Ran Libeskind-Hadas, a member of the Computing Community Consortium's Council and a professor at Harvey Mudd College, has an interesting post today on the CCC blog asking, in light of the recent Netflix Prize announcement, whether prizes are a viable mechanism for encouraging research in the computing fields.
From Netflix’s perspective, the answer is almost certainly yes. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is quoted telling the New York Times (probably tongue-in-cheek) "You’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour."He notes several other examples of prizes that have led to new results and asks:
Are there some major problems in computer science that could be incentivized by prizes – financial or otherwise? What are the potential benefits and risks of this approach? We’re eager to hear your thoughts.Add your two cents (or more) in the comments section. (No prize for doing it, though.)
Yesterday the Congressional Robotics Caucus, chaired by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), hosted a briefing on healthcare robotics. Four speakers addressed various aspects of robotics in healthcare. They were: Tandy Trower, Microsoft, who spoke on Healthcare Challenges and Robotic Solutions; Maja Mataric, University of Southern California, who spoke on Socially Assistive Robotics for Personalized Care for Stroke, Autism, and Alzheimer’s Disease; Charles Remsberg, Hocoma, Inc., who spoke on Robots in Rehabilitation Medicine; and Howie Choset, Carnegie Mellon University, who spoke on Same Day Surgery: The Future of Medical Robotic Technology Interventions.
Healthcare is clearly a hot topic on the Hill these days and the speakers emphasized that robotic technologies could lower costs, particularly with a growing senior population. All the speakers called for more research in robotics but showed examples of currently deployed healthcare robotic technology and had demonstrations available before and after the presentations.
Trower pointed out that, outside military robotics, the United States research funding for service robotics is limited. He referenced the CCC funded Roadmap for US Robotics which calls for increased research funding, accelerating commercialization of robotics research, and promoting robotics, among other recommendations.
Remsberg discussed the strides already made by the Department of Veterans Affairs to increase the use of rehabilitative robotics for returning wounded veterans but called for wider adoption of the technologies in light of the costs of physical therapy using human therapists. Remsberg points out that therapy using the various robotic technologies allows more patients to get more therapy and have better outcomes than using human physical therapists alone.
Mataric focused on stroke, autism and Alzheimer’s patients and how they can be assisted with robotics. Many autistic children will interact with, and learn from, robots when they cannot do so with people according to Mataric.
Choset spoke on the need for better surgical robotics to lower the invasiveness of surgery and therefore, decrease recovery and hospital stay time for patients. He also stressed that robotic technology in surgery is not meant to replace human surgeons but to assist them in doing the surgery faster and safer.
The presentations will be available online at the Robotics Caucus web site next week.
CCC’s Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) Council, led by Ellen Zegura, released a new agenda for networking research at the GENI Engineering Conference this week. The agenda, version 1.0, is available here (pdf) but the Council stresses that this is a “living document” and as such requests feedback and comments from the community at the CCC NetSE web site.
The agenda is the result of a process initiated in 2008 at the behest of the CCC, who charged the NetSE Council with developing a comprehensive research agenda that would support the development of better networks. Through a series of workshops and much community input, the NetSE council gathered the input to produce this draft, which includes four overarching recommendations:
Recommendation 1: The funding agencies of the United States government must increase investment in research that will lead to a better Internet or risk a marginal future role.Recommendation 2: Funding agencies should rebuild the experimental capabilities of networking researchers, through funding individual systems-building efforts, providing adequate and persistent shared experimental infrastructure, and supporting research that leads to continued improvements in experimental methodology. Experimental work is expensive and long-term; typical NSF awards are insufficient, therefore either NSF will need to change its award portfolio or other agencies will have to play a significantly increased role.
Recommendation 3: Funding agencies should foster and support research activities relevant to network design within the theoretical computer science community, the new Network Science community, and other theoretical disciplines.
Recommendation 4: Funding agencies should support a broad array of interdisciplinary research activities related to understanding the current Internet and designing future networks to include the Internet.
More information on the NetSE effort and the full version of the report are available at the CCC NetSE web site. Also, feel free to comment on the
CCC Blog.
