Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Consilience: Innovation Enabler

A few thoughts from my Communications of the ACM blog post.

In this era of hyper-specialization, it is important to remember the combined power of generality and specialization, lest we render true the old joke that education teaches one more and more about less and less until finally one knows everything about nothing and is eligible for a Ph.D. After all, Ph.D. is an abbreviation for the Latin Philosophiae Doctor (Doctor of Philosophy), and science itself evolved from natural philosophy.

Smart Grids: Getting Personal

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

How many electronic devices do you own? It is tempting to answer, "Just a handful," but the truth is much more nuanced. Here's a simple experiment that will (quite literally) illuminate the truth. Some evening, after darkness has fallen, turn off all the lights in your house, walk from room to room and count the number of lighted power indicators, blinking LEDs and glowing screens. I suspect you will be surprised.

Each of us owns and operates a diverse array of electronic devices, almost all of which draw power whether they are fully active or being used. From your flat screen television and its infrared (IR) sensor, which awaits commands from the remote, to wireless access points, computers and game consoles on standby, and even electronic thermostats, our wired world consumes an increasing amount of energy.

Isn't it time we began to make the smart grid personal? Imagine coupling predictive models of individual and family behavior with real-time measurement and control of home and office environments to minimize energy consumption and carbon footprints. Such a vision depends on broad deployment of inexpensive energy sensors and device actuators, intelligent energy adaptation and appropriate regulatory policies, as well as consumer education and awareness. Many companies and groups are exploring the space, including Microsoft via its Holm initiative.

There are challenging cyberphysical systems research issues, complex systems integration challenges, and economic and policy decisions. We can make a difference – and we must.

The World Is Small

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

As I write this, I am flying to a business meeting in Asia. In turn, this caused to me reflect on the changing nature of information flow, global business and 24x7 accessibility.

There was a time, not that many years ago, when international travel meant one was largely inaccessible to colleagues at home, wherever home might be. Yes, you could send a telegram or place a telephone call, but both were expensive and often required foresight and planning. Similarly, news from home came via the International Herald-Tribune, radio and newswires, or film that had been airlifted to a television network.

Slowly, we began entering the Internet age. I distinctly remember attending an international research conference on high-performance computing where all the attendees stood in line for email access on the single, Internet-connected terminal. The international bandwidth was so low that I could type faster than the characters could be echoed. Needless to say, one only scanned messages for deadline-driven events.

Today, when my plane lands, I will turn on my smart phone, connect to the local GSM network and download queued messages. By the time I am ensconced in a taxi to my hotel, I will be responding to electronic queries. At the international hotel, I will connect my laptop to the local wireless network and work as productively as I would in my office or at home. Other than the delay due to time zone separation, most of my colleagues will not realize that I am traveling, and the inevitable late night wakefulness due to jet lag will ameliorate even that delay.

Inexpensive, global communication now allows distributed, international groups to work collaboratively and productively, with little regard to location. Computing research – in networks and protocols, servers and storage, devices and user interfaces – made all of this possible. The world may or may not be as flat as Thomas Friedman suggested, but it is certainly small.

Now if I could just catch up on my email deluge.

Impact, Not Indicators or Artifacts

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

Publish and/or perish; proposals and reports; research, teaching and service: these are the "death and taxes" equivalents for life in major research universities. Success -- or at least promotion and tenure – is normally measured by how well one plays the academic game, publishing frequently in the "right" places, placing students in the "right" institutions and serving on the "right" committees. All too often, however, we tend to focus on these indicators rather than the presence or absence of impact from our activities.

Counting Beans

Many of us know faculty who have published hundreds of papers, but who have not demonstrably changed the nature or direction of their specialty. Conversely, many of us can readily identify individuals who have transformed the nature of computing, but who have few – if any – of the standard beans that are counted when quantifying traditional research success.

As a department head, my guidance to young assistant professors was always simple: do something interesting and important, make a difference that is recognized, and the artifacts will come. The artifacts are just that -- things that accrue from impact, not objectives to be sought.

I was reflecting on all of this as I tracked the responses to Moshe Vardi's CACM editorial, Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research, and Lance Fortnow's CACM article, Time for Computer Science to Grow Up. Before these two articles appeared, I had already discussed these same concerns about computing's shift from journal to conference publications in my March 2009 CRA column: Publishing Quarks: Considering Our Culture, where I bemoaned the rise of the minimum publishable unit and called for a reinvigoration of journals.

Cultural Conservatism

It is somewhat ironic that many aspects of our computing research culture are now so often conservative, especially when research itself is defined by an insatiable curiosity about the unknown and unexplained. If you have any doubt, try to secure research funding for a proposal that is controversial or try to move a curriculum revision rapidly through the academic approval process! (To be sure, there are exceptions and there are good reasons for many of these checks and balances, but the process is sometimes excruciatingly slow and often incremental.)

It is worth remembering that our field grew from the confluence of mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, psychology, information theory and management and a host of other disciplines. The founders were radicals and iconoclasts, eschewing the extant culture of their disciplines because this new notion of computing was so pregnant with possibilities that could transform society and the nature of discovery. In short, it was the most exciting thing they could imagine doing, even if it was not the "safe" thing to do. More to the point, they were not focused on getting multiple papers in this year's specialty conferences.

Remember, it's the impact that matters, not the artifacts.

Bridging Cultures for Collaboration

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

Several years ago, I was invited to give the welcome address to the extended community participants in a new computational science project. The meeting was being held at a facility a few blocks from the nearest hotel, which happened to be very near the ocean. On the first day of the meeting, I made my way downstairs from my hotel room, only to encounter an unexpected sight.

It seemed there were two major groups staying at the hotel, in addition to those I expected to attend the computational science meeting. One group was dressed in t-shirts, shorts and sandals and would have blended nicely with the nearby beachgoers. The second group was dressed in conservative business suits that would not have drawn a second glance in the corporate world.

Both groups streamed from the hotel, seemingly bound for recreation and business, respectively. Imagine my surprise when I saw members of both groups entering the building where I was scheduled to speak! One was a group of engineers; the other, not surprisingly, was a group of computer scientists. (Full disclosure: I am proud to say that all of my degrees are from engineering schools, and I spent twenty years in a computer science department located in a college of engineering.)

As I stepped to the podium to begin my remarks, I glanced down at my own attire: dress shoes, pants, button down shirt, and a blazer, but no tie. Recognizing the humor of the situation, I began by saying that I was a community bridge builder, the statistical mean of the audience's sartorial distribution. I continued by recommending that those wearing ties get better acquainted with those wearing sandals, as that was precisely the cross-cultural engagement necessary to ensure the success of a computational science or engineering project.

The point of this anecdote is the importance of cultural flexibility and willingness to understand the diversity of reward metrics and expectations across disciplines. Only in so doing can we realize the true power of computational science and engineering, or more broadly, of computing plus X, where X is any of the possible domains of computing applicability, from the humanities, arts and social sciences, through government, business and consumer products, to science and engineering.

All too often, our technical curricula fail to focus on the human aspect of cross-domain collaboration. Technical skills are necessary, but not sufficient. One must also understand and meld the disparate motivations of the collaborative team in a positive and productive way to achieve success.