Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

On Catastrophes and Rebooting the Planet

As all those who can self-isolate to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and all but essential services are closed in many locations, local, regional, national, and international commerce has declined precipitously, with calamitous effects for many workers, businesses – large and small – and even governments and their instrumentalities.  There is fear, pain, and suffering in many places and in many forms, and this reality supersedes any claims to the contrary. (See Nature Cannot Be Fooled.)

This is a wicked problem, more complex in many ways than the Great Recession of 2008 because it convolves two complex issues – public health and economic vitality. The same actions that encourage commerce endanger human lives. Conversely, the actions that protect lives have profound, negative economic consequences.  Our socioeconomic equilibrium has been disrupted, with an uncertain path to its restoration.  It is, to use a common phrase, a global catastrophe -- an abrupt and unexpected event causing great and relatively sudden damage and suffering.

There’s a branch of mathematics that studies such abrupt and unexpected changes; it’s aptly named catastrophe theory.  As Wikipedia explains, “catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems,” but a simpler description is that catastrophe theory characterizes small changes in the parameters of a nonlinear system that cause equilibria to appear or disappear and a system to jump from one macrostate to another. In that sense, it is a formalization of the colloquial meaning of a disruptive event.

My Geek Childhood

When I was a young teenager, the catastrophe theory work of René Thom had a brief run in the popular consciousness, as the country grappled with economic shocks engendered by the energy crisis of the 1970s. It was even featured in the print edition of Newsweek, due in part to its popularization by Christopher Zeeman. Catastrophe theory was also featured in that other must read periodical of my childhood, Scientific American, alas after I was already in college. (See Zeeman’s delightful April 1976 Scientific American article, entitled simply, Catastrophe Theory.)

That I both read Newsweek and Scientific American avidly and ravaged multiple libraries for books on the underlying mathematics of catastrophe theory perhaps says more about my young teenaged years in rural Arkansas than about catastrophe theory’s grip on the popular imagination.  (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) Let us now bow our heads in a brief acknowledgement of the self-evident reality that I was and am a geek or nerd. (I accept either appellation – but I take umbrage at dweeb or dork.) Needless to say, I had plenty of time for reading on Saturday nights.  Having explicated the limitations of my teenaged social life, let us plunge deeper into catastrophe theory.

Catastrophe Theory 101

This simple diagram on the right illustrates one of the most commonly used models, a cusp catastrophe. Here, two control variables (a, b) perturb a simple function y = u⁴/4 by the addition of a quadratic

yielding a potential function of the form

(Note that the constants are purely for mathematically simplicity.  Any desired scaling factor can be applied to the control or internal variables.)

When the control variables (a, b) have fixed values, the system settles into an equilibrium state where the internal variable u minimizes the potential function.  However, as the control variables change, a local minimum can disappear, and the internal variable can jump suddenly to a different equilibrium, the cusp in the diagram.

A little calculus – setting the first derivative to zero – shows that the equilibrium surface is

The line that marks the edges of the bend in the surface from the upper sheet to the lower sheet is called the fold curve. Finally, the bifurcation set (cusp) is the critical image of the projection (a, b, u) -> (a, b) from the equilibrium surface onto the control space.

Intuitively, small changes in the (a, b) control plane define situations where a stable solution (for values of u) will suddenly jump to an alternate stable solution. As the diagram also shows, there are hysteresis loops where crossing the cusp curve in one direction may cause a catastrophe, but immediately reversing direction does not restore the previous state.

The astute reader will have noted that the cusp catastrophe describes a deterministic system (i.e., the first derivative is time invariant), and most domains include random, time-dependent elements.  The simple cusp catastrophe can be readily extended to stochastic environments (e.g., by adding a Wiener process, W(t)), resulting in a stochastic differential equation.  This means the equilibrium plane and transition cusp vary over time, based on the underlying stochastic process.

For those of you playing the game at home, a Weiner process is a real valued continuous time stochastic process that is the scaling limit of a random walk.  This is yet another example of the interconnectedness of things, spanning topology, dynamic systems, random walks, probability theory, and diffusion processes.

Rebooting the Planet

Now that I have totally buried the lede of the current public health and economic crisis under childhood geekdom and the mathematics of catastrophe theory, here is the relevance and intuition. Think of our control variables (a, b) as social distancing and government economic policy, respectively, and our outcome as socioeconomic health and stability.  Small changes in social distancing or government policy can trigger abrupt transitions in socioeconomic stability due to large declines in public health or economic function (e.g., a pandemic and recession). This is the important point: no simple reversal of those changes can immediately return society to its prior, healthy and prosperous state. All of which brings us to hysteresis and a restart of global society.

Shutting down a planet, a country, a city, or even a university is neither a small nor a simple thing.  Critical infrastructure must be maintained and essential services must remain operational.  More importantly, each of those has collateral dependences.  Infrastructure and services are fractal and self-similar at multiple levels. They are also globally interconnected, with dependences unimagined even a generation ago. (See The World Is Small and Globally Connected, Globally Worried.)

How does one reboot a planet?  First, an immediate return to normal is simply not possible; as the cusp catastrophe model shows, there is hysteresis in any individual and collective action set.  Jobs and income have disappeared; businesses and industries have been damaged and destroyed; tax revenue has been lost; and families and communities have been devastated by illness and death.

Second, an overly rapid and aggressive restart – an “all is back to normal” ethos – risks a rebound pandemic, given inadequate herd immunity or a time to develop a future vaccine.  Conversely, a timid, overly cautious resumption of business and social activity risks unnecessary economic loss and prolonged pain and suffering for hundreds of millions of individuals.