Two events this week on Capitol Hill that CRA will be involved in. First, there will be a Congressional STEM Education Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus briefing on CS education called “Bringing Innovative Computing Curriculum across the Digital Divide” that CRA is co-sponsoring with ACM, CSTA, NCWIT, SWE, IEEE-USA, and Microsoft. The briefing will cover the current state of CS education at the K-12 level and discuss new curriculum and teacher preparation developed by NSF and Microsoft. The briefing will take place on Wednesday, May 20 at noon in B339 Rayburn.
The second event will unveil the first CCC funded initiative in robotics this Thursday, May 21. The Congressional Robotics Caucus is hosting this briefing to showcase the Robotics Roadmap and the potential for growth and roadblocks for the use of robotics in various industries. Speakers at the briefing will include Henrik Christensen who led the CCC robotics effort, Rodney Brooks of Heartland Robotics, Dan Jones of Intuitive Surgical, Eric Close of RedZone Robotics, and Jared Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University. The briefing will take place beginning at 11:45 at the Capitol Visitor Center HVC 201 A-B. Lunch will be served and it will be a widely attended event. RSVP to Patti Rote at pattir at techcollaborative.org.
The Computing Community Consortium is looking for help with a brainstorming exercise. Here's what they have in mind:
Identify about a dozen game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years. Here’s what we mean:To start the conversation, they've picked four examples:
- The advance needs to be "game changing,"in the sense of dramatically altering how we think about computing and its applications.
- The importance of the advance needs to be obvious and easily appreciated by a wide audience.
- There needs to be a clear tie to computing research (or to infrastructure initiatives that build upon research and were sponsored by computing research organizations).
- We're particularly interested in highlighting the impact of federally-funded university-based research.
Today, as part of CRA's mission to improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research, we're pleased to announce the launch of a new feature on the CRA and CCC web pages: the Computing Research Highlight of the Week. Each week, we'll highlight some of the exciting and important research results recently generated by the computing community.
Our first highlight features a new algorithm developed by researchers at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego that promises to significantly boost the efficiency of network routing.
We hope to accomplish a few things with these highlights. First, we want to show off the good work being done in our community in a way that is accessible to the general public. One model for this is the very popular Astronomy Photo of the Day, where each day a new photo or graphic (or video) having something to do with astronomy is featured along with a succinct description. We hope to do the same for computing. Second, we hope to build up a good database of examples of the vibrancy of the computing fields that we can use in our advocacy efforts with Congress, the Adminstration, and federal agencies. Having a collection of easily accesible and digestable research "nuggets" helps us immeasurably when trying to make the case for computing research to policymakers. And thirdly, we want to make sure our members of our own community are aware of some of the wide variety of interesting research results that are being generated across the various sub-disciplines of computing, and perhaps even make connections to their own work.
We've tried to make it easy for you to keep track of the current weekly highlight with an RSS feed, an email notification system, and even embed code that allows you to feature the highlight of the week on your own web page. Each week's highlight also features prominently on both the CRA and CCC home pages.
So how do you get your own work featured as a Computing Research Highlight of the Week? It's easy: just submit it! From those submissions CRA and CCC staff and volunteers chose a new highlight each week. We're pleased that so many answered our call last July for your research highlights, but we want more. So submit your interesting and important research results today!
A couple of small announcements:
First, those of you who attended CRA's biennial conference at Snowbird last week already heard this call, but for those who didn't (or who need to be reminded), we want your research highlights! CRA and the Computing Community Consortium are in the process of gathering recent computing research highlights to feature prominently in CRA and CCC publications -- on the web, in our advocacy efforts, and in our print publications -- and we'd like yours.
What we're asking is that you add this e-mail address -- highlights@cra.org -- to any press release distribution list your department or institution may have to publicize your exciting research results. We're gathering those interesting stories, putting them into a searchable database, and then highlighting selected ones on the CRA and CCC websites. The model here is something like the very popular Astronomy Photo of the Day, where each day a new photo or graphic (or video) having something to do with astronomy is featured along with a nice succinct description. While we don't anticipate being able to feature new computing research daily, we hope to refresh it frequently enough (weekly?) to make it worth checking back often. But, to do that, we need your highlights.
