Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Make No Little Plans: NITRD Plus Twenty

Two weeks ago, I attended the 20^th anniversary celebration for the U.S. Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The celebration began with a dinner and continued with a daylong program at the Newseum in Washington, DC. It is hard to believe is has been over twenty years since the High-Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 inaugurated the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that elevating the profile of computing and networking and coordinating activities across the research arms of the Federal government was a great idea. It was far less obvious at the time, as former Vice-President Al Gore reminded us during an anecdote-filled lunchtime reminiscence. There were several hearings over multiple years, with many doubters.

Yet only two years later, the Mosaic web browser was born at NCSA at the University of Illinois, helping birth the Internet revolution and the original dot.com boom. Some of you may not know that Mosaic was intended as a collaboration tool, itself the successor to another NCSA collaboration tool called Collage. Anyone see a naming pattern there? It was all about bringing people together who were otherwise separated by time and space.

At the time of Mosaic's release, NCSA was an anchor site of the NSFNet, the nascent backbone of the Internet we know today. Given the popularity of Mosaic and the fact that NCSA's web site was Mosaic's default home page, the NCSA site, hosted by NCSA HTTPd, was the world's busiest. (Bob McGrath, Thomas Kwan and I wrote an early paper on web traffic analysis, and Will Scullin, Steve Lamm and I developed some real-time traffic visualization tools for the CAVE.)

It was also a time when Illinois undergraduates were asking me if a $250K signing bonus was too small, and the startup mantra was "get big fast," focusing on number of page clicks and customers. Eventually the old economics – the one based on profits – demanded its due, and the crazier startup ideas died. For the record, selling dog food (a low cost, high weight item for shipment) on the Internet may not have been the best business plan, though a few succeeded. More rational business models emerged, today it is hard to imagine the world without e-commerce.

Looking Forward

As the NITRD celebration, I was reflecting on all of this, as well as digesting the technical content of the presentations, which spanned topics as diverse as computational science, the economic impact of computing and the rise of big data. It was in this context that I posed a question to the final panel, a question grounded in the ever-rising importance of information technology and innovation to global economic competitiveness: What national research strategy should we pursue in light of the coordination now present in other parts of the world?

The question was really about whether the HPCC initiative, with all of its economic, scientific and cultural benefits, was a singular event or something replicable in today's political environment. It was a bit of a rhetorical question, but one that seemed appropriate to frame the celebration's context. The unflappable and always thoughtful Chuck Vest gamely responded with some thoughtful observations on the importance of educational investment for the future.

Burnham and Sandburg

Former Vice-President Gore didn't invent the Internet, but fully deserves all the fulsome praise he has received for raising the issues and helping creating the conditions that let it grow and flourish. Musing on this and the NITRD discussion, I found myself thinking about another Illinois story, one that captures the tumultuous change of another century and the singular contributions of another individual.

It's the story of Daniel Burnham and the birth of modern Chicago. Daniel Burnham didn't invent Chicago, but he might as well have, for it bears his indelible stamp. He one of the driving forces behind the 1892 Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400^th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas. The Columbian Exposition and the "White City" was Chicago's coming of age party, elevating Chicago in stature as one of the world's great cities. Mind you, this was a mere twenty years after the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city.

One element of the story has Burnham standing on the shore of Lake Michigan on a cold, winter day, pointing into the distance and describing the buildings and the city that would rise from the windy desolation. A visiting architect turns to Burnham and asks, "How can this be?" To which Burnham is reputed to have replied, "It is already decided." And so it was.

The anecdote is probably apocryphal, but the vision and the outcome were decidedly not. As Burnham himself wrote,

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.

It's the emotion Carl Sandburg also captured in his Chicago poem about Chicago as the tool maker, stacker of wheat and player with railroads, the city of big shoulders. It was the spirit of a city and a young nation, confident and excited about the future. It's the same spirit we all felt in 1991 at the beginning of the HPCC program and then in the web revolution.

No Little Plans

As we look to the future, I believe Burnham was right. It's time to make big plans, defining a truly compelling research and education strategy for the 21^st century knowledge economy, one that inspires and compels us all to action. We need not be riven by doubts and troubled by today's financial research malaise. There is another way, one that rebuilds our research institutions, empowers our citizens and creates new opportunities for all. Amazing and transformational things are within reach.

How can this be? The lessons of NITRD and Burnham's Chicago point the way, working together.

