Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Reflections on the B20 Meeting

Last week, I had the privilege to participate in the B20 meetings in Los Cabos, a prelude to the G20 economic summit. For those of you who do not know, the B20 is a meeting of international CEOs who gather to discuss economic issues and provide suggestions to the G20 leaders. I was there representing Microsoft and substituting for Steve Ballmer.

The B20 has several working groups, including food security, green growth, trade and investment, and ICT and innovation. I co-chaired the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Innovation group, along with Carlos Slim Domit. (Carlos is the son of Carlos Slim Helú, the world's richest man. Yes, I know names are a bit confusing, but it follows naming tradition.) I have also served with Carlos Slim Helú on the United Nations Broadband Commission. I will return to this topic in a bit.

Economic Assessment

The B20 meeting opened with a plenary presentation by the Mexican President, Felipe Calderón, who was also chair of this year's G20 meeting. The President gave a rousing speech advocating free trade and the economic benefits. This was followed by a rather sobering panel conversation with Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, Bob Zoellick, head of the World Bank, and Angel Gurria, secretary general of the OECD.

Not surprisingly, the Eurozone crisis and the then ongoing Greek elections dominated conversation. The frustration and near despair was palpable, with Gurria noting that fiscal union without effective governance was the root of the problem. I found myself thinking that this as an old story. After all, the U.S. fought a civil war to resolve, among other issues, the relative power of states and the Federal government. In any case, there were repeated pleas for strong and consistent action the resolve the financial crisis permanently, but limited faith that would happen.

The spirit of the conversation was captured succinctly in an exchange with a B20 delegate from Africa, who rose to ask why the conversation was dominated by European concerns. It was a quite reasonable and appropriate question at a global economic panel. Each of the panelists smiled wryly and said, in their own words, "In this context, no mention is good news."

My takeaway is that the global economic situation is not going to get better any time soon. The Chinese economy is clearly slowing, the Eurozone crisis seems endless, and the U.S. situation is tenuous at best.

ICT Recommendations

As I mentioned at the outset, I co-chaired the B20 ICT and Innovation task force. The core recommendations focused on broadband access and digital inclusion, with four main pillars, and they were presented in a panel discussion, with comments from the Chilean President, Sebastián Piñera.

Enabling Broadband for All.

This recommendation is an extension of the work I have been doing on spectrum and telecommunications policy, including white spaces. The economic and political circumstances in each country and region are different, with different regulatory regimes and wired and wireless incumbents. However, the economic data are clear and unmistakable. When broadband – at affordable rates – is available to a substantial fraction of the population, net economic growth is higher. The details of the recommendation are in the report, but the focus is on removing regional and national regulatory restrictions, stimulating competition, supporting new business models, and making devices available to stimulate deployment and access.

Developing Content and Applications for the Public Good.

Those of us in developed countries, and particularly English-speaking ones, tend to forget that access to local content and software, in one's native tongue, is more limited in other parts of the world. Local content and services, including government data and transparency, can increase citizen participation in government, increase political transparency and stimulate economic growth.

Ensuring Cybersecurity for All.

These recommendations centered on uptake of best practices globally and public-private partnerships to ensure security access to services.

Promoting Innovation in ICT.

These were the standard, oft-repeated pleas for appropriate support for innovation and risk tasking.

Personal Reflections

Over the past six months, have I had several opportunities to have small group conversations with President Calderón. I have been impressed by his sincerity and commitment to collaboration and open government. It will be interesting to see what happens to Mexican policies after the Mexican President elections in a few months.

As one would expect, there was intense security around the leaders. From this event, my earlier participation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APAC) meeting and visits to the White House, I have come to realize that security details for senior government officials all look very similar. There are dark suits, the subtle but clear bulges of weapons, and the constantly searching gazes.

Finally, the gala events provided an opportunity mingle and discuss politics, economics and policy with a diverse and interesting group. There are not many places where one can first discuss social inclusion with a Peruvian cabinet minister, then join a dinner conversation with the South African ambassador and two CEOs. In addition, of course, there are the obligatory photographs of me in a guayabera.

A Question to Ponder

I speak to groups large and small on an almost weekly basis. Some of these are technical presentations; others address global policy issues; and still others are public events for a popular audience. If you were to see me speak on related topics in semi-contiguous weeks, you might assume that the presentations never change. It is true that I have a series of standard "stump speeches," but I also add new content to each of these, allowing them to evolve as I develop new ideas and understand what topics resonate with the audience.

For popular audiences, I occasionally open by jokingly opining that some members of the audience, for reasons both baffling and befuddling, may find my erudite and insightful presentation, though delivered with elegance, verve and panache, rather turgid and opaque. In that rare and extraordinary event, I humbly offer an alternate question for them to ponder while the dismal proceedings that are my prepared remarks meander interminably toward their much-anticipated conclusion.

That self-deprecating opening usually makes people smile, albeit weakly. What follows, though, is a very simple, though serious question. I simply ask, "What probability of successful return would you accept to be the first human to set foot on Mars?"

Walking on Mars

Superficially, this is the quintessential geek question, conjuring images of mighty rockets like the old Saturn V, complex orbital dynamics, spacesuits and EVAs, and ultimately, the an adventure on the red planet itself. On reflection, though, the question is more subtle, morphing into something deeper that makes the audience think carefully about themselves and the nature of the human condition.

