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One of the visioning activities supported by the CCC is exploring the possibility of a compelling research agenda in the theoretical, experimental, and societal aspects of “network science and engineering” (NetSE). A NetSE Council has been established.  It’s chair, Ellen Zegura, provides this brief status report on the NetSE Council’s activities.

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.

I had the opportunity to attend the CCC-sponsored workshop, “A Research Roadmap for Robotics in Manufacturing and Automation“, which took place in Washington, DC on June 17, 2008. Below is a loosely-edited excerpt of the notes I took during the workshop. The intention is to convey a general sense of what happened at this meeting, and how we can apply the lessons of this workshop to other CCC initiatives.

Workshop Notes (excerpts)

There were 35 people in attendance, including Joe Bordogna (former COO NSF), Clint Kelly (formerly DARPA), Elena Messina (NIST), William Joyner (Semiconductor Research Corporation), people from industry (General Motors, General Electric, ABB, C&S Whole Grocers, Willow Garage,…), plus academics (GATech, CMU, Berkeley, Utah, Colorado, UPenn,…).

This workshop was unlike those that typically happen at research conferences.  The discussion was not about pure science, but the intersection of science, national needs, public policy and funding.  There were almost no prepared talks. Instead, the program consisted mostly of group discussions, break-out sessions, and consolidation discussions with all attendees together.

Henrik Christensen gave a brief initial presentation to set stage. This was then followed a series of presentation by non-academics:

• Joe Bordogna: On how big science gets funded.
• William Joyner: On collaboration between industry and research in the semi-conductor industry.
• A series of talks by industry folks (GM, GE, food industry…). What is the state of the art, and what is needed? These presentations made clear the large impact of robotics on national infrastructure and economy, what past/current techniques are, and what new technology is needed for progress.

After the presentation, the workshop divided into breakout groups:

• Societal/Business drivers for robotics. Why does the country need robotics?
  • external drivers: inflation, human-resource costs, energy, environment
  • demographics: aging workforce, different skills/job expectations
  • manufacturing as a critical technology for economy and security
  • maintenance/management of national infrastructure: bridge painting…
  • successful design (our current strength) requires manuf. know-how
  • trend toward personal manufacturing: lot-size=1, customized products
  • traceability: salmonella, tomato processing…
• Obstacles to progress in these drivers. What research/technical progress needed.
  • Henrik: “Only at level that could be understood by Congressmen.”
• If given $$$ for robotics, what would you invest it in? Included technical discussion in both application and theory.
• If you had to write a roadmap now, how would you tell the story. How would investing in robotics make a difference?

By bringing together academic researchers, industry experts and public-policy experts, there were great exchanges and discussions that don’t happen at typical research conferences.

After the workshop, a number of documents were produced. That night, immediately after the workshop, a “DRAFT DRAFT” version of workshop report was produced. Later, a draft outline of of “roadmap” for robotics in a manufacturing and automation was also generated. This was presented to a Robotics Congressional Caucus, which involved congresspersons from Pennsylvania and Tennessee. (The documents will be made available on the web at www.us-robotics.us/blog. (Register to be able to comment on the report and participate in community discussion.)

The plan is to have a revision and synthesis of comments by September, in time for a possible review meeting at IROS’08, and then a synthesis workshop around November 2008. The goal, then, is to have a first complete document in November 2008, and presentation to university presidents and others in December. (There was a suggestion to organize an open meeting at IROS to get more feedback from the robotics community. However, IROS organizers said that it would be difficult to make room for such a discussion. Other possible conference venues are being explored.)

At one point during the workshop, I asked Henrik Christensen several questions:

Andrew McCallum: How did Robotics Congressional Caucus start?

Henrik Christensen: The President of CMU started it on his own initiative. The CMU Robotics Institute is important to CMU, and he wants to keep it strong.  (Side comment:  University Presidents are a great, highly-connected resource, and we should think about ways to leverage them more often than we have historically.)

MC: What is the end game for your CCC robotics initiative?