All Grown Up Now: Service and Serial Reciprocity

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

Though the frequency and ease of electronic communication now make it less common than when families were connected by little more than the postal service, each of us has experienced the momentary sense of surprise when seeing the child of a relative who has grown and matured since the last family gathering. It's a case of cognitive dissonance, where expectations and memory collide with the reality of change. The child became an adult when we were not watching.

As a set of disciplines, computing is a bit like that too. Within the world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), we've become an adult. As with any transition from childhood toys and recreational endeavors, adulthood brings certain family and societal responsibilities and obligations. These are the quid pro quo for daily life's rights and privileges. In many cases, though, I fear that in computing we are still overly enamored with our technological toys rather than honoring all of our responsibilities.

Others, including CACM's editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi, have written about the challenges we face in timely and appropriate review of conference and journal submissions. I also touched on this topic in another blog post and an article for CRA's Computing Research News (CRN). In turn, Jeannette Wing discussed the differential rejection rates for computing proposals at the U.S. National Science Foundation. We also know that our funding agencies struggle to recruit staff from our ranks. However, I believe these may be merely small aspects of a larger issue, the need for all of us to shoulder more responsibility in the global science and engineering community.

Pipelining and parallelism are concepts we understand well. They, like the transition from childhood to adulthood, are metaphors for the shifting nature of our communal responsibilities. As a young student, one looks to teachers, advisors and mentors for instruction and guidance. As a mid-career researcher or practitioner, one is expected to be facile with the tools and technologies of the discipline, able to draw on one's skills to advance the state of the art, cognizant of the broader context in which the technologies and products are used. As an older and wiser senior leader, one's role is to offer advice and guidance to those younger, taking a perspective broader than one's own career or even one's own discipline.

In computing, we used to rationalize our lack of presence in key debates as a consequence of the newness of the field. Today, we are "all grown up" – a set of mature, though still rapidly evolving disciplines, that touch almost all aspects of society. I believe we have a social responsibility to both the computing community and the society to act accordingly. Within the discipline, that means taking on the sometimes thankless tasks that ensure its continuing vibrancy and success – providing international, national, regional and local service on policy and strategy committees; volunteering as organizational leaders; serving as government agency staffers, program officers and leaders; and writing, speaking and testifying about critical issues (diversity and inclusion, education and curricula, research priorities, funding and resources).

Across the broader STEM community and society, computing pervades science and engineering research; it impinges on critical infrastructure function and safety, personal health and well-being; its prevalence raises new and thorny issues around personal privacy and digital security; its capabilities create new opportunities and challenges around education, digital literacy and societal inclusion; and it is the digital messenger of social, political and cultural change. Simply put, computing is central to the debate about so many aspects of our present and future that we have a duty and responsibility to be active and enthusiastic participants. That means explaining technical issues, their implications and their possibilities in terms understandable by those outside the discipline, indeed outside science and technology. It means helping frame the discussion, raising awareness of both the risks and the rewards of technological change, so that societal decisions can be made wisely and collaboratively. As I have noted elsewhere, this requires fluency in technology and policy and a willingness to look beyond one's own personal self-interests.

As a community, we are mature. Our community is filled with individuals who have both the skills and wisdom to serve our discipline, our organizations and our countries. All of us, and I include myself, need to look beyond our personal interests and give more for the benefit of others. Many of us are, but we can and should do more. Our colleagues in the physical sciences, engineering and the social, biological and biomedical sciences are active and engaged. We need to follow their example. By paying it forward (serial reciprocity), we create an environment where a new generation can thrive, just as the founders of the field did for us.

Predicting Our Technological Future

What does the future hold? Those who are fortunate or lucky enough to anticipate major social, economic or technical changes will generally be more successful than those who do not, though sometimes luck plays a role. The factors leading to change are manifold, and I am no expert in either economic theory or social dynamics. That leaves technology, and I am perhaps foolhardy enough to hazard a few guesses about what the future may hold.

Foolhardy, foolishly rash, unwisely bold, those are all operative, for the Brownian motion of component technology changes that together enable new products is complex indeed. It does not take a rocket scientist, though I was once a member of a rocket simulation team, to extrapolate the continued proliferation of mobile and embedded devices, the rapid growth of "big data," and the seemingly insatiable demand for more wired and wireless broadband capability. Beyond devices, big data and broadband, lie the challenges and opportunities posed by the Internet of Things, the dark silicon challenges beyond Dennard scaling, the rise of post-GUI natural user interfaces and a shift from explicit to implicit computing.

