key is to make lots of them happy and productive.

But can those programmers lead us anywhere interesting? The most intriguing part of this story is that in the last 5-10 years, the set-oriented, data-centric approach has been gaining footholds well outside of batch-oriented data parallelism. There has been a groundswell of work on “declarative”, data-centric languages for a variety of domain-specific tasks, mostly using extensions of Datalog. These languages have been popping up in networking and distributed systems, natural language processing, compiler analysis, modular robotics, security, and video games, among other applications. And they are being proposed for tasks that are not embarrassingly parallel. It turns out that focusing on the data can make a broad class of programs simpler — much simpler! — to express.

Networking and distributed coordination protocols are one good example. They run in parallel, and are themselves a key to cloud services. In our work on Declarative Networking over the last years, we showed that a wide range of network and distributed coordination protocols are remarkably easy to express in a data-centric language. For example, our version of the Chord Distributed Hash Table (DHT) protocol is 47 lines of our Overlog language; the reference implementation is over 10,000 lines of C++. (DHTs are a key component of cloud services like Amazon’s Dynamo.) Meanwhile, graduate students at Harvard prototyped a simple version of the tricky Paxos consensus protocol in an alpha edition of Overlog in 44 rules. (Paxos is a key component in cloud infrastructure like Google’s GFS file system and Chubby lock manager.) We have other examples where our declarative programs are line-for-line translations of pseudo-code from research papers. These are the kinds of scenarios where the quantitative differences are best captured qualitatively. You can print out our Chord implementation on one sheet of paper, take it down to the coffee shop, and figure it out. Doing that with 10,000 lines of C++ would be a superhuman feat of Programmer-Fu, and a big waste of paper.

Machine Learning is another area where data-centric declarative programming seems to help with parallelism and distribution. A group at Stanford pointed to a range of standard machine learning tasks that can be expressed almost trivially as MapReduce programs, without any requirement for parallel programming expertise. More deeply, a number of the fundamental algorithms driving Machine Learning center on “message-passing” algorithms like Belief Propagation and Junction Trees that work on a computational model of explicit dataflow, rather than shared memory. Research in ML over sensornets showed how to overlay that logical communication onto a physical network. And these inference networks — much like DHTs — turn out to be a good fit to Overlog. (Distributed Junction Trees in 39 rules, anyone?) The Dyna language is another good example, with a focus on (currently single-node) Natural Language Processing.

I’ll be the first to admit that Datalog syntax is horrible, and it is not a reasonable language for developers. There is much to be done before adoption of complex data-centric languages can occur. But what excites me here is that the main positive trend in parallel programming — the one driven by the Industrial Revolution of Data, the one with programmer feet on the street — that trend feeds into this promising new generation of much richer data-centric languages. If MapReduce is the boot camp for a next round of parallel languages, those languages are likely to be data-centric. And there’s growing reason to believe that the data-centric approach will suit a wide range of tasks.

– Joe Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on data management and networking.

Thanks for the opportunity to update the community on what has been happening recently with the Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) effort, from my perspective as chair of the NetSE Council.

Let me explain my take on NetSE with an anecdote from my Georgia Tech colleague Mike Best based on a recent trip he made to Africa. Mike and his group met with a group of chiefs of the Acholi people in Northern Uganda. This is an area that has suffered through profound conflict and lacks for essentially any communication technology. Mike and his team wanted to engage in participatory design to understand the existing communication needs, unmet needs and requirements, and latent requirements.

They were very cautious not to influence the conversation towards modern communication technologies so they did not mention specific systems. But after about thirty minutes of this exercise one of the chiefs finally stated, “We want the internet. Unless you have something better.”

To me, NetSE is about the potential for something better. That isn’t to take away from how incredible the Internet is, but that success has led to a dependence on an infrastructure that we understand surprisingly little about. Figuring out what “better” means and how we might get there is a challenge that is intellectual, economic, political and social. In other words, hard, but incredibly important.

The last couple of months have been busy for the NetSE community. Five workshops and meetings have taken place since mid-June covering Network Design and X, where X has been Network Science, Societal Values, Theoretical Computer Science, Behavioral Economics, and Network Engineering. The goal of these activities has been to add to all the good work on research opportunities done under the auspices of GENI, but without the yoke of justifying a large facility.

NetSE is shaping up to be strongly disciplinary AND interdisciplinary. There remain major challenges and opportunities in the core disciplines of networking and distributed systems, as well as across disciplines in and out of CISE. For example, technology advances are producing the ability to program all the way down to the photon or RF wavelength. How can and should future networks take advantage of programmability at this extreme? In the interdisciplinary vein, there are important and exciting opportunities at the intersection of human behavior and network behavior. How should home networks be structured so that mere mortals can deploy and manage them?