To fill the pot, we're accepting any release your department or institution may have sent in the last 24 months or so. Obviously, we'd like to feature the most timely ones, but we don't mind pushing the clock back a bit for anything truly exciting. So, please submit yours today, and make sure your press offices have highlights@cra.org on their distribution lists.
In other news, we've created some new CRA-related "groups" on two popular social networking sites: LinkedIn and Facebook. Both are for those involved in, or just fans of, CRA. To join the LinkedIn one, go here and we'll approve you. On Facebook, you can find us here. We hope you'll take a look!
Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, has a passionate post today on the CCC Blog about what the latest numbers from CRA's Taulbee Survey really mean. The news is not, he points out, that computer science bachelors degrees show another year of decline -- that was completely predictable from the enrollment statistics for freshman CS majors published four years ago in the survey. The real news (as we noted back in March) is that for the first time in many years, freshman interest in CS as a major increased and enrollments have stabilized -- indicating that perhaps we may have turned a corner. What's responsible for the turnaround? According to Lazowska:
[B]y far the most important factors are (a) the job market (or people’s sense of the job market), and (b) the level of “buzz” associated with the field.Ed also talks about the experience at his institution, the University of Washington, tries to put the "crisis" in computer science in perspective by offering up some comparisons to the other science and engineering disciplines, and emphasizes the bright outlook suggested by various Dept. of Labor workforce projections (pdf). In typical Lazowska style, it's a forceful but accurate refutation of the standard story on CS enrollments we've seen for the last few years. It's definitely worth a read (and comment!) over at the excellent CCC Blog (Disclaimer: CCC is an activity of CRA, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.)Let’s start by considering graduate enrollment, rather than undergraduate enrollment. For the past 15 years, the number of Ph.D.s granted annually in computer science has been in the 900-1100 range. Suddenly, though, in the past 2 years, it has climbed to 1800. Why is this? The answer is totally obvious:
This is not a news flash — it didn’t take a genius to predict, a few years ago, that it was going to happen, and it doesn’t take a genius to explain it, either.
- In 2001, lots of startup companies went bust.
- This dumped onto the job market a number of the best bachelors graduates from a few years before, who now had two or three years of experience under their belts.
- This made it hard for some excellent new bachelors graduates of 2001 and 2002 to get the super-exciting jobs they had anticipated — they were competing with people whose academic records were every bit as good as theirs, but who also had 2 or 3 years of experience working at a hot startup.
- Because these great new bachelors graduates couldn’t get exciting jobs, they went to graduate school instead.
- And, mirabile dictu, 6 years later, they’re emerging with Ph.D.s.
Similarly for bachelors degrees. Starting in about 2002, there was lots of news about the tech bust. Tech was no longer sexy. Jobs were no longer plentiful. Subsequently, there was a lot of misleading information about the impact of offshoring. And the newspapers never bothered to report that by late 2004, US IT employment was back to the 2000-2001 level — we had fully recovered from the bust — somehow that wasn’t considered newsworthy. So it’s not surprising that interest in bachelors programs decreased sharply, and that 4 and 5 years later, the number of degrees granted precisely mirrored this decline.
Also, it’s not surprising that things are turning around. Google is hot. Tech in general is hot. There are startups everywhere. It’s clear to anyone that there are plenty of jobs. (By the way, given the incredible state of today’s bachelors job market, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that the number of Ph.D. graduates in 2014 will show a decline. When you read the scary headlines 6 years from now, remember that you heard it here first!)
The next couple of weeks will be busy ones here at CRA World Headquarters. On June 18, the Congressional Robotics Caucus will be holding its second briefing, this time on Industrial Robotics. (CRA is on the Robotics Caucus Advisory Committee.) The lunch briefing will feature Jeff Burnstein of the Robotic Industries Association, Richard Seif and Chris Bailey of the Lincoln Electric Company, and John Dulchinos of Adept Technology. In conjunction with the Caucus event, CRA's Computing Community Consortium will be hosting three days worth of robotics workshops. All the details on the CCC endeavor can be found on the CCC blog.