Dennis Gannon, Jim Larus and I speculated about all of these topics in the January 2012 issue of IEEE Computer in the cover article entitled, Imagining the Future: Thoughts on Computing. We also discussed the social and policy implications of new technologies, including the nature of privacy and security in a sensor-rich, big data world, the need for new approaches to adaptive spectrum allocation that respond more quickly to shifting demand, and social and technical expectations for new computing curricula.

All of us who are or have been researchers know that creating new technologies is exciting and fulfilling. Combining technologies to create viable products within a shifting policy landscape is a challenge of a different sort. When thinking about product and process failures, all of us would do well to recall Richard Feynman's telling denouement of human folly when serving on the review commission following the space shuttle Challenger's explosion, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Marketing does not make successful products, at least not for long. Instead, they must have real and intrinsic value to the users, and they must operate reliably as advertised. Predicting user value is, of course, far more difficult than it superficially seems, else venture capitalists would have higher success rates, and major corporations would not be foundering on the rocks of technological change.

Nor is past or present success a guarantee of future profitability. Shot any Polaroids lately? Written any VAX assembly code this month for anything other than legacy systems? Still driving your Rambler to work? All three products were icons of the 1960s and 1970s, yet their parent companies are no more.

There are many reasons why initial success becomes the father of later failure. Sometimes designers cling too long to old technology, sometimes companies make ill-advised leaps to new and untried technology, and sometimes leaders cling to old business models when change is essential to survival.

As William Gibson famously noted, "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." Though both pithy and true, it is hardly a guide to navigating the implied temporal mixing of present and future. Instead, I take more comfort from Søren Kierkegaard, "Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards."

Research Data Sustainability and Access

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

How recently have you mounted a 9-track open reel tape, hoping to access the irreplaceable data that was the foundation of your first research paper? At this point, you may not even remember if it was 800, 1600 or 6250 bits per inch (bpi), EBCDIC or ASCII, blocked or unblocked. You are not that old, you say? What about your 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disks or DAT archive? Odds are you haven't accessed the data because you can't without seeking the services of a conversion company that specializes in data retrieval from obsolete media.

Have you ever been involved in a research project, either individually or as part of a multi-institutional team, that produced data intended for broader community use? If so, then you probably placed it on the project web site, perhaps with the research software needed to decode and process the data. A decade later, is the data still accessible and does the software even compile or execute on current systems?

Personally, I still have some 9-track computer tapes, a punched card deck and a paper tape in an office desk drawer, saved for both reasons of pedagogy and nostalgia. I also have some data analytics tools originally designed for workstations now found in the Computer History Museum.

These examples may seem quaint, and perhaps they are, but each of us has some variant of this data obsolescence and inaccessibility experience. They are the analog (pun intended) of our previous consumer media experiences. After all, have you played any of your 45s, 8-track tapes, or cassettes lately?

These are the symptoms of three bigger issues: the rapid obsolesce of specific storage technologies, the explosive growth of research data across all scientific and engineering disciplines, and the even more difficult task of sustaining data access past the end of research projects.

The first is a natural consequence of technological change, one that we have collectively managed across the history of modern digital computing. In turn, "big data" is a hot topic of research and business innovation, with new tools and techniques appearing to extract insights from large volumes of unstructured or ill-structured data. However, the social and economic challenges around research data preservation are profound and not yet resolved.

In the U.S., the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on behalf of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) recently issued a request for information (RFI) on Public Access to Digital Data Resulting from Federally Funded Scientific Research. In addition, the National Science Foundation has instituted a requirement that research proposals include a data management plan, which notes that "Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants."

Several issues are convolved in our desire and expectations for data sharing. One is advancing discovery and innovation via the free flow of information, replicating and expanding experiments and sharing data from increasingly expensive national and international scientific instrumentation. This is central to the scientific process, though it brings the cultural disparity that exists across disciplines to the fore – astronomy, biology and computing are culturally quite different.

The second is the need for multidisciplinary sharing and cross-domain fertilization. Increasingly, new insights emerge from fusing and analyzing data drawn from diverse sources. Such integration places a premium on metadata schemas, well documented data formats and service access protocols. In turn, these require standards and coordination, both within and across disciplines.

