Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Microsoft/NSF Cloud Research Partnership

Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. (See the NSF announcement: The Sky Is No Limit: 13 Research Teams Compute in the Clouds.) This is a continuation of the program that then NSF Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Jeannette Wing, and I announced in February 2010 (See Microsoft and the National Science Foundation Enable Research in the Cloud and Democratizing Research: How "Client Plus Cloud" Computing Can Amplify What's Possible for Scientists).

As part of this agreement with the NSF, Microsoft is making available access to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform. In addition, a support team of Microsoft researchers and developers is working with grant recipients to equip them with a set of common tools, applications and data collections that can be shared with the broad academic community, and also providing expertise in research, science and cloud computing. Broader details on the program and its research tools and software for Windows Azure can be found here.

Diverse Projects

Increasingly, the important scientific questions lie at the intersections of traditional disciplines, and insights from multidisciplinary collaborations drive innovation, economic development and our response to complex problems and natural disasters. This is one of many reasons I am so pleased with the technical diversity among the list of NSF-Microsoft award recipients.

All of the award recipients were selected via NSF's rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. Projects range from exploring scientific applications of cloud computing as well as extensions of cloud computing with new tools and techniques.

• Cornell University (Kenneth Birman) - Building Scalable Trust in Cloud Computing
• J. Craig Venter Institute (Audrey Tovchigrechko) - Bettering Interactive Protein-Protein Docking
• SUNY at Buffalo (Tevfik Kosar) - Enhancing Stork Data Scheduler for Azure
• University of California, San Diego (Kenneth Yocum) - Utilizing Continuous Bulk Processing
• University of Colorado, Boulder (Richard Han) - Enabling Mobile Cloud Computing
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Qiaozhu Mei) - Refining Language Models using Web-scale Language Networks
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Zhengchang Su) - Predicting Transcription Factor Binding Sites for Genes
• University of South Carolina (Jonathan Goodall) and the University of Virginia (Marty A. Humphrey) - Managing Large Watershed Systems
• University of Southern California (Viktor Prasanna) - Tackling Large Scale Graph Problems
• University of Texas at Austin (Michael Walfish) - Storing Data with Minimal Trust
• University of Washington (Magdalena Balazinska) - Understanding Relational Data Markets
• Virginia Tech (Wuchun Feng) - Conducting Intensive Biocomputing
• Virginia Tech (Kwa-Sur Tam) - Effectively and Widely Using Renewable Energy Sources

  Worldwide Reach

The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international program that the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) and Microsoft Research are building with the scientific research agencies worldwide. We believe cloud computing, coupled with powerful client tools, can transform the nature of research. This worldwide program currently targets collaborations with several national and international research partnerships, including

• National Institute of Informatics of Japan Info-plosion project
• European Commission FP7 funding program, Venus-C project
• U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Horizon project
• French INRIA-Microsoft collaboration on cloud computing
• Australian engagements with NICTA, ANU and CSIRO

Power via Simplicity

This Microsoft/government partnership is about so much more than access to cloud computing resources. The deep partnership between academic and Microsoft researchers, creation and release of easy-to-use client tools and an exploration of the new world of massive data are all key elements of our shared journey to a new model of data rich analysis enabled by powerful client tools and cloud services.

Any successful technology ultimately becomes invisible, enabling and empowering without requiring the user to focus on the idiosyncrasies of the technology itself. Technical computing can and should be an invisible intellectual amplifier, as easy to use as any other successful consumer technology. As I wrote last year when we first launched this program, it is really about transforming how we conduct research by broadening researcher capabilities, fostering collaborative research communities, and accelerating scientific discovery by shifting the focus from infrastructure to empowerment.

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!