Resumption is not a binary process. Today, we are self-isolating and social distancing, alternating between sitting alone in sweatpants while anxiously watching talking heads on cable television and venturing out with trepidation for food and supplies, warily eyeing the person across the street, fearful they will not keep their distance. We cannot immediately shift to large group activities, attending mass sporting events and glad-handing colleagues, friends, and family with abandon. Rather, resumption must be phased, with careful monitoring of public health and economic activity and recognition that there may be multiple missteps and necessary backtracking. It is a thoughtful, careful process that must be driven by reason and data, not emotion and intuition. (See The Simple Things Matter, Most of All Now and Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)

Nor are universities exempt, with their tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff drawn from around the world, living, working, and eating in close proximity.  As a practical matter, universities are small cities, with logistics and transportation systems, museums and performing arts centers, hospitals and healthcare systems, housing, dining, and recreation facilities, all interconnected with research, education, and community engagement.

These are complex dynamic systems with many co-moving stochastic components, self-similar at many, many scales.  Individuals adapt continuously, but public policy is necessarily discrete. As my colleague, Michael Good noted, it is wise to view the post-pandemic reboot as consisting of red, orange, yellow, and green phases, each representing incremental resumption of social and economic activities, albeit with potential reversion to earlier phases based on observed outcomes.

Remember the key lesson of the stochastic cusp catastrophe. Disruptions cannot be immediately inverted; complex dynamic systems involve hysteresis. We will persevere and the planet will reboot, but it is more complex than a simple Ctrl+Alt+Del. The future will not look like the past for quite a while, but it can be both different and better if we work together in a collaborative spirit.  (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.)  

Predicting Potentialities, Reifying Futures

N.B.  This is a rather long post, motivated by my recent discussions about the art of predicting the future.

Baseball player and everyman philosopher, Yogi Berra, is justifiably famous for his malapropisms (e.g., “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”), some actual, some simply attributed.  Now enshrined in the popular vernacular is his amusingly true and philosophically vacuous observation, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Alas, navigating the darkling plain of history is as murky as predicting the pristine future, for variants of Yogi’s bon mot on the uncertain future have been attributed to such diverse figures as physicist and Nobel Laureate, Niels Bohr, and filmmaker, Samuel Goldwyn.  I speak from personal experience on uncertain exegesis.

At various times, in op-eds, columns, articles, interviews, debates, and speeches, I have pontificated on the murky future, speculating on possible and likely outcomes in education, innovation, science, medicine, technology, and society. While doing so, I have also been privileged to serve on a diverse set of advisory groups, among them, the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the FCC’s Technical Advisory Council, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, and the National Science Board (NSB). I have also participated in or led various World Economic Forum and B20 events.  

None of these experiences made me an oracle, far from it, but they have given me a sense that, as Morpheus promised in The Matrix, the rabbit hole of the future goes very deep indeed. Have a cookie and free your mind.

From musings on Jevon’s paradox though innovation friction and educational futures to the effects of accelerating change, I have plunged in fearlessly – and some might say foolishly – to reflect on the future, with the uncertain chronicle of my dubious musings documented at http://www.hpcdan.org.

In one memorable exchange, I once debated the European Union’s science adviser, Anne Glover, before EU policymakers. It quickly became clear that she (a biologist) and I (a computer geek) were in complete agreement, though both of us puzzled at the audience’s repeated and insistent questioning about slowing the pace of change in microbiology and computing.  Whether concerning digital privacy, genetically modified organisms, cloud computing, or genetic engineering, we emphasized that scientific insights could only be managed wisely, not forestalled. 

I remain convinced this was and is the correct answer, but it was not the desired one. It is also why I believe passionately that an educated populace is an essential prerequisite to thoughtful and informed debate on the appropriate use of new technologies. Absent that, we are but on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

In a less serious but equally thoughtful vein, I interviewed and debated futurist and science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling. To the amusement of our live audience, we sought to establish the major consensus narrative (aka the truth) about future technology and society, as we rambled across post-genomic biology and medicine, nanotechnology and personalized manufacturing, cognitive radio and the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and grand AI, and privacy and information flow in the digital age, while discussing the cultural aspects of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma.  (See A Conversation on Designing the Future.)

Several times, I have been mostly right (e.g., the criticality of digital privacy) about the future.  Other times, I have been right about the technology and wrong about the socioeconomics (e.g., online higher education and MOOCs) or wrong about the technology but right about the socioeconomics.  In many cases, I have just been unambiguously and laughably wrong.  (Bought any Itanium computers lately?) However, embarrassment has never stopped me from thinking or asking others what the future might become.  As writer Neal Stephenson provocatively noted, “… if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams.”

Those waking dreams begin by identifying which aspects of the present are malleable – and the associated costs (economic, political, social, and technical) and timescales (months, years, or decades) – as well as those aspects that are truly immutable.  The goal, however, is not just to understand and adapt to the future, but to shape and reify it, for dreams without plans are simply illusions.

Recognize, though, that each envisioned change must be pursued thoughtfully and wisely, for change has both expected and unexpected benefits and consequences.  Foresight is always uncertain, as Ursula K. Le Guin so poignantly portrayed in the Lathe of Heaven.

Futurist Imagining

Technical innovation – predicting the qualitative effects of quantitative change – is often easier than social and legal/policy change, though I recognize my geek bias may be evident in so saying. Even within a specific technical domain, the locus of innovation can shift with time and technology. Consider commercial aviation as one salutatory illustration.

Though the cruising speed of commercial aircraft rose throughout the first half of the 20^th century, today’s Boeing and Airbus commercial airplanes fly no faster than the vaunted Boeing 707 of the late 1950s. Higher speeds were and are technically possible, as military aircraft and the Concorde demonstrated, but supersonic commercial transport remains economically non-viable. Nevertheless, aircraft innovation continues apace, with more reliable, fuel efficient jet engines, carbon fiber designs, glass cockpits and fly by wire. (See Nothing Lasts Forever.)

