Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Technology and Everyday Skills

In my current role at Microsoft, I speak about the future of technology and its implications for economic development and global competition, for research and education, for business practices and social welfare. Do I speak as often as when I was a professor at the University of Illinois? No, for that was a set schedule of lectures, either twice or three times each week. Do I speak to more diverse audiences with more varied interests? Absolutely, for I address groups both large and small – government policymakers, non-profit and non-governmental organization (NGOs) members, business leaders, technologists, customers, business partners, faculty, students and the general public.

Almost all of these presentations involve extended question and answer sessions, which I find quite stimulating. The diversity of the audience guarantees that the questions will be equally varied and interesting, with widely varying perspectives and insights. I learn from the audience just as I hope they, on occasion, learn from me. After all, you can take the professor out of the university, but you cannot take the university out of the professor!

In one of these discussions, a member of the audience posed a thoughtful question that I have continued to ponder. The context was a presentation I had just given on the future of intelligent assistants – computer systems that can respond to speech and gesture (i.e., natural user interfaces) and that can reason based on a corpus of unstructured data. The specific question was about the effect of global positioning system (GPS) devices on our intuition and spatial reasoning. Simply put, did use of a GPS lessen an individual's ability to think about the reasonableness of the directions and relative locations?

I do not know the answer; it is really a question for sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as urban planners. In response to the questioner, I did opine that I had at least once blindly followed my GPS to an empty field, which was supposedly the address of a restaurant. I was surprised to find a colleague there, one I was meeting for dinner. He had done the same thing.

This set me to thinking about the effect of technology on many day-to-day activities. My cursive writing has descended into near illegibility given rarity of use. Of course, my handwriting was never great, as my former graduate students can attest, based on their struggles to decipher my written comments on thesis drafts. I always blamed it on my left-handedness, though that is more of an excuse than a justification. In my defense, I still remember my second grade cursive writing teacher noting that I was left handed and remarking, "You're on your own here, kid."

Similarly, my spelling, which was once excellent, has atrophied due to word processor autocorrection. When writing longhand, I took care to spell each word, with a dictionary nearby for those rare occasions I needed to verify the spelling of a word. Now, I continue touch typing at full speed, knowing that I can correct the errors either inline or later.

Although I rue the loss of my cursive skills, I generally believe that successful technologies become invisible, dissolved into the fabric of society. They supplant older, previously valuable skills. Few of us would now survive as hunter-gatherers, but almost all of us can now use a search engine to query the world's knowledge base.

Having said that, qualitative reasoning and intuition regarding orders of magnitude do still matter. If your pedometer suggests you walked 50 miles today, think again. If your ATM reports that your bank balance excceds that of a small country, don't retire just yet. And if your GPS sends you to an empty field, don't wait for your table at the restaurant to be cleared!

Explaining Science and Engineering

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

The human suffering caused by the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor damage in Japan have saddened us all. As we watch the ongoing struggle to cope with the complexities of a multifactor crisis, we can offer technical and logistics assistance where appropriate, extend emotional and social support to our friends and colleagues, and draw insights, as we always do, for possible responses to future disasters. Each such challenge reminds us that the interplay among complex, dynamical systems is subtle and deep, and that chaos, not just in its popular definition, but in its deep mathematical sense, is ever present, lurking in the shadows, aided by its old friend entropy.

Public Communication

Beyond generating an outpouring of international concern and highlighting the interconnectedness of our society and our shared humanity, the events in Japan have also thrust a plethora of scientific and engineering terms into the international news media and public discourse: tectonic plates, subduction zones and fault planes in the lithosphere; tsunamis, fluid dynamics and wave shoaling; nuclear fission, criticality, neutron moderation and half-lives; atmospheric dispersion, the jet stream and diffusion processes.

As I have read the international newspapers, watched the television reports, listened to the radio interviews and scanned the web sites, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical concepts in intuitive and readily accessible terms. Whether it be explaining logarithmic earthquake scales (e.g., the Richter scale), where a unitary delta corresponds to an order of magnitude difference in magnitude; radioactivity and half-lives, where exponential decay reduces the quantity of material; or the subtleties of dose equivalent radiation exposure measurements, Sieverts and food life cycles, successful explanations depend on both the knowledge of the reporters and of the audiences.