Let us begin with the geek part, probability and statistics. There are many possible answers to the question, only one of which is categorically wrong. Anyone who says, "Why probability one, of course!" has failed to consider that nothing in life – other than death – is certain. Notwithstanding the popular claim, even taxes can be changed. One need only recall the old astronaut joke about sitting atop millions of pounds of fuel and thousands of parts, all produced by the lowest bidder. Hence, unless one's answer is, "I have no interest in going," any answer involves accepting some degree of risk.

The technically inclined among the audience inevitably then begin considering possible failure modes and probabilities, including mechanical, electronic, biological, chemical, environmental and social ones. In the mind's eye, one sees rockets exploding on the launch pad, solar storms creating lethal radiation during the long flight, failed entry in the thin Martian atmosphere, and a host of other deadly scenarios. The process reminds us that everything is fraught with some risk, and that we habitually and instinctively calculate risk-reward ratios every day. It is only the extraordinary risks that we consciously contemplate, and even then only rarely.

Risk and Remembrance

The question also illuminates two other salient issues. The first is one's personal risk-reward ratio. For a very few, perhaps the most reckless and thrill seeking among us, probability zero is an acceptable answer. For others, the adventuresome and the explorers, those with the putative "right stuff," almost any carefully quantified, non-zero probability is acceptable, for it offers the hope, even if improbable, of safe return. Many opt for an answer where the prospects of success exceed those for failure, for they value their lives.

The second aspect cuts to the centrality of our humanity, our insatiable curiosity and our hope to be remembered for having done something new, for having made a difference. To set foot Mars offers a chance to answer some deeply intriguing and vexing scientific questions about planetary formation and history and about the possibility of life on Mars, past or present. To be the first offers something else, the opportunity to be remembered, at least in the brief span of recorded human history, for having done something extraordinary.

What Is Your Answer?

It is an interesting and thought provoking question. It is a presentation unto itself. What probability of successful return would you accept?

As for me, as John Glenn once said, if there were a bird on the pad and they offered me a ride, I would be on it. I would have calculated the risks with the engineers, worked with the scientists and made an informed choice. Beyond that, the science, the technology, the curiosity, the opportunity – I feel their call.

My Big Scientific Data Are Lonely

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

"Big data" is the meme of the day. Like all such phrases, it is a tabula rasa on which everyone writes their own version of the tale. What then, is big data? Superficially, it is data so large that it challenges one's standard methods for storage, processing and analysis. Like all adjectives, big likes in the eye of the beholder. If your traditional approach to data management has been based on spreadsheets, you may view gigabytes as big data. Conversely, if you are operating a social network site or a major search engine, big has an entirely different meaning, where a petabyte is often the smallest unit of measure worth discussing.

Although much of the strum und drang surrounding big data has focused on the deluge of data from online consumer behavior – web site visits and cookies, social network interactions, search engine queries and online retailing – there are equally daunting, though different big data problems in science and engineering. The scale and scope of data produced by a new generation of instruments, from domains as diverse as astronomy and high-energy physics through geosciences and engineering to biology and medicine, are challenging both our technical approaches and our social and economic structures. One need look no further than high-throughput genetic sequencers, the Large Hadron Collider, and whole sky astronomy surveys to see the challenges and the opportunities.

The challenges to technical approaches are self-evident; any shift by orders of magnitude inevitably brings change, and we need new tools and techniques to extract insights from the data tsunami. As the late Herb Simon once remarked, "…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

The social and economic challenges are just as difficult, though much less discussed. Two issues merit special attention, the culture of sharing, within and across disciplines, and the economics of research data sustainability.

Data Sharing

An old joke defines data mining as (insert possessive gesture here) data are mine. Sadly, this hoary saw is more often truthful than humorous. Historically, competitive research advantage accrued to those individuals and groups who first conducted the experiments and captured new data, for they could ask and then answer questions before others. The rise of large-scale, shared instrumentation is necessitating new models of sharing and collaboration across disciplines and research cultures. When many groups have access to the same data, advantage shifts to those who can ask and answer better questions.

The rising importance of data fusion across disciplines brings a deeper issue than simple sharing. Often, data proves to be most valuable in disciplines and groups other than the ones where it was first captured. Social network data illuminates the spread of disease; geosciences data guide urban planning; and atmospheric measurements reveal the health effects of effluents. All of these sometimes unexpected uses have timelines and utility extending far beyond the specific research projects and groups that produced the data. The question then becomes how we maintain this data and cross the cultural boundaries needed to make it accessible to others, particularly when the timescales for initial research data creation and later use by other disciplines may differ by decades.

Data Sustainability

The default reaction to the question of data sustainability is often to propose retaining everything. After all, device storage capacities continue to grow rapidly. However, like an iceberg, the raw cost of storage is simply the small and most obviously visible portion of total cost of data ownership. The majority of the cost lurks beneath – metadata management and creation, access systems and security, curation and coordination – and some entity must bear these costs for sustainability. More pointedly, rarely do the creators of the data have either the technical skills or the incentives to maintain data for long periods. At a higher level, research agencies and universities now face fiscal exigencies that further exacerbate the financial strain of research data sustainability.

Even in the most financially opportune times, not everything can or should be saved. The challenge is in creating economic and social models that extract a larger measure of research and economic value from the data, providing subsidies for data sustainability and further research. Equally importantly, such models could provide the backdrop for choosing which data to retain and which to discard. Lest this seem a Luddite perspective, remember that librarians and archivists have been triaging materials for thousands of years.

Simply put, we must find a new way forward that defines the principles and processes for protecting intellectual property while also creating appropriate cultural and economic rewards for data sharing and sustainability. This is a challenge facing not just individual disciplines, but society at large. We must work together to find a solution.