For those playing the futurist game at home, consider just a few other disruptive examples, past and present. What if long distance communications were effectively free, rather than costing dollars per minute as in the days of Ma Bell? (Answer: the Internet, the web, and e-commerce). What if computers were small and cheap and could store the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress in the palm of your hand, rather than costing millions of dollars and filling massive rooms?  (Answer: laptops, smartphones, and the Internet of Things)

What if the DNA you inherited at birth were just a starting blueprint, rather than a lifelong constant? (Answer: CRISPR and personalized medicine). What if each decade the summers got just a little hotter and the winters got just a little colder? (Answer: climate change, economic loss, and global migration) What if autonomous AI systems were empowered to identify individuals and make life and death decisions? (Answer: stay tuned, this experiment is still underway)

Now slip on your futurist goggles and engage in a brief, though humorous, gedanken experiment.  Might the triumvirate of 5G cellular, talking shoes (no, not the ones with flapping soles), and drone pizza delivery be in our near future? (Stop, right now! How dare you laugh at talking shoes; they’re just a lateral from talking thermostats. Where’s your George Jetson ethos?) In a world where a dystopian Max Headroom is a quaint memory, all three depend on advanced computing, deep learning, and edge AI, but each has divergent social and economic drivers and probabilities. (See Come to the Supercomputing Big Data Edge.)

Despite trade wars, deployment costs now measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and massive picocell requirements, the early rollout of 5G cellular – or at least its marketing twin – is already underway, driven by revenue-salivating carriers and insatiable consumer demand for wireless connectivity and cat videos.  Conversely, marketing talking shoes would be cheap, a dubious fashion statement realizable by any wannabe teenaged designer of chic couture, no more or less likely than any of a dozen other bizarre trends.  Finally, pizza delivery by autonomous drone is now technically feasible, and Dominos has already delivered pizza by drone in New Zealand. Drone delivery is currently illegal in the United States, though legislation to satisfy a national craving for pepperoni might be in our future.

Multivariate Uncertainty

Make no mistake, predicting the future is not for the faint of heart, even with a 5G smartphone, a full belly, and talking shoes; the future is not a simple convolution of linearly independent possibilities. Each possibility depends on a host of uncertainties, with different constraints and interdependences – some are technical, others are cultural; some are economic, others are social; and still others are legal or ethical. More tellingly, each of these uncertainties evolves with varying speeds and scales.  The future is many things, but it is not an unconstrained n-dimensional random walk; even if it does occasionally feel like a Wiener process; it is far more Bayesian, as any inveterate Let’s Make a Deal knows all too well. (The Monty Hall problem is a classic veridical paradox; choose wisely lest you lose the Big Deal behind door number three.)

A few of my geekier friends might say the future is explained by Everett’s many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where all possible outcomes attain, and we live in but one of many possible universes. Yes, this might mean there is a world where polyester leisure suits and platform shoes are part of a man’s professional wardrobe, disco reigns as a national art form, Inktomi dominates web search and digital advertising, high-speed maglev trains crisscross the U.S. hourly, and adult obesity and diabetes are rare.  This is not our world, though I might reluctantly accept disco, but not leisure suits, in exchange for high-speed trains and diabetes’ elimination.

Despair not, there is hope in understanding the Copenhagen interpretation of the wave function’s collapse – when the superposition of eigenstates reduces to a single state consistent with observation.  Put another way, observation tells us the status of Schrödinger's cat, the future of flying cars, and talking shoes.  Flying cars, though technically possible, are economically and statistically unlikely. However, the jury is still out on talking shoes. (For an anecdote about uncertainty and faculty recruiting, see Schrödinger’s Gershwin.)

Lessons for Futurists

Enough philosophy and raconteuring – herewith are five things I have learned about predicting and shaping the future.

1. n the near term, we tend to overestimate change, but in the long term, we underestimate it.

The Gartner hype cycle is real.  Shiny objects readily capture our attention, mesmerizing and beguiling us with pregnant possibilities.  We see a world of inflated options, infected with go fever, ignoring the challenges posed by a still nascent idea. After the trough of disillusionment, most ideas descend quickly into the valley of death.  In a few cases, after innovation and much hard work, the slope of enlightenment appears, with subsequent success.  By then, we have forgotten how much change the innovation has wrought, now comfortable in an Orwellian sense that the past is invariant, as we willingly and enthusiastically embrace double think. Yes, we have always had smartphones, and Google has always been the go to source for homework questions.

2. Linear extrapolation is easy; exponential extrapolation is extraordinarily difficult.

Tomorrow is generally an incremental variant of today, and small changes rarely have dramatic effects.  Yet there are situations where change truly is exponential.  The cadence of transistor shrinkage, popularly known as Moore’s law, along with its more subtle technical enabler, Dennard scaling, has birthed exponentially more powerful and inexpensive computing systems over the past thirty years. That cadence is now ending, with profound implications for a future where an exponential has reached its fuzzy terminus. The cost of whole genome sequencing has plunged similarly, with concomitant disruptions in the science and finances of health care. (DNA sequencing at near consumer prices is here, albeit for smaller sequences – look at the nanopore-based SmidgION.)  Neither of these exponential changes was guaranteed; rather, they were the product of continued, incremental innovation.

3. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change, but this but one type of disruptive change.

Sufficient change in speed, size, capacity, capability, and price almost always lead to qualitative change. If unit prices drop dramatically and volumes rise commensurately, new opportunities and markets arise. Contrarily, continuing design improvements in gas lamps would have never led to the electric light bulb, whose disruptive technical innovation triggered an ecosystem revolution, as did the automobile and the airplane. Anticipating these disruptive innovations is by definition, difficult, but understanding context and tipping points can lessen surprise; these are the trigger points of the hype cycle.