The third is the distinction between research, which produces data, and data preservation, documentation and dissemination. In my experience, the skills and expertise, as well as reward metrics, are distinctly different for the two activities. This is an oblique way of saying that researchers will generally optimize for research advancement over data preservation when forced to choose between the two. This is only natural, given our current reward structure.

Research and data preservation also differ markedly in their timescales, for data preservation and dissemination services often require decadal planning, with associated infrastructure and professional staffing, rather than the 3-5 year funding for principal investigators, graduate students and post-doctoral research associates that is typical of research grants and contracts.

Finally, data preservation and dissemination can be expensive, rivaling or exceeding that of the initial research investment. Quite clearly, not everything can and should be preserved in perpetuity, but predicting the future value of data is both difficult and perilous.

This suggests that we need economic and social processes that more rigorously access the present and future value of data. They might include combinations of commercial, fee-based models, where researchers and organizations vote with their funds for access to and retention of certain data (i.e., a cloud-based research data marketplace), government funded and managed repositories where key data is retained (e.g., NIH's GenBank), or distributed but interconnected archives funded by multiple agencies and governments (e.g., the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid).

What is clear is that the dramatic growth of research data, the collaborative and competitive nature of international science and engineering research, expectations for economic returns from research investments and disciplinary differences all make this a pressing and difficult problem. Our current, ad hoc approaches are inadequate and not sustainable.

Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder

The end of year holidays are a time filled with travel, food and family. Like many of you, I spent time with family and friends, socializing, discussing life events and sharing stories. Among the most memorable of those experiences was the time spent with my nieces' children, all of whom are between the ages of one and four. Because I do not spend much time with small children these days, I was able to observe them and their behavior from a fresh perspective.

Yes, there was the frenetic pace and seemingly boundless energy of the young, followed immediately by exhaustion and serene sleep. There was also the complex and sometimes daunting logistics of feeding, travel and entertainment that all parents manage daily. Neither of those, though, was what I found most fascinating. Rather, it was the wide-eyed wonder with which the young greet new things.

A one-year old fascinated by musical tones, a two-year old enthralled by the tensile strength of a spring, or a four-year old pondering the statics and dynamics of a pile of blocks, these are the wonders of science experienced firsthand.

In turn, this caused me to reflect on the nature of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and the nature of scientific and engineering research. After all, the fundamental and unbridled curiosity of a child is the birthmother of all of science and engineering.

Science Education

I am no expert in educational pedagogy, far from it. Nevertheless, after spending over forty years in schools, colleges and universities, one does learn a few things. At the very least, I once carried the title of professor and was granted license to claim to know.

In reality, science and engineering, and even abstract mathematics, are about experiential learning – one gains insights and appreciation by doing rather than merely observing. It is why we conduct experiments to test hypotheses, build computational models to bring our theories to life, and build new devices that embody engineering knowledge. We want to see and experience, demonstrate and validate.

Yet so much of our K-12 science education remains driven by a dry recitation of facts that expunges all the experiential joy of science, leaving only dried husk of knowledge. Too frequently, we insist on conformity, when the practice of science and engineering has always been critically dependent on the iconoclasts who question the current orthodoxy. Indeed, that questioning is at the very foundation of the social and technical process we call science. I believe we must nurture that curiosity throughout the educational system, letting students see how they can ask and answer questions that make a difference in our world.

The questions are simple yet profound, and the shift from a child's question to our deepest unsolved queries is so very small. Mommy, why is the sky blue? (Answer: Raleigh scattering, though simple, not easily explained to a child.) How does a flower grow? What is gravity and why is there mass? (Answer: These are some of the deepest questions at the frontier of science.)

Discovery's Passion

All too often, the process, politics and bureaucracy of science and engineering consume us. Whether writing the research proposals and the inevitable progress reports, crafting the papers under deadlines, or traveling to conferences and symposia, our time and energy can be frittered away. All these are necessary, but they are not sufficient. In truth, they are the detritus of innovation and discovery, the artifacts of our modern scientific enterprise.

Periodically, it is worth taking a step back, pausing for a moment to remember why each of us became scientists. It was not the research grant (necessary though it is), nor was it the publication (essential to disseminating a discovery). It was the curiosity, the passion, the amazement and the wonder. Those things make it the love and the labor of a lifetime.

The next time you see a small child, staring in wide eyed, open mouthed wonder at some action or object, remember and savor the experience. It is why you are a scientist or an engineer, asking questions and staring in amazement at the answers the experiments reveal, still a child at heart.