All too often, I have heard inaccurate descriptions of scientific processes or hyperbolic assessments of risks, neither grounded in facts or statistics. To be sure, explaining complex concepts is not easy. This is, perhaps, a teachable moment, where we can highlight the importance of scientific and engineering literacy across all of society, not just among a cadre of technical experts.

Scientific Literacy

Regardless of what we might hope, no engineering structure, whether a nuclear reactor, tsunami sea wall, or earthquake resilient building can be perfectly safe, fully effective or absolutely resistant. Nor can all possible outcomes be anticipated in a natural disaster. One can only plan and assess, then execute accordingly, drawing on the best practices and knowledge currently available, and then learning valuable lessons from each failure.

Our society depends deeply on scientific and engineering advances – including those in computing – for they are embedded in our communication systems, manufacturing processes and supply chains, food production and processing, logistics and transportation, energy production and environmental interactions, and economic mechanisms. Societal understanding of scientific processes and terminology, as well a shared appreciation for the engineering design balances among costs, functionality and risks are essential to informed debate and decision making.

In turn, that understanding rests on our continued investment and support for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, from advanced technical degrees to general awareness of science and engineering principles among all our citizens. We must continue to make STEM and computing exciting and accessible, for we live in a technological society, with all its incumbent implications.

Meanwhile, I continue to wish my friends and colleagues in Japan the very best. Their struggle is our struggle.

Goldilocks, Porridge and Science: Getting It Right

We all remember some variant of the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It is a tale of the search for a good meal and a nap, though it also involves breaking and entering, culinary theft and accidental vandalism. If, perchance, you feel a worrisome gap in your erudition and erstwhile encyclopedic knowledge of this element of the Western cultural lexicon, fear not, for I will summarize the key elements of the tale. And please bear with me, this does relate to science! (Pun intended.)

Porridge and Bears

The young girl, Goldilocks, visits the home of the bears and samples the porridge of Papa, Mama and Baby Bear, pronouncing each, in turn, too hot, too cold and just right. Sated with porridge, she then seeks a place to sit, finding the chairs of Papa and Mama Bear too large. As she settles comfortably into Baby Bear's chair, it collapses. She then explores each of the beds before falling asleep in Baby Bear's bed, where she is found by the returning bear family. On discovery, she flees.

This tale, of course, raises worrisome questions. Do bears really like porridge? Could they sit in chairs and would they sleep in beds? More tellingly, are they underwater on their cottage mortage? Though all worthy of whimsical rumination, let us defer literal scrutiny of the fairy tale's purported ursine facts and the anthromophrized bears and focus on the porridge bowls and their metaphorical implications for science.

Science: Matching Need and Availability

Like porridge bowls, science comes in many sizes, from research conducted by a single investigator (e.g., a theoretical computer scientist studying computational complexity) to experimental projects that involve thousands of people (e.g., the ATLAS and CMS detectors at CERN). More to the point, there is no "right size" for science, other than matching the resources to the nature of the problem and the approach, albeit with the usual assessment of investment versus potential payoff. Nor is there, a priori, differential value between large and small science. Groundbreaking discoveries with broad and transformative effects have occurred across the entire spectrum of project sizes.

Scientific culture does vary widely with discipline and scale, however. Just as the ethos and metrics of biology differ markedly from those in physics, so too do the approaches and politics of small and large science. Large-scale experimental science typically involves long-term planning, geo-political negotiations, and infrastructure construction that may span multiple years before data can be captured and analyzed.

Big Infrastructure for Small Science

Historically, these two worlds – small-scale science (both theoretical and experimental) and large-scale science – have largely depended on separate and distinct infrastructure. That historical separation is now disappearing, mediated by the tsunami of data now being produced by new generations of scientific instruments and computational models. (See The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different and Language Shapes Behavior: Our Poor Cousin, Data.)