CRA is also gearing up to participate in the Coalition for National Science Funding's Annual Science Exposition on June 25. This year we will be represented by Dr. R. Michael Young from North Carolina State University. Dr. Young will visit his Congressional delegation during the day and then host an exhibit of his research in the early evening. The exhibit is “Cognition and Computation: Exploring the Sciences of Computer Games for Serious Applications.” Details from last year’s event are here. If you have any interest in showing your work at a future CRA event, let us know!
The Computing Community Consortium -- a partnership between CRA and the National Science Foundation that seeks to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer-range, more audacious research challenges, then work to realize them -- has launched its new blog, and it's definitely worth checking out.
Given the goal of CCC to get the community talking about research visions (and then setting to work on developing the most promising ones into clearly defined initiatives that could receive funding from various federal agencies), a blog seems like a reasonable way to help spur the discussions. Researchers on the CCC Council will author some of the initial (hopefully opinionated) pieces, but I think the hope is that the discussions will get carried on both in the open comments section and in some additional online fora.
Anyway, you can check it out at http://www.cccblog.org. They've already got a good summary of some of the activities of the new CCC "Big Data Computing Study Group" -- including the Hadoop Summit and the Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Symposium.
The blog also looks really nice -- I'm a little jealous and am wondering whether my IT guy (who is also CCC's IT guy) can set me up with the same nice Wordpress setup -- and features open commenting and the ability to subscribe to the articles via e-mail, which is very handy. Definitely worth checking out.
An announcement from the Computing Community Consortium:
November 5, 2007Zegura to Chair GENI Science Council
Ellen Zegura, Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named Chair of the GENI Science Council (GSC).
The GSC was established by the Computing Community Consortium in February 2007 to articulate a visionary and compelling research agenda in networking and related fields, with a particular focus on topics that might require substantial shared research instrumentation such as has been envisioned as GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations.
Previously, Zegura co-chaired the GSC with Scott Shenker from UC Berkeley. For personal reasons, Shenker is stepping down as Co-chair, but he will remain a member of the GSC.
The Computing Community Consortium congratulates Ellen, and thanks both Ellen and Scott for their contributions -- past and future! -- to the GSC.
Further information on the GENI Science Council.
Further information on the Computing Community Consortium.
Update: Zegura has also written a handy guide (pdf) to GENI that helps lay out the case for the project. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in learning what GENI proposes to accomplish.
An announcement from your friends at the Computing Community Consortium:
October 11, 2007Four Added to GENI Science Council
The Computing Community Consortium is pleased to announce the addition of four members to the Science Council for the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI). The new members will join 15 current members of the council in providing scientific guidance for the GENI project -- a proposed experimental facility to allow research on a wide variety of problems in communications, networking, and distributed systems.
The new members will expand the breadth of research expertise on the GENI Science Council, said Edward Lazowska, Chair of the CCC Council.
The new members:
- Joan Feigenbaum, Henry Ford II Professor of Computer Science at Yale University
- James A. Hendler, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Michael Kearns, National Center Chair in Resource Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylavnia
- Larry Peterson, Chair of Computer Science at Princeton University.
The GENI Science Council was originally established in March 2007 by the CCC, in partnership with the National Science Foundation. The Science Council will produce a comprehensive research plan that describes the scientific and engineering research questions that GENI will make possible to address, the educational opportunities that GENI will afford, and the industrial collaborations the GENI will invite. Members of the GENI Science Council were selected from a pool of more than 100 individuals nominated by the computing community representing roughly 20 research areas.
Further information on the GENI program, including the composition of the Science Council, can be found on the web at http://geni.net.
About CCC: Formed in partnership with the National Science Foundation and the Computing Research Association, the Computing Community Consortium seeks to catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives. On the web: http://cra.org/ccc
The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req’d.) has a great article on the future of the Internet and the Global Environment for Network Innovations or GENI. It contains quotes from many participants of the new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) that CRA helped launch.
The article talks about the problems with the current state of the Internet:
Identity theft, viruses, and attacks on Web sites are on the rise — a few weeks ago the country of Estonia was practically shut down, digitally, by deliberate attempts to jam government computers. Spam, which was less than 50 percent of e-mail traffic back in 2002, is now close to 90 percent, according to Commtouch Software Ltd., an Internet-security company.Moreover, the Internet has great difficulty coping with the sharp increase in mobile devices like cellphones and laptops, and handling bandwidth-hungry traffic such as video, now demanded by an increasing number of users.