HC: I’d like to make menu of research opportunities, in the form of a 2×2 matrix. On one axis we have long-term vs short-term, and on the other axis we would have applied research vs basic research. We could then take this to many congresspeople, pitch lots of ideas, with the hope that some of them get excited. Then, we would ask for their help in enhancing robotics research opportunities. The entries in the matrix could also be targeted to specific funding agencies:

• short-term applied: go to NIH
• long-term basic-research: go to NSF
• long-term applied: go DARPA,…

Concluding thoughts

I think the organizers of this effort are on the right track. They have their sights focused on things that aren’t already provided by existing workshop venues.  The set of participants and the break-out sessions were all very high quality.  To his credit, Henrik runs a tight ship.

The CCC should encourage and find ways to provide even more support for this effort. In particular, Henrik and others are trying to make important governmental connections on their own. The CCC Council should be well equipped to help him. Even more importantly, the CCC should provide services, pointers, and contacts to other CCC groups that aren’t already as savvy as Henrik.

I thought there was great value from inviting some people outside robotics, in neighboring fields. The CCC should encourage other workshops to do this. We should also encourage other CCC initiatives to structure their workshops like this.

– Andrew McCallum

The CCC “Big Data Computing Study Group” helped organize two adjacent events in Sunnyvale in March: the “Hadoop Summit” and the “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) Symposium”.

The Hadoop Summit was an open event, hosted by Yahoo! Research. Its goal was to build a community among users of the open-source Hadoop software suite for distributed programming in the map-reduce style. About 350 people attended, a much larger crowd than originally expected. The DISC Symposium was an invitation-only event (~125 attendees) whose goal was to build a community among DISC researchers.

The presentations at the Hadoop Summit were fascinating. While they varied greatly in technical depth, in total they gave a sense of rapid growth in the amount of ingenuity being directed towards solving large-scale data-intensive problems on scalable computing clusters. As one might expect, academic researchers were among the speakers, as well as people from industry research labs at Yahoo!, IBM, and Microsoft. But there were also technical talks by developers at places like Google, Amazon, Rapleaf, Facebook, and Autodesk, each one essentially doing a “show-and-tell” on interesting data-intensive problems being tackled in their companies. This gave the attendees a glimpse into the growing industry interest in Hadoop.

The DISC Symposium had attendees from a broad range of companies and research institutions. By design, the program was broad and shallow — the idea was to bring together researchers from all aspects of DISC. Among the highlights:

• In the “DISC systems” arena, Randy Bryant laid out a broad range of research challenges, Jeff Dean gave a lightening-fast overview of Google’s tools (clusters, GFS, MapReduce, BigTable, Chubby), and Garth Gibson talked about challenges in large-scale data systems.
• In the “middleware” arena, ChengXiang Zhai discussed text information management, and Joe Hellerstein promoted declarative programming as a universal elixer.
• In the “applications” arena, Jill Mesirov described computational paradigms for genomic medicine, Jon Kleinberg talked about algorithms for analyzing large-scale social network data, and Alex Szalay described applications in the physical sciences.
• Jeannette Wing and Christophe Bisciglia announced NSF’s new program supporting DISC research utilizing a large-scale cluster provided by Google and IBM.

Slides from all presentations at both the Hadoop Summit and the DISC Symposium, as well as videos of most presentations, are available here.

So what can we conclude about all of this? Well, at the Hadoop Summit, the speakers (especially the ones from industry) were not the “usual suspects”, especially considering the fairly hard-score technical nature of research in large-scale distributed systems. However, there is an overwhelming sense that a major wave is starting, and overall we the excitement level at the meeting was extremely high.

Regarding the concept of “DISC”, here is our unabashed opinion about all of this: Ubiquitous cheap sensors (in gene sequencers, in telescopes, in buildings, on the sea floor, in the form of point-of-sale terminals or the readable web, etc.) are transforming many fields from data-poor to data-rich. The enormous volume of data makes “automated discovery” (machine learning, data mining, visualization) essential, requiring innovation throughout the stack. The traditional “high performance computing” crowd has missed the boat on this one. (The focus must be on the data.) Web companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have made significant strides. But there remains lots of room — and lots of need — for additional breakthroughs. Bluntly, a university that lacks this “big data” capability is not going to be competitive.

The job of the Computing Community Consortium is to facilitate the computing research community in envisioning, articulating, and pursuing longer-range, more audacious research challenges. “Visioning workshops” such as these are one route that the CCC is pursuing. This was the first CCC-sponsored meeting. While there’s room for improvement (more time for discussion, more younger attendees, …), most participants viewed this workshop as a success — there was a real buzz.

Let us know your thoughts!

– Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee