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)

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.

Statement like this are, of course, motherhood and apple pie. Computing architecture researchers have faced all of these challenges for years and there are numerous projects forging into the future to address them, among them the Department of Energy’s Exascale efforts and the nascient program from DARPA, the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing Program.

However there is a renewed need to build a community of computing architecture reseachers across the country to give an avenue to the large number of new people in the field to bring their ideas to the national stage.

The CCC sponsors workshops (http://www.cra.org/ccc/vision.php) to help researchers put together visions for research programs. Josep Torrellas of the University of Illinois and Mark Oskin of  the University of Washington recently held a workshop in San Diego on Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR), February 21-23, 2010. The theme of this first of two workshops was Failure is not an Option: Popular Parallel Programming. This is a follow-on to the Computing Research Association Workshop in 2005.  The workshop had representation from academia, industry and national laboratories.

Torrellas and Oskin asked of the workshop participants:

• What will computing platforms look like in 15 years?

• How will they impact the socio-human condition?

• What are the major research challenges that must be overcome to create these platforms?

And are synthesizing the discussion around two goals:

• Articulate an agenda and roadmap for computer architecture research to address the challenges above.

• Create excitement and community building for computer architecture research across academia, industry and national labs.

Workshop summaries and  proceedings will soon be available at
http://www.cra.org/ccc/acar.php.

Submitted by Bill Feiereisen for the Computing Community Consortium.

- 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

The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT.

Highlights of the workshop included plenary presentations by William Stead of Vanderbilt and Richard Bucholz of St. Louis University School of Medicine. Stead  argued that the “increasing complexity and amounts of biomedical information will overwhelm individual experts, leading to the need to move beyond expert-based medicine.”   (For more information see: Beyond Expert-based Practice, William W. Stead, M.D., and John M. Starmer, M.D.  http://courses.mbl.edu/mi/2009/pubs/Fall_Stead_Expert.pdf )

Bucholz, who is a computationally-savvy neurosurgeon and inventor of the StealthStation, a neurosurgical navigational system, described linking the cutting edge (literally) of neurosurgery and computing to create integrated realtime intra-operative delivery of information via navigational systems, images, 3D visualizations, EEG and other information sources.

Chris was particularly interested in the biomedical aspects of the workshop.  He says:
Healthcare and biomedical research have become increasingly intertwined with computing.  The status, goals, and impediments for 21st century biomedicine were well summarized in the 2004 NIH Roadmap. The Roadmap noted that computing has become absolutely essential to progress in biomedicine, stating:  “The success of computational biology is shown by the fact that computation has become integral and critical to modern biomedical research.”

However, the report also noted that both the substantial and substantive challenges biomedical researchers face in embracing and applying cutting-edge computing research, as well as those faced by computing researchers in understanding current and future biomedical computing needs, have inhibited biomedical research:  “Because computation is integral to biomedical research, its deficiencies have become significant limiters on the rate of progress of biomedical research.”

The productive synergies between these two fields can accelerate research in both, but only if we address these challenges through cooperative effort.  The agencies and the communities, in other words, must work together to enhance frontier or cutting edge research at the interface.  The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT.

Let’s hope that the healthcare, biomedical, and computing research communities  take this as a further opportunity to  overcome current roadblocks by moving across traditional disciplinary boundaries and truly engage computing and biomedical researchers.

Beth’s take-away was somewhat different.  She says:

I also attended the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop.  With so many obvious shortcomings in the current healthcare system, it is tempting to focus on near-term challenges.  In fact the discussions in the press and on Capitol Hill orient to current inefficiencies in the healthcare system as well as the poor health outcomes that stem from misaligned incentives.

However this workshop allowed space for the discussion of long term challenges that, when addressed, could also solve many short-term deficiencies.

As detailed in the NAS report, “Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions,” (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12572) current health IT is deployed as a transactional system instead of supporting workflow, decision making and collaboration.  Furthermore the practice of healthcare is dramatically shifting along a number of dimensions including:

• the overwhelming cost and impact of chronic disease (e.g. diabetes, heart disease, obesity)
• the abundance of information that is available but not utilized by health care practitioners (sensor data, research reports, population data)
• the advent of new diagnostic techniques, based on genomic data, that could enable disease diagnosis years before the disease is detectable by traditional means.

Many of the breakout groups at the workshop honed in on approaches for patient-centered care, chronic disease management and prevention, and distributed, collaborative care.  These approaches mirror the reality of healthcare now and for the foreseeable future.  They also call for deep and challenging computing research including:

• Ubiquitous computing technologies for chronic disease management, including technologies that enable behavior change
• Workflow and decision support systems that actively incorporate health outcome data
• Security and privacy models for distributed, patient-centered care
• Machine learning techniques to predict future health trends and treatment complications
• Organizational modeling and simulation to anticipate economic repercussions in future healthcare approaches

Contributed by Chris Johnson, Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah (www.sci.utah.edu) and Beth Mynatt, CCC Member and Director, GVU Center at Georgia Tech (www.gvu.gatech.edu)

The third meeting will likely be scheduled for late October, though draft vision/consensus documents are being crafted before this next meeting.  The meeting will held at IBM in Austin, Texas, and will engage leaders from funding agencies as part of the program.

Under the leadership of Beverly Woolf, head of the GROE initiative, the group discussed the results of the April workshop held in Tempe, Arizona, as well as the next steps for research involving the “road map” that came out of that workshop.

This meeting provided enthusiasm, support, and new ideas for the GROE initiative.  Results of the workshop will soon be reported on the CCC’s GROE initiative web site.

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!

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

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.

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 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