GENI and its possibilities are discussed in great detail:
The people pushing for change are the very people at universities and colleges who built the Internet in the first place. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, among others, have joined Mr. Peterson in the GENI planning process. Industry players such as chip-maker Intel are also on board.…
In late May of this year, the science foundation awarded Cambridge-based BBN Technologies the job of planning GENI, giving them $10-million to spend over the next four years. The company has deep roots in the old Internet: It built the first network segment connecting four universities back in 1969.
Chip Elliott, the BBN engineer who will be running the GENI project office, thinks the project calls for two approaches. "First, if you don't like conventional Internet protocols, try something completely different. Second, do it on a large enough scale, with enough users, so that your results actually mean something." People associated with GENI say that "large enough" means access for experimenters at several hundred universities and, eventually, a user community in the tens of thousands.
Thousands of users will provide a crucial dose of reality, say planners. Over the years, there have been many papers published on new Internet design, and simulations run on networks such as PlanetLab. "But you don't know how an Internet design will behave until a large group of people actually use it," says Ms. Zegura, who will co-chair a GENI science council charged with rounding up ideas from the research community. "They will do things that you don't expect, just like in the real Internet, and then you'll see how robust your idea is. That's where the rubber meets the road."
An announcement from CRA:
CRA NAMES 16 TO FIRST COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM COUNCIL
WASHINGTON, DC - The Computing Research Association, in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), today announced the membership of the first permanent Council for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). The council will direct and oversee the operations of the CCC as it provides scientific leadership and vision to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects.
CRA created the CCC under a $6 million, three-year agreement with NSF to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the computing field. The CCC will create venues for community participation in developing a vision for computing research and in launching new research activities.
Today's announcement names 16 leaders of the computing research community from industry, government and academia to terms on the permanent CCC Council ranging from 1 to 3 years. Those named to the council are listed below.
Edward Lazowska, University of Washington, Chair
Three-year terms
Bill Feiereisen, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Susan Graham, University of California at Berkeley
David Kaeli, Northeastern University
John King, University of Michigan
Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon UniversityTwo-year terms
Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts
Beth Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology
Fred Schneider, Cornell University
David Tennenhouse, New Venture Partners
Dave Waltz, Columbia UniversityOne-year terms
Greg Andrews, University of Arizona
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Dick Karp, University of California at Berkeley
Bob Sproull, Sun Microsystems
Karen Sutherland, Augsburg College“We're pleased to have assembled such a strong council with a broad range of interests and backgrounds,” said Daniel Reed, chair of the Computing Research Association and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute. “Having representatives from such a wide array of sub disciplines, from schools both large and small, and from industry and government research labs should provide the diversity of thought necessary to enhance our community's ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals.”
Reed said key tasks for the council will be to help the CCC catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, build consensus around research visions, and develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives.
The council members' terms begin July 1, 2007.
About CRA: The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
CRA: http://cra.org
CCC: http://cra.org/ccc
Update: Some of the term limits in the original press release were wrong. Edward Lazowska, Chair, currently does not have a fixed term limit. Fred Schneider, Cornell University, has a two year term. These have been corrected in the list above.
The National Science Foundation today announced it has selected BBN Technologies to create and run the project office for its proposed Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) research facility. BBN, which won the original government contract to build the ARPANET in 1969, will manage the planning and design of the GENI network facility, in consultation with the research community and the GENI Science Council.
GENI is conceived as a large-scale research instrument to test and mature a wide range of research ideas in data communications and distributed systems. While GENI itself isn't a replacement for the current Internet (or any other communications technology), it is designed to create an environment within which researchers can pursue ideas and develop technologies that might lead to an Internet fundamentally better than the current one.
