Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1378704.1378714
Viewpoint
Envisioning the Future
of Computing Research

Advances in computing have changed our lives—the Computing Community Consortium aims to help the research community continue that lineage.

HOW CAN WE work together to establish, articulate, and pursue compelling visions for our field—visions that will shape the intellectual future of the field, that will catalyze research investment and public support, and that will attract the best and brightest minds of a new generation?

The National Science Foundation asked the Computing Research Association to create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to address this challenge. The mechanics of the CCC have been described elsewhere; ⁵ in this column, I focus on the substance.

computing has made
extraordinary Progress

William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen invented the transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947, just over 60 years ago. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Bob Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor demonstrated the integrated circuit only 50 years ago, in 1958. It was 1965—just a bit more than 40 years ago—when Gordon Moore described what is now universally referred to as “Moore’s Law.”

Today, the computational power of an early mainframe can be found in an electronic greeting card, and the computational power that guided Apollo 11 to the moon is contained in a Furby electronic toy. There are more than one billion PCs, and nearly that

many Internet hosts.

It was only 10 years ago that Deep Blue—a supercomputer by any definition—defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Today, thanks more to progress in software than to progress in hardware, you can down-load for your PC a chess engine with a rating 10% higher than any human player. Most of the “futurist scenarios” described when Time magazine featured the computer as “Machine of the Year” 25 years ago have been realized, including computer-controlled tailoring using laser-scanning, robots performing domestic chores, embedded systems that people don’t realize are computers at all.

Advances in computing are changing the way we live, work, learn, and communicate. These advances are driving advances in nearly all other fields and are significantly influencing the U.S. economy—not just through the growth of the IT industry, but even more importantly, through productivity growth across all sectors.

Research has

Laid the foundation Almost every aspect of computing that is integral to our lives today can trace its roots, at least in substantial part, to federally sponsored research. In 1995, the National Academies’ “ Brooks-Sutherland Report” ² traced the lineage of a number of billion-dollar sub-sectors of the computing indus-

try: timesharing, computer graphics, networking (LANs and the Internet), personal workstation computing, windows and the graphical user interface, RISC architectures, modern integrated circuit design, RAID storage, and parallel computing. In each case, the role of federally sponsored research was clear.

The panel conducting this study (I was one of the 12 members) lamented our inability to identify new ideas that might someday be comparably influential. But eight years later, the National Academies did a reprise of the study⁴ and noted entertainment technology, data mining, portable communication, the Web, speech recognition, and broadband last mile as new billion-dollar subsectors whose roots could be traced, at least in substantial part, to federally sponsored research. (The figure on the next page shows the approximate time frame from concept to billion-dollar industry.)

While we may not be sure which they are, there surely are technologies in our laboratories today that will have comparable impact a decade from now.

 

the future is full of opportunity Several months ago, the National Academy of Engineering unveiled 14 “Grand Challenges for Engineering” for the 21st century. ³ The majority of these “Grand Challenges” for all of engineer-