Over the next couple of months, we will be synthesizing the output of the various activities into a NetSE research agenda that will include recommendations to funding agencies about what is needed to advance the agenda. You can watch for updates on the NetSE page hosted by the CCC at www.cra.org/ccc/netse.php.

– Ellen Zegura is Professor and Chair of Computer Science, School of Computer Science, College of Computing, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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For over thirty years, we have watched the great cycle of innovation defined by the commodity hardware/software ecosystem — faster processors enable software with new features and capabilities that in turn require faster processors, which beget new software. The great wheel has turned, but it no more, as power constraints and device physics now limit the performance achievable with single microprocessors. Multicore chips — those with multiple, lower power processors per chip — are now the norm. Moreover, current multicore chips (those with 4-8 cores/chip) are but the beginning. We can expect hundreds of cores per chip in the future, with diverse functionality (graphics, packet protocol processing, DSP, cryptography and other features).

The software research challenge is clear — developing effective programming abstractions and tools that hide the diversity of multicore chips and features while exploiting their performance for important applications. Hence, we need a vibrant community of researchers exploring diverse approaches to parallel programming — languages, libraries, compilers, tools — and their applicability to multiple application domains.

Microsoft researchers are investigating all of these approaches, from coordination languages for robots and distributed systems to mobile phones to desktops and data center clouds. To engage the academic community, Microsoft funds multicore research projects and many sites, and we have partnered with Intel to fund the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRCs) at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As Richard Hamming famously noted, “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” In that spirit, I believe our research challenge is to break free from the limitations of the desktop metaphor and exploit the ever greater performance of multicore chips to create new human-computer interaction metaphors that are more natural and intuitive. This will require new approaches to parallel computing education and increased collaboration with researchers in application domains.

As an example, consider one possible future — “spatial computing” — where real-time vision and speech processing, coupled with knowledge bases, distributed sensors and responsive objects, enhance human activities in contextually relevant ways while remaining otherwise unobtrusive. Such an infosphere would adapt to its user’s needs and behavior and move seamlessly across home, work and play.

Multicore brings enormously interesting intellectual challenges and the opportunity to rethink much of how we approach computing.  Let’s embrace the opportunity!

– Daniel Reed is Microsoft’s Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategist and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Contact him at reed@microsoft.com or his blog at www.hpcdan.org

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Multicore (parallelism) represents a fundamental challenge and change for all of computing and computer science. It represents the fundamental constraints of physics — nature loves parallelism — surfacing and interacting with some fundamental tenets of computing. We have formulated our theory of computation and complexity primarily on sequence — in control and state. Fundamental physics (and consequently circuits and architecture) which makes parallelism fundamentally cheaper is now challenging us to broaden the foundation of computing with parallelism as a first class element. I believe that as a research community, this is a first-order challenge to respond — in nearly all disciplines of computer science. First and foremost, this is a major intellectual challenge to the computer science community to “reinvent” or at least broaden computer science in this way. Second, this is a major educational challenge, where students we are training today to think about “Computer Science founded on sequence” are being launched into a world of parallelism. For their benefit, we must mount a rapid response in pedagogy and curriculum to ensure these students emerge armed to deal with the future of computing in their careers.

Now, let me turn to research funding in parallelism — which is a critical need in all areas from architecture, runtimes, compilers, programming languages, algorithms, and theory. We need major increases in funding and research activity in all of these areas. Governments must take the primary role in funding research in information technology for the long term economic development and societal well-being. We would like to see aggressive large-scale funding of long-range research in parallelism, and that the fruits of that research be made broadly available for commercialization. In the U.S., DARPA has a long track record of funding such research in IT, but such investment has decreased in recent years. We would like to see it increase both in DARPA, as well as other parts of the US government, and yes around the world. History has proven that only governments are able to invest in this type long-term general economic development, and it is critical that the research outputs be generally available for society at large to benefit — not just a small population of gatekeepers. It is great to see this vision being pursued in many regions around the world.

At Intel, we depend heavily on a broad range of science and engineering research pursued by the global academic community. Many of the innovations we commercialize were first conceived in universities — often many years before their practicality — and we have contributed additional innovations and refinements to bring them to the broadest swath of society possible. We strongly support (and contribute our time, money, and leadership to) the health of the research and innovation community globally. We have made significant investments in education (multicore curriculum and training) and research (research grants, Universal Parallel Computing Research Center with Microsoft) for parallelism, and continue to encourage others to join us in doing so.

– Andrew Chien

– To see the first article in this series, click here.