4. Disciplinary experts are often blinded by knowledge of certain constraints; outsiders see differently.

If you have ever worked on any new idea or approach, you are intimately aware of its limitations and the associated risks, and occasionally terrified when others embrace it with blithe obliviousness.  At one level, this cautionary awareness is a critical damper on unbridled enthusiasm.  (After all, few things really are better than sliced bread, though some might opine that canned beer has been a close competitor.) Building an inclusive and thoughtful circle can lessen surprise; non-domain experts, including many science fiction writers, often better anticipate the broader implications and uptake (or rejection) of new ideas.

5. The interplay of technology evolution and social dynamics is both complex and subtle.

Predicting social reaction to technical change is challenging.  I have personally seen a single technical idea met with unbridled enthusiasm and unqualified horror when applied to slightly different human domains. None of the scientists and technologists, and I count myself among that community, would have predicted that response divergence. Again, diverse teams with disparate experiences and knowledge can lessen surprise and increase predictive accuracy.

Coda

The future is a tabula rasa, albeit with social, economic, political, and technical constraints.  We are not simply passive voyagers on an uncertain sea; we can and should shape our future. Doing so requires both contextual awareness and thoughtful shaping of alternatives. 

Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Yogi was right; the futurist mantra is pity and cautionary.

Predict, reify; rinse, repeat.

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship

What motivates us to discover, to explore new frontiers?  What unbroken causal chain connects a child’s boundless curiosity to the focused, but equally insatiable questioning of a trained researcher at the peak of their intellectual prowess?

Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? How did it all begin?  How will it end? Why is there anything at all? Why, why, why? Why, indeed?

As the inimitable and ever quotable Richard Feynman once remarked in an interview, “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” This omnivorous curiosity has driven us since the dawn of self-awareness, shaping our culture, our values, and our future. (See Science:  It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder and The (Scientific) Good News.) I worry, though, that all too often we reward conformity and punish curiosity, particularly in formal education; the deep and existential why deserves more than a superficial because.

Education and Research: An Unnecessary Division

I’ve spent over half a century in U.S. educational institutions. Some might say I am a very slow learner, others might say it is good that I’ve been institutionalized. Perhaps they are right in both assessments.

Nevertheless, I remain amazed that we spend so much of our educational energy on the transfer and regurgitation of knowledge, rather than nurturing the curiosity that fuels learning. Make no mistake, knowledge is essential, the whetstone of a sharpened mind able to ask insightful questions and understand nuanced answers. However, learning can and should be an inevitable consequence of fueled curiosity, for a curious mind is passionate, indeed desperate, to know and understand.

I speak, of course, of the bicameral separation of education and research. (Here, I use research as a catholic placeholder for discovery and creative works in the sciences, engineering, and medicine, as well as in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.) All too often, formal education is presumed isomorphic with (sometimes) trained performers in classrooms and lecture halls, the sage on the stage, lecturing to passive and often restive students who have been told repeatedly and emphatically this is important and will be on the exam but not why it is interesting or why it might matter. In some, more enlightened contexts, this public education lives in more lively flipped classrooms and the halfway house of experiential learning. 

Meanwhile, research thrives privately in laboratories, libraries, field stations, workshops, communities, and offices, largely isolated from public lecture halls and student habitudes. While our faculty members lead double lives – teachers in the classroom and seekers in the laboratory – many of our undergraduates see only an enervated and desiccated version of the vibrant life of the mind that so energizes and defines faculty.

Our students walk daily past buildings filled with research spaces, unaware of both the process and methods of research and scholarship, and of the passions that drive scholars to pursue answers to age-old questions.  Then, we wonder why the public does not understand why fact-based reasoning and investment in basic research are so important to our nation’s future. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim and The Epistemology of Science.)

No bright line divides education and research, the known and the unknown. The great mosaic of human knowledge is fractal, with intriguing questions large and small, lurking everywhere, and few answers in the back of the proverbial textbook. (See Research: When There Are No Answers in the Back of the Book.) 

What is now transmitted knowledge was once breakthrough research, and when we separate the passion of discovery from the joy of learning, we diminish both. We want our students to slip unawares across the fractal edge of the known and the unknown, as they ask and seek answers to both old and new questions.

Expanding Undergraduate Research

All research universities, public and private, have organized undergraduate research programs (URP), where selected students work with faculty members. During my years at both Iowa and Utah, I have been impressed by the URPs run by Iowa’s Center for Research by Undergraduates (ICRU) and Utah’s Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). More to the point, I always found it an unbridled joy to discuss research with students, as they explain problems, methodologies, and insights. It always reminds me that research and education are truly one, driven by curiosity.

Many of these URPs involve thousands of students, but few, other than at smaller institutions, seek to involve all of their entering undergraduate students as a defining and distinguishing educational attribute of their research university experience. There are many reasons for this, some related to scalability, others to fiscal realities, and a few lost in the mists of institutional history, but we can and should do better.

Simply put, I believe every student should have the opportunity to experience the consilience of the known and the unknown, from the very first day on campus. Research universities not only transmit extant knowledge; they create new knowledge. We ask the whys, not just explain the answers. Given this, education at a research university can and should differ from that at even an elite college.

There are national exemplars of this integrative approach, notably the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) at the University of Texas at Austin and Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) at Georgia Tech. FRI currently enrolls over 900 first and second year students annually through 29 faculty-driven research “streams.” In contrast, VIP serves over 1,000 students at varying stages throughout their undergraduate careers in 70 faculty-drive multidisciplinary teams. These are scalable, highly successful programs with demonstrable outcomes.  Student retention and graduation rates rise, diversity and inclusion grow, and research awareness – informed curiosity – thrives.

At the University of Utah, the College of Science is building on these insights to create an Undergraduate Research Initiative, as a complement to our Office of Undergraduate Research, our Honors College, and our Office of Undergraduate Studies. I am excited about this future and its implications for our students.

Research is more than a metaphor for life.  It is life grounded in the knowledge and ability to ask and answer questions that shape our individual and collective futures.

