Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

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.

America COMPETES Passage

My Microsoft colleague, Elizabeth Grossman, has posted a thoughtful essay, entitled Investment in Federal Research Enables Innovation. In the essay, she reflects on today's passage of America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Reauthorization Act of 2010 by the U.S. Congress.

The AMERICA Competes Act outlines target funding levels and priorities for the research and education programs at several federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. As Elizabeth notes, "Robust federal support for breakthrough research conducted throughout the U.S. is critical to fueling the ecosystems of government, industry and universities, allowing the U.S. to make discoveries and turn them into products that improve our nation's ability to compete globally."

After initial crafting, the bill faced a long and arduous process that involved many negotiations and compromises. Hence, final passage of AMERICA Competes is a holiday event worthy of celebration.

A Few Thoughts on Clouds, Science and SC10

Update:  The New York Times story on NCBI BLAST atop Windows Azure:  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/microsoft-gives-the-cloud-to-scientists/

Over on the Microsoft blog, I posted a few thoughts on SC10, the rise of clouds and the power of simplicity in high-performance computing. In includes a few thoughts on our announcement of NCBI BLAST availability on Azure, work done by my Extreme Computing Group

There is also a video of my smiling face expounding on this topic.

Modeling the World

Today, Microsoft publicly launched a new technical computing vision, Modeling the World. In addition to the Modeling the World web site and a message from Bob Muglia, President, Microsoft Server and Tools Business, there is also a Facebook page, a Twitter account (@modelingtw), and a Vimeo page. The web site contains vignettes about computing from a variety of technical computing leaders, both inside Microsoft and across the broader community. There's even a snippet where I explain what attracted me to computing and computational science.

The core areas of the Microsoft technical computing vision are:

• Technical computing to the cloud
• Simplify parallel development
• Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications

Powerful tools, flexible toolkits and ease of use, these are the enablers of innovation. These are the key messages I have been emphasizing for a long time, namely the importance of democratizing access to technical computing by focusing on discovery and innovation rather than infrastructure. It is also why my colleagues and I have been engaging the research community on client plus cloud technical computing tools, as exemplified by the Microsoft/National Science Foundation partnership.

I am very excited about this future and what it means for the technical computing community.

Jaron Lanier: Time’s Thinker

Time magazine annually publishes a list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World. The categories include leaders, heroes, thinkers and artists. This year, my Microsoft XCG colleague, Jaron Lanier, was named to this list in the thinker category. Congratulations to Jaron!

Jaron is perhaps best known in technology circles for his pioneering work on virtual reality, but Jaron's interests and skills span music (composition and performance), the arts and technology and society. His recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, explores the power and effects of human-computer interaction in a deeply and socially connected world. It is a provocative and thoughtful discourse on the challenges and opportunities posed by technology. These are deep and subtle issues, practical and social, affecting commerce and culture.

Checkers, Chess and Go

The incremental, yet systematic progress in game playing software and hardware is well documented, yet still astounding. Checkers has been "weakly solved," and a checkers playing program is unbeatable (i.e., the program will always win or draw). Though chess is more complex, with deeper positional and strategic subtleties, the tide has turned there as well.

IBM's Deep Blue victory over Garry Kasparov was international news in 1997. Today, inexpensive chess computers routinely defeat all but the world's foremost players. The mystique of human chess dominance is gone, and it is doubtful that even the most confident international grandmaster will ever again challenge the best chess playing computer to public mano-a-mechano competition.

Go, as an even more complex and subtle game, is the next great human-computer battleground. Humans remain unmatched at go, though history and the march of computing exponentials suggest that human players should not feel unduly confident of their long-term position. Here's a shout out to my Microsoft Research colleagues, who are working on this problem.

However, this essay is not about the sound of inevitability and the rise the machines (my weak pastiche of lines from The Matrix and The Terminator). Rather, it is about the nature of human abilities to perceive and exploit complex strategies in an uncertain and rapidly evolving environment. Innovation and competitive advantage rest on this bedrock – seeing the whole board and playing the right game.

See the Whole Board

There is a memorable vignette in one of Aaron Sorkin's West Wing teleplays, where the U.S. President is dealing with an international territorial dispute. As I recall it, the President orders a naval force to sail into a region fraught with historical disputes and diplomatic sabre rattling. One of his young aides questions why the President would order such a seemingly provocative and dangerous action.

In reply, the President remarks enigmatically, "See the whole board." By this, he means envision the positional advantages and disadvantages of each player, their strategies and their historical predilections. And lest the metaphor be lost on a primetime audience, the President makes this remark over a game of chess. In formulaic fashion, the international situation resolves itself peacefully as the other players respond in predicted fashion, and the aide is left to ponder the lesson learned about strategic and international relations.

Play the Right Game

Although I have often found international relations often better understood via the lens and metaphor of five year old children squabbling in a sandbox over toys, the West Wing chess vignette does highlight the importance of broad, strategic perspective when analyzing and responding to complex, volatile situations. There are games within games, superficial and deep connections, tactics and strategies, short and long term perspectives, the players and the played, the winners and the losers.

A checkers metric -- counting the number of an opponent's pieces still on the board – is a poor measure of one's position in chess, and even more dangerous in a game of Go. In business, market share is a historical indicator, not necessarily a predictor of future outcomes. Instead, it is the ecosystem of partners and their shifting strategies, the micro and macroeconomic forces in backdrop, and the derivatives of change – those technology exponentials we both love and fear.

Most of all, it is the unexpected, the new game, that disrupts and changes. It is that point when you suddenly and terrifyingly realize that your opponent is playing a deep and subtle game of Go, while you have been contemplating your next checkers jump with the wild eyed naiveté of a nine year old neophyte. Careers are made and destroyed in such moments.

Play the New Game

So what is the new game in computing? It's clearly one played with rich client plus cloud services. It is things that think, creating experiences that enrich and empower via ubiquitous invisibility. It is cognitive communication that exploits spectrum efficiently, while protecting essential public services. It is new software models that are largely device agnostic, with components that discover and diffuse across new hardware. It is natural interfaces that anticipate and respond to human wants and needs. It is new models of security and privacy that create end-to-end trust for software, data and applications that readily cross organizational and national boundaries.

If the mainframe era was a game of checkers, the PC and Internet era was a game of chess. We are deep in the new game, the game of experiences Go. See the whole board.

Daniel Reed is Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Technology Strategy and Policy (TS&P) and the Extreme Computing Group (XