Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

KAUST: A New University

I am traveling to Saudi Arabia tomorrow as a member of a small academic and industry computing delegation. I’ve never been to the Middle East, so this promises to be both fun and interesting.

Life in the Clouds

My thanks to my colleagues Dennis Gannon and Rich Wolski for stimulating conversations and great observations on this topic. Any errors or just plain stupidity are, of course, my own.

A computing revolution is underway -- in broad daylight – yet most are unaware. Perhaps because there are only a few hushed and furtive conversations and no Paine-like polemics, we do not feel the winds of change. They howl and rage nevertheless, stirred by three intertwined, powerful technical forces that are reshaping entertainment, discourse, commerce and culture: big data centers, cloud computing and the mobile Memex.

Mind to Mind: Building Innovation

An abridged version of this essay will appear in the November issue of Computing Research News, the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) quarterly newsletter.

My friend, Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s chief architect, relates a wonderful story about his undergraduate experience, when he worked as part of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PLATO, the brainchild of Illinois Professor Don Bitzer, was an early computer-aided instruction (CAI) system that included touch sensitive plasma displays (designed by Don and others and the precursor to today’s plasma televisions), computer-synthesized music, a chat system, message boards and email. A thriving electronic community grew around PLATO, which shaped the professional lives of many -- more on that shortly.