Coda

Oh yes, I know you were wondering.  Why is the sky blue? Two words: Rayleigh scattering. Why is the grass green? Because chlorophyll, used in photosynthesis, absorbs red and blue wavelengths more efficiently, and the light reflected by plants is enriched in green wavelengths. How did it all begin?  How will it end? Those are among the deepest and most profound questions of cosmology.

The Endless Frontier and the National Science Board

N.B. I am pleased that the White House has announced that I am being appointed to the National Science Board (NSB), which provides advice and oversight for the National Science Foundation (NSF). In recognition of this honor and responsibility, I have been reflecting on how much the NSF has shaped my career over the past thirty-five years, and how much I owe the Foundation in return.

Anxious Proposal Writing

As a new, assistant professor in the fall of 1983, armed with a thin NSF proposal guide, I labored to write my first proposal. Like all young and inexperienced proposal writers, I struggled, searching for a lede that was both novel and compelling.  I wrote and rewrote, agonizing over each paragraph, late into the nights.  Sleep deprived, with the submission window at hand, I decamped to the local post office with a postage meter, where I mailed a set of proposal copies to NSF’s old Washington, DC. address at 1800 G St. NW, near the International Monetary Fund. 

Mind you, this was before electronic proposal routing, with far fewer certifications and checklists.  Paper forms were simply duplicated and stapled for mailing. The World Wide Web did not exist, the NSF supercomputer centers (including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)) had not been created, and NCSA’s Mosaic web browser not yet been released.  It was a time when a daily dialup CSNET connection was the state of the art among most computer science departments, and I knew a non-trivial percentage of the electronic world’s denizens blessed with an email address. (See Remembering Internet Dogs.) 

My first NSF proposal was about a then radical idea, one I had explored in my Purdue Ph.D. thesis, that supercomputers could and should be built from large collections of microprocessors. When I began that work, the Intel 8086 was still a new and novel product, and the IBM PC had not been released. Doubling down on this crazy idea, my friend and colleague, Richard Fujimoto, and I later wrote an MIT Press book about this approach. Fortunately, time has shown that we – and others – were right about microprocessor clusters.

A few months after submitting my first proposal, I mustered my courage and called the NSF program officer, hoping for good news. To my great joy, he kindly related that the proposal, entitled Performance Directed Design of Multimicrocomputer Systems, would be funded in the fall of 1984, with the munificent sum of $55,825. Although many tens of millions of research dollars have since followed, I will always be grateful for NSF’s initial investment in my future.

A Lifetime of NSF Connections

At the time of that first NSF proposal, I had no idea what arc my career might follow, nor how intimately I would be involved in computing’s future and its myriad connections to NSF.  These have included serving as computer science department head at Illinois, as NCSA director, as founding director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at North Carolina, and as the leader of the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft. Throughout, I have been fortunate to be involved in building advanced computing infrastructure for scientific research (clusters, GPUs, and the NSF TeraGrid, now XSEDE), advancing high-speed networking, ensuring access to cloud services for science, and engaging in research collaborations of many forms.

When I wrote that first proposal, neither could I have then foreseen how much the world would change due to computing’s now ubiquitous influence. For a few musings on these effects, see NCSA@30: The Revolution Continues, Microsoft/NSF Cloud Research Partnership, and Reluctant Revolutionaries, the Trolley Paradox, and Ender’s Game. 

The one constant in all of my experiences has been the National Science Foundation. Over the years, I have been fortunate to engage NSF on many levels:

• As a researcher and an early Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) awardee, which made possible long-standing industry collaborations with Intel, IBM, and other companies
• As a member of many multi-institution research projects (e.g., on scalable I/O, virtual grids, and mesoscale weather forecasting)
• As a member of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) advisory committee
• As a proposal reviewer, workshop organizer, report writer, informal advisor, distinguished lecturer, member of National Academy studies, and member of both the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST)
• As a witness in Congressional hearings about computing, science, and technology futures (e.g., this House Science Committee hearing)
• As a leader of a Major Research Equipment and Facility Construction (MREFC) project – the Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) and Extended Terascale Facility (ETF) that were the TeraGrid
• As an industry partner – the Microsoft/NSF Cloud Research Partnership

All of that built on a long legacy of NSF innovation.

The Endless Frontier: Looking Forward

In July 1945, Vannevar Bush responded to a request from President Roosevelt with a prescient and insightful report, one whose significance and import echo across the decades.  In that report, entitled, Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush noted, “…without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” He further notes, 

… since health, well-being, and security are proper concerns of Government, scientific progress is, and must be, of vital interest to Government. Without scientific progress the national health would deteriorate; without scientific progress we could not hope for improvement in our standard of living or for an increased number of jobs for our citizens; and without scientific progress we could not have maintained our liberties against tyranny.

Bush’s seminal report, still worth reading, resulted in what we now know as the National Science Foundation, charged to both develop new knowledge and to train new generations of scholars.

I, along with many of you, have been blessed beneficiaries of that wisdom and foresight. I have also been fortunate to count many CISE leaders and NSF directors as friends and advisers.   It is in that spirit, that I am now pleased that I am being appointed to the National Science Board, where I hope to help the NSF continue to support and sustain scholars – young and old – and to advance scientific research and ensure national competitiveness.

Innovation Imperiled: Golden Eggs No More

N.B. This editorial appeared in the Des Moines Register on Monday, June 12, 2017. It was co-written with Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President for Research and Regents' Professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma

We browse the web on our smartphones, shop online, are alerted to a problem with our car's engine by a computerized sensor, receive real time severe weather information down to the level of city streets, protect our homes and businesses using computerized alarm systems, and rely on advanced medical imaging to detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. All of these capabilities, and innumerable others that directly benefit our lives, have been made possible by scientific and engineering research conducted in our nation's research universities and national laboratories

In the last decades of the 20th century, the U.S. created a research and higher education system that not only is the envy of the world, but also is unparalleled in human history. That system has been, -- to use a line from a recent Washington Post editorial by MIT's Eric Lander and Google's Eric Schmidt -- a "miracle machine," that produced a bounty of research innovation that transformed our economy, our society, our health, and our world.

However, like Aesop's fable of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, we now risk killing the very thing that has given the U.S. an enormous national security and economic advantage at the very time that the rest of the world, having watched us with unbridled envy, is now thoughtfully and determinedly raising its own geese. China's investments are growing at a prodigious rate, followed by major investments by South Korea, Russia, India, and the European Union. Meanwhile, U.S. government investment in basic research is now at a forty-year low as a percentage of GDP, and the U.S. is losing ground to other nations – and losing ground rapidly.

This decline is especially worrisome given the clear and convincing evidence that basic research investments are critical to the growth of our economy, to developing drugs and medical treatments, to ensuring our national security, and improving our quality of life. Research also directly creates jobs and builds a workforce that keeps the U.S. in a leadership position in today's global society.

Federal investment in basic research has long enjoyed strong and deep support from both Republicans and Democrats. It is not a partisan issue; it is the embodiment of a quintessentially American desire, rooted deeply in our history as explorers and trailblazers – to explore the unknown, to ask the difficult questions, to protect our citizens, and to create a better future for our children and ourselves.

You do not have to take our word for it. In 2013, our BIG10 colleagues launched the UMETRICS project to quantify the direct impact of basic research on the economy. This project, which has since expanded to include public and private research universities across the U.S., showed that Federal investment in research stimulates the purchase of goods and services in counties, large and small, across the country, as well as employing tens of thousands of workers. The UMETRICS project, under the auspices of the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), is now using U.S. Census data to quantify the creation of new companies based on research expenditures.

Science and technology have been responsible for more than half of all U.S. economic growth since World War II, an astounding return on a modest Federal investment in basic research. Unlike science fiction television shows, where complex problems can be solved before the next commercial break, translating research discoveries into innovations often takes years. The now indispensable smartphone and GPS are cases in point. Although both are "miracles" of engineering and design, they rely on breakthroughs in physics from decades ago. As a nation, we have always been patient to wait – for we have trusted that research ultimately will deliver. It always has, and it always will.

Like failing to exercise or follow a healthy diet, the consequences of failing to invest in research materialize only slowly, almost imperceptibly, which makes the challenge of ensuring robust investment even greater. The benefits of short-term savings in the yearly Federal budgets, wrought through cuts to research, frighteningly overshadow the insidious, long-term consequences. Hardworking researchers produce the "miracles" we now take for granted. Due to underfunding, we risk losing an entire generation of these researchers when we need them most, and rebounding from the loss of talent is neither immediate nor inexpensive.

We applaud Congress for recognizing the value of research investment in the final FY 2017 omnibus funding bill, and the bipartisan tone in the America COMPETES Act. To ensure U.S. competitiveness and quality of life for all, the White House and Congress must continue their long history of support for basic and applied research, starting with the FY 2018 budget.

Recent increases to the budget of the National Institutes for Health are extremely important, yet similar increases in physical science, engineering, and the social and behavioral sciences have not been forthcoming for other agencies. Disciplines no longer explore in isolation; funding one at the expense of another harms the entire research enterprise and slows solution of our most challenging problems.

Make no mistake; the research "miracle machine" that has made the U.S. the envy of the world is in grave danger. Balance, predictable and stable funding for research and development – across all relevant disciplines – is essential for the U.S. to remain not only a world leader in research, but also a translator of research outcomes into practical products and services that benefit to all of our citizens.

Research, Education, Engagement and Bovine Transport

It's been said many times. The accelerating pace of change is challenging extant social structures, economic mobility in the United States is declining, and many millennials may never experience the economic success of their parents. Globalization and automation are increasing manufacturing efficiency and output while requiring fewer workers with different skills. We face continuing global population growth and demographic shifts; sectarian forces are creating a global diaspora; environmental sustainability and climate change are existential threats; health care costs continue climbing while accessibility recedes; and social justice and equality remain elusive. Unsurprisingly, people are deeply worried about their future and that of their families, regardless of political persuasion. In turn, this stress has stirred the cauldron of political rhetoric, while reasoned debate, political compromise, and purposeful, strategic action have become ever more difficult.

As states continue to grapple with revenue shortfalls and mandatory spending commitments, others are publicly questioning the value of higher education as an essential public good. Meanwhile, the great recession has accelerated the decline in state funding for public universities, limiting their ability to respond, and forcing rises in tuition to help offset declining state support. Given these challenges, how do we in academe address the wicked problems now facing our global village?

Public University Roles and the Social Compact

By analogy with William Jevons' four functions of money, let me suggest that we in research universities have three functions, each of which matters in equal measure. First, we create new knowledge; that is the essence of research and scholarship, the defining attribute of a research university, one that distinguishes it from institutions focused solely on teaching. Second, we transmit knowledge and skills to a new generation; we educate and inform, not just with long-known facts but also with fresh insights from recent scholarship. Finally, we engage society with our knowledge and expertise; at our best, we address societal issues and challenges with new found capability that enlightens, empowers and improves the lives of others.

Though basic research, by definition, often lacks immediate or obvious applications, when we fail to communicate and demonstrate the importance of research via clear and telling examples of past success or future possibility, we abrogate our support. (That indispensable smartphone rests on decades of basic research in physics and computer science.) When we fail to connect education to the needs and opportunities of our citizens, we lose our relevance. (Those pharmacists, nurses, dentists and medical doctors trained by universities serve our communities.) Most dangerously, when we fail to engage society in times of need, we sacrifice our place of honor and respect. (Our partnerships on flood management and our support for business startups help ensure the well-being and economic success of our communities.)

And the Horse You Rode in On

Polls show that professors still rank far ahead of used car salespeople and members of Congress in both respect and trust, but we have slipped a few notches in the public's eye. Sometimes, our language and mien often give credence to those who believe academics are the very embodiment of the Ben Franklin adage, "He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on."

When we take umbrage (a fine academic phrase, but one not commonly heard on any street non-adjacent to a university) at public questions and criticism, denigrating it as uninformed pique, we often confirm Franklin's caricature of one possessing knowledge but lacking wisdom. We must be willing to reflect on the reasons for criticism, engage in thoughtful discussion with our critics, and respond appropriately. As that old Scot, Rabbie Burns put it,

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

Collaborative Partnership: The Future

As academics, we must engage our stakeholders and partners in their context and address their legitimate problems and concerns, and we must do so honestly, humbly and thoughtfully. In so doing, we will help them and also help ourselves, educating one another. Solution to complex, wicked problems requires many insights, diverse perspectives, new ideas, and determined commitment. We in academia do not have all the answers, but we do have knowledge, skills and insights that are of value.

We begin by knowing ourselves, as Alexander Pope's timeless opening couplet from his Essay on Man suggests:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is Man

We abandon academic hubris and a sense of entitlement. We talk less and listen more. We roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and engage society. When we do, the true conversation begins.

Now excuse me, while I go mount my bovine steed, er horse, and head into town.

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N.B. The following essay appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on January 23, 2016. My thanks to Stephen Pradarelli for his help with an initial draft. The essay motivates the importance of research and scholarship as a prelude to a WorldCanvass conversation: Research to Real Life.

If the phrase academic research brings to mind tweedy professors poring over rare manuscripts or bespectacled scientists in lab coats examining glass beakers — you're probably not alone. Nor is the stereotype entirely wrong; I've certainly dressed the part of rumpled geek during my career, to the occasional chagrin of my family.

The prolonged and often unglamorous work of studying how social, economic and political forces shaped history or how the universe operates down to the subatomic level and out at the furthest edges of space can seem mysterious, tedious, and irrelevant to people outside of academia.

However, basic research and scholarship expand the collective body of human knowledge, even if they don't always or immediately lead to the development of a new gadget, a medical treatment, or a new public policy. They are about understanding the physical world around us; plumbing the mysteries of biology and life; and illuminating the human condition. Intellectual inquiries begin with a prepared and open mind, willing to follow the unexpected, wherever it may lead.

Very often, they lead to world-shaping change—basic research has fueled most of the technological, scientific, and medical breakthroughs over the past 70 years. More than half of U.S. economic growth since World War II can be traced to science‐driven technological innovation. That's a stunning statement about the power and strategic national importance of academic research and scholarship.

The computer industry, Internet, and smartphones; the biomedical revolution with its continuing flow of vaccines and lifesaving drugs; the advance of diagnostics such as the MRI; and most of the technologies that have helped make the U.S. military the world's most effective fighting force, all had their start in federally funded basic research. 

At the University of Iowa, we're developing virtual environments to test military gear to make soldiers safer and more effective on the battlefield, improving flood prevention strategies, and creating personalized medicine that delivers treatments unique to each patient.

Scholarship and creativity in the arts and humanities also enrich our lives and inform our society. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, the first creative writing degree program in the United States, has produced 17 Pulitzer Prize winners, four recent U.S. Poets Laureate, and numerous other major award winners. The UI's world class Center for the Book developed the special paper that now sits beneath the Charters of Freedom in their encasements at the National Archives Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

Just as the crops produced by Iowa's farmers require soil, water, and sunlight, research and scholarship require investment, diligence, and patience. By its nature, research is a long game; every inspiration is followed by years, sometimes decades, of perspiration. Your new smartphone is based in part on research ideas from 30 years ago, and the newest drug began with a laboratory discovery that triggered a decade of pharmaceutical company development and testing before it reached the market.

Almost all basic research and scholarship is conducted by universities, and the federal government is by far its largest single supporter. Industry relies on the stream of new research ideas and educated students emerging from universities to drive its development of new products and services. This virtuous cycle, where federally funded university research and newly trained students feed private sector innovation, and the resulting innovation and economic growth benefits our society, has made the U.S. the envy of the world.

Unfortunately, federal funding for university research has been eroding for a decade, while other countries, most notably in Asia, have expanded their support dramatically. Concurrently, U.S. higher education is undergoing tectonic shifts, with new expectations for societal engagement and educational accessibility, while facing their own financial challenges.

Working together, we must reimagine how we support and sustain research and scholarship in the U.S. and in Iowa. That means telling our story more clearly and more effectively; addressing societal needs more directly; collaborating across disciplines more strategically; and partnering with our cities, our region, and our state more aggressively.

Our health and prosperity, our global competitiveness, and our national security depend on it. It's why I'm looking forward to participating in the January 26th WorldCanvass interview on "Research to Real Life," where we will discuss research and its impact.

Quantifying Innovation and Investment

It is no secret that these are straitened and difficult times for basic research in the United States. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), federal funding for research, development, and facilities has declined from 1.23 percent of gross domestic product in fiscal year 1976 to an estimated 0.75 percent in the President's proposed 2015 budget. (Detailed data can be found on the AAAS web site.)

Today, we are struggling to sustain commitments to international scientific and engineering collaborations, and we are being forced to choose between operating budgets for existing, highly valued instruments and construction of innovative new ones. Concurrently, the probability of highly rated, peer reviewed proposals being funded is at or near historic lows, and an increasing number of post-doctoral associates in the basic sciences are struggling to find jobs in their disciplines. In short, it often feels as if we have only jingling money (coins), when the price of entry to the future requires crinkling money (bills).

A Science of Science

Just before I joined the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in 2005, the late Jack Marburger, then White House Science Advisor and Head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), was excoriated by some when he posed the following question in a Science editorial ("Wanted: Better Benchmarks," Science, 308:1087):

How much should a nation spend on science? What kind of science? How much from private versus public sectors? Does demand for funding by potential science performers imply a shortage of funding or a surfeit of performers? These and related science policy questions tend to be asked and answered today in a highly visible advocacy context that makes assumptions that are deserving of closer scrutiny. A new "science of science policy" is emerging, and it may offer more compelling guidance for policy decisions and for more credible advocacy.

Like many other scientists, my instinctive and emotional reaction at the time was, "There are so many deep and important unanswered questions. This is Vannevar Bush's endless frontier! Of course, we need to invest more." Our insatiable quest to know and understand is a deep and abiding part of the human experience. As the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, wisely noted, the urge to understand is older than history itself.

Fact-Based Reasoning

On further reflection, Marburger's was and is a thoughtful policy question, one that requires an equally thoughtful and measured response, based on unassailable, quantitative data, not just scientific passion. Though our inability to conduct controlled experiments in science policy poses obvious challenges, econometrics and meta-analysis offer opportunities for quantitative insight. After all, that's what we scientists do – test hypotheses using rigorously captured and analyzed data.

This realization, as well as the 2008 economic downturn, motivated the U.S. STAR METRICS initiative. Jointly led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and OSTP, and involving the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), as well as a large fraction of the leading U.S. research universities, STAR METRICS is developing a common data infrastructure to analyze and document the outcomes of scientific investment.

Within the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the coordinating group for the Big Ten universities (which includes the University of Iowa) plus the University of Chicago, the UMETRICS initiative is using the STAR METRICS infrastructure to understand the economic impact of research, study workforce effects and implications, and assess investment strategies. In addition, it will provide normative data for communicating the results of research to policymakers, legislators and other stakeholders. Like my other colleagues in the CIC, I have committed the University to active sharing of our institutional data on research investments and expenditures and to a rigorous, comparative analysis and assessment.

Building the Future

As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." I believe we must expand federal investment in basic research. In a knowledge-driven, global economy, research and innovation are crucial to long-term economic growth and national security. The facts and the data support this, as does our shared passion to continuing exploring the endless frontier.

Iowa and the Digital Lab for Manufacturing

Yesterday, I had the privilege to be at the White House as President Obama announced the Digital Lab for Manufacturing (the Digital Lab), a new partnership in the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI). Led by the University of Illinois, the Digital Lab includes the University of Iowa, as well as Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, as part of a national network of 40 industry partners, and 30+ academia, government, and community partners, and an additional 500+ supporting companies and organizations. The Digital Lab was awarded $70M from the U.S. Department of Defense and will be supported by an additional $250M in matching funds from industry and academia.

The focus of the NNMI and the Digital Lab is increasing the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing industry via industry-academic-government partnerships. This coalition will exploit advanced digital design and 3-D visualization, computational modeling and resilient design and manufacturing process optimization to maximize efficiency and minimize design and manufacturing costs.

To say that U.S manufacturing has been under great stress would be the understatement of the decade. Manufacturing plants have shuttered, middle class jobs have been lost, and communities have suffered. We cannot roll back the clock to the halcyon days of the past, but neither must we accept the inevitability of manufacturing declines and globalization. There is a way forward, one based on digital manufacturing technologies and industry-academic partnerships that can create new high-paying manufacturing jobs for Iowa and American workers. As I have written in other contexts, engaged public-private partnerships, where research universities and the private sector work in close partnership to address real-world problems via business and technology partnerships, are the keys to competitive success in the 21^st century global knowledge economy.

Iowa Implications

Manufacturing, both large and small, is an anchor of the Iowa economy. In fact, Iowa ranks very near the top of U.S. states in manufacturing. That is not a surprise to those of us in Iowa, but it may be a revelation to others. From Rockwell-Collins (high technology) through Lennox (furnaces and air conditioners) and Pella (windows and doors) to farm equipment (Kinze and Deere), manufacturing is one of Iowa's strengths – now and in the future.

It is essential we help these and other Iowa companies, large and small, remain successful and completive in a global economy. The Digital Lab, and Iowa's partnership with it, will give Iowa companies even greater access to engineering, information technologies, and computer-aided-design (CAD) expertise as part of regional and national collaborations.

In particular, Professor Karim Abdel-Malek, director of the Center for Computer Aided Design, is the Digital Labs project director for the Iowa team. He and his colleagues in the College of Engineering will bring their expertise in modeling and simulation of humans and of electromechanical systems, data visualization and virtual reality, and materials processing to the Digital Lab partnership. Examples of that expertise include:

• Virtual testing via simulation to understand equipment failure modes due to vibration and wear, enabling design for resilience, reducing repair costs and down time
• Software tools and simulations to minimize the number of design iterations and prototypes before manufacturing, reducing costs
• Additive manufacturing (3-D printing) of prototypes and parts, allowing efficient, low-cost, custom design of small volume parts
• Digital manufacturing for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) of defense systems and extension to partner manufacturing companies
• Human-device interaction (human factors) for design and manufacturing
• Education and training opportunities for Iowa students and workers at all levels in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields

Why I'm Excited

I am excited about the Digital Lab for many reasons. The most important is the opportunity it affords for the University of Iowa and Iowa companies to participate in one of the country's leading initiatives in manufacturing. Working together, we can strengthen Iowa businesses, create exciting and well-paying new manufacturing jobs, and attract and retain talent across the state.

The second is more personal. Many of my old friends and former colleagues from the University of Illinois lead the Digital Lab. As one of its former directors, I was also delighted that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will play a leading role in applying advanced computing to manufacturing. This reflects both the capabilities of the center, host to one of the world's fastest computers, and its long history of industrial partnerships.

This is a great opportunity – for all of us.

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