Mar

29

More on “Computing Research that Changed the World”

Filed Under policy, research horizons, resources, workshop reports | Comments

Susan Graham provided a great overview in a post a few days ago of the Computing Community Consortium’s March 25th day-long Library of Congress symposium, “Computing Research that Changed the World:  Reflections and Perspectives.”  I thought I’d provide a few additional details — as well as a reminder that all materials (slides, videos, a summary booklet, etc.) will be available on the CCC website in the very near future.

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

Mar

26

My Day at the Library of Congress

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A contribution from Susan Graham, the Pehong Chen Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-chair of the CCC Council:

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

Mar

20

The Mystic Arts of Emergency Informatics

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Rescue Robots at the Cologne Germany Building Collapse

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.

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