Initially, the job of the GENI Program Office (GPO) will be to develop detailed engineering plans and costs for the facility. NSF's original solicitation for the GPO estimated a budget of up to $12.5 million a year for four years ($2.5 million a year for administrative costs, $10 million for development and prototyping). GENI still has quite a few hurdles to jump in the NSF approval process, but the naming of a GPO contractor, coupled with the CCC's naming of a GENI Science Council in March, should provide more heft to the effort.
The GPO is online now and includes this useful FAQ.
The BBN press release is here.
NSF's Press Release: Three Wishes for a Future Internet? GENI Project Will Soon Be At Your Command
The following is brought to you by your friends at the CCC...:
Under an agreement with the National Science Foundation, the Computing Research Association (CRA) has established the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to engage the computing research community in articulating and pursuing longer-term research visions - visions that will capture the imagination of our community and of the public at large.
The CCC invites your engagement in this process! At the Federated Computing Research Conference in San Diego during the second week in June, five special talks will sketch the possibilities. These talks are intended to be inspirational, motivational, and accessible. Please join us!
Monday June 11, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Christos Papadimitriou, UC Berkeley
The Algorithmic Lens: How the Sciences are Being Transformed by the Computational Perspective
Abstract
Tuesday June 12, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Bob Colwell, Independent Consultant
Future of Computer Architecture '07
Abstract
Wednesday June 13, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Randal Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University
Data-Intensive Super Computing: Taking Google-Style Computing Beyond Web Search
Abstract
Thursday June 14, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Scott Shenker, UC Berkeley
We Dream of GENI: Exploring Radical Network Designs
Abstract
Friday June 15, 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall (FCRC Keynote Talk)
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington and Chair, Computing Community Consortium
Computer Science: Past, Present and Future
Abstract
More info here.
Time Magazine has a pretty decent piece on NSF's Global Environment for Networking Innovations program, which has the goal of "[enabling] the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet."
Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.We've covered the progress of GENI previously in this space, including the most recent announcement by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the naming of the initial members of the GENI science council. As it stands now, GENI is a "Horizon" project in NSF's 2007 Facilities Plan -- a step away from "Readiness Stage," which would allow for extensive pre-construction planning. There are currently 10 projects listed in the plan as "Horizon" projects, and just one in the "Readiness Stage" for FY 2008 (the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope). For FY 2008, NSF has requested $20 million to ramp up GENI pre-construction planning -- so the program is moving forward, but still has some distance to go before it's ready to be included in the queue of projects being considered for the "Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction" account in future budget years.The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.
The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."
No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.
Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), in consultation with the National Science Foundation, has selected the initial membership of the Science Council for the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI). This GENI Science Council (GSC) will represent the computing research community in guiding the Science Plan for GENI -- an experimental facility planned by NSF in collaboration with the research community, "to enable the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet."
The initial members are:
The members of the GSC were selected from a pool of more than 100 specific individuals nominated by the computing community representing roughly 20 research areas.
In selecting the GSC, CCC and NSF considered a number of criteria, including trying to insure that most GENI-relevant research communities were represented on the GSC, that the members should have strong individual reputations in the GENI-relevant research communities and recognized as "deep thinkers," and that the selection process seek diversity of all sorts: geographical, institution type, gender, ethnic, etc. In addition, the CCC intends to add representation from the networking industry that builds components and provides network engineering expertise for the alternative technologies, but will wait to add those individuals until the results of the GENI Project Office (GPO) solicitation are known. (It was felt that individuals who are likely to have key roles in the GPO shouldn't serve on the GSC, so that the GSC can offer independent advice if requested.)
Scott Shenker will serve as Chair of the GSC, and Ellen Zegura will serve as Vice Chair. A few details remain, including establishing the terms of service (and determining the staggering of the terms of the initial appointees) -- but those are expected to be worked out shortly.
Additional detail (pdf) on the selection of the GENI Science Council.
More on GENI. And a helpful FAQ.
The Computing Research Association is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Edward Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, as the inaugural Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. This appointment was made after extensive consultations with computing research leaders, the Interim CCC Council and the National Science Foundation.
