Nov

4

Game-Changing Advances from Computing Research

Filed Under Uncategorized 

We’d like your help with a brainstorming exercise: Identify about a dozen game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years. Here’s what we mean:

  • 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

Comments

  • Mead and Conway introducing VLSI to the academic community through their influential book, followed by the revolution in CAD/VLSI (design rule checkers, routers, switch level simulators, Binary decision diagrams and the verification technology, all the way through modern delay and power estimators, the founding of MOSIS for University Design projects, ...) has been a game changer.
  • Bruce Buchanan
    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.
  • Edward Feigenbaum
    In the robotics area of AI, the Stanley autononous vehicle that won the first DARPA Grand Challenge; and the CMY vehicle that won the 2nd (urban) DARPSA Grand Challenge.
  • Eugene Charniak
    Statistical machine learning and the reformulation of many aspects of AI (natural-language processing, computer vision) as applied statistical learning.
  • Eugene Charniak
    Statistical machine learning and the reformulation of many aspects of AI (natural-language process, vision) as applied statistical learning.
  • Off-the-shelf representation resources. WordNet, for example, revolutionized natural language research and applications by providing a broad-scale, open-license resource that anyone could use. VerbNet and OpenCyc/ResearchCyc, both of which are much newer, look like they will have similar impact over time. Want a million-fact knowledge base? Download it from SourceForge! That changes what researchers can do.
  • Keith Cooper
    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 deserves consideration. Here, I am thinking of the theory and practice of public-key encryption, up to and including the tools that allow my mom to obtain a public key without needing expertise in software engineering.

    Clearly, this family of related results changed the game, 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, ...
  • Ruzena Bajcsy
    Wireless sensors and their distributed processing is a game changer in monitoring elderly and childern (the most vulnerable) and georgrpahiclaly distributed communication (meeting and intercating in Virual worlds)
  • Fractals.
  • anon
    I strongly believe that the list must include at least one theoretical game changer, though it will be hard to sell for non-computer scientists.

    The use of logic in various areas of computer science was unexpected, at least for non-theorist. Formal Methods, AI, NLP, ... Just take a look at handbook of logic in computer science and handbook of logic in AI and logic programming.

    Martin Lof's Type Theory, Denotational Semantics, ...

    Open Source movement was/is also an important game changer in a higher level.
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