- 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

• 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.

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!

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!”

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

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

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.

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.