"CRA is delighted that our colleague, Ed Lazowska, has accepted this important role" said Daniel A. Reed, Chair of the CRA Board and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Lazowska has a distinguished career in computing research, public service, and service to the computing research community, including time spent as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Defense Advanced Projects Agency Information Science and Technology study group. Dr. Lazowska is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In his new role, Dr. Lazowska will lead the CCC -- a consortium of experts drawn from and chosen by the computing research community -- as it seeks to stimulate scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. The CCC, established by CRA in partnership with NSF, will catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives. The next step in its implementation is populating the CCC Council, which will facilitate the processes by which the consortium will do its work.
About CRA. The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
For more on the CCC: http://www.cra.org/ccc
Previous posts on the CCC.
From CRA Executive Director Andy Bernat:
We are pleased to announce that the following individuals have agreed to serve on the interim CCC Council. The interim Council will begin immediately to implement the activities envisioned in the CCC proposal (see www.cra.org/ccc or the November 2006 Computing Research News).Previous coverage of the CCC.Greg Andrews, Arizona
Bill Feiereisen, LANL
Susan Graham, California-Berkeley
Jessica Hodgins, CMU
John Hollerbach, Utah
Daniel Jackson, MIT
Anita Jones, Virginia
Dick Karp, California-Berkeley
Ken Kennedy, Rice
John King, Michigan
Peter Kogge, Notre Dame
Ed Lazowska, Washington
Ran Liebskind-Hadas, HMC
Dan Ling, Microsoft
Dan Reed, UNC
Frances Sullivan, IDA
David Tennenhouse, A9
Ellen Zegura, Georgia TechWe are currently constituting a Nominating Committee to generate potential appointees to the more permanent (rotating three-year terms) CCC Council and Chair. Our intent is to move quickly towards appointing this group.
As we noted last week, the National Science Foundation has tasked CRA with establishing a Computing Community Consortium that can provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. Today, the CCC Planning Group released a white paper (pdf, 210kb) with much more detail on the structure and purpose of the CCC. They've also released a timeline of future activities.
The first step in "Bootstrapping Phase 1" has been completed with the naming of an interim CRA GENI Community Advisory Board. Its members are:
Charlie Catlett, Argonne National LabFinally, we've set up a page for all CCC related information: http://www.cra.org/ccc.
Vint Cerf, Google
Susan Graham, University of California, Berkeley
Ron Johnson, University of Washington
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington (Chair)
Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon University
Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
Update: (9/29/06) -- The CCC Planning Group has released a white paper with much more detail on the structure and purpose of the CCC. They've also released a timeline of future activities.
The first step in "Bootstrapping Phase 1" has been completed with the naming of an interim CRA GENI Community Advisory Board. Its members are:
Charlie Catlett, Argonne National LabFinally, we've set up a page for all CCC related information: http://cra.org/ccc.
Vint Cerf, Google
Susan Graham, University of California, Berkeley
Ron Johnson, University of Washington
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington (Chair)
Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon University
Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
For Immediate ReleaseWe'll have more on this announcement shortly, including a white paper that will help provide a little more detail. But in the interim, you can get some additional context by looking at NSF's original solicitation for the CCC, "Defining the Large-Scale Infrastructure Needs of the Computing Research Community."
Contact: Peter Harsha, CRA
202-234-2111 x 106NSF TAPS CRA TO CREATE COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM
WASHINGTON, DC, September 18, 2006 - The National Science Foundation today announced an agreement with the Computing Research Association (CRA) to establish a consortium of computing experts that will provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects.
Under the three-year, $6 million agreement, CRA will create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the field. The CCC will create venues for community participation for developing visions and creating new research activities.
One of the first tasks of the CCC will be to assume the role of community proxy organization for the NSF's Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) Project, providing broad scientific oversight to its potential construction and operation. In addition, the CCC will provide scientific oversight for future NSF large-scale computing research initiatives.
A council of 9 to 15 members and a council chair will lead the CCC. All council members will be leaders of the computing research community and will represent the diversity of that community.
"We're pleased that NSF has charged our organization with establishing the CCC," said Dan Reed, chair of the Computing Research Association and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina. "Computing research continues to fuel the innovations that drive economic productivity. We see the CCC as a mechanism that will enable continued innovation by enhancing our community's ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals."
Reed said the main challenges for the CCC will be to catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives.
About CRA. The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.