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 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)

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

• 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).

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!”

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