Historically, the researcher who had unique experimental infrastructure also maintained a competitive advantage, for he or she could conduct experiments and capture unique data. With the rise of large-scale, shared instrumentation in a host of disciplines, most notably in biology, astronomy and physics, and open access to the resulting research data, advantage instead accrues to the researcher who can ask and answer more interesting questions. This is a profound shift in scientific culture with deep implications.

It is now incumbent upon us to rethink how we facilitate discovery and innovation in this brave new world of large data, for practitioners of both small and large science. Simply put, we must reconsider how we fund, construct, manage and operate scientific data repositories.

As I have learned at Microsoft, there are lessons that can be drawn from the construction of cloud data centers, web search engines and tools for analyzing ill-structured data that could both accelerate and simplify scientific discovery. These tools and practices are not only applicable to individual scientific domains, they are also especially relevant to the problems that lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines, where scientific cultural divides and divergent terminologies often inhibit collaboration and exploration. We will also need new models of public/private partnership to realize this vision, something we are pursuing with Microsoft's worldwide engagements on client plus cloud infrastructure.

Remember the porridge, the bears and Goldilocks. We can match the needs of all scientists, working together. Whether you like it hot or cold, large or small, it can be "just right" for everyone.

Ubiquitous Communication

I have posted a few thoughts on the coming Internet of Things and the implications for cognitive communication over on the Microsoft on the Issues blog. As I have written in other pieces, I believe we have to rethink how we manage spectrum allocation and adopt much more nimble and flexible policies that leverage the emerging capabilities of cognitive radio. (See Spectrum Future Shock.)

Everywhere, anytime communication is a notable result of recent computing advances, but it's dependent upon available bandwidth, and that bandwidth is finite. Spectrum is, in many ways, like a natural resource that has to be managed judiciously, especially if we are to continue to advance the digital economy and leverage technology to drive innovation—to create new services, new business models, new ways of communicating and living for the betterment of society.

Intellectual Amplification via Computing

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

Many years ago, Fred Brooks relayed a tale about how he chose the first application target domain for his computer graphics research. It was not long after he had left IBM and completed his work on the IBM System/360. He had just moved to Chapel Hill and taken a faculty position at the University of North Carolina.

As Fred tells the story, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, he went to see one of the senior university administrators. He told the administrator that as a computer scientist, he was in the intelligence amplification business. Who on the campus, Fred wanted to know, might most benefit from having their intelligence amplified?

I have recalled this story many times, always with a smile, as I have reflected on the nature of computing and its power.

Amplification and Universality

Computing systems share many features with other instruments and machines, in amplifying human abilities. However, one aspect distinguishes them – namely, their general utility as an intellectual amplifier. Like a universal Turing machine, which can simulate any other Turing machine with arbitrary inputs, computing is broadly – dare I say universally – applicable to human intellectual endeavors, much as all the variants of the inclined plane and lever are applicable to human physical endeavors.

The English scientist Sir Humphrey Davy could well have been speaking about computing when he said, two centuries ago:

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument. The native intellectual powers of men in different times are not so much the causes of the different success of their labors, as the peculiar nature of the means and artificial resources in their possession.

In a phrase – success accrues to the talented with access to the most effective and powerful tools.

Supercomputing and its applications to science and engineering have been canonical examples of this universal benefit. Powerful new telescopes advance astronomy, but not materials science. Powerful new particle accelerators advance high-energy physics, but not genetics. In contrast, supercomputing advances all of science and engineering because all disciplines benefit from high-resolution model predictions and theoretical validations.

As exciting as those opportunities remain, new ones are emerging in the world of big data.

Big Data: Structured and Unstructured

The tsunami of structured scientific data, produced by a new generation of sensors, and the growth of semi-structured and unstructured data from business, entertainment, social networks and popular culture have created new needs for creative application of our intellectual amplifier. As the recent performance of IBM's Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! Illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing is opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush's 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.

It really is about how we use computing as an intellectual amplifier, allowing humans to be more productive and more creative by doing what we do best – asking interesting questions, ones that span multiple disciplines and that illuminate opportunities at their interstices – aided by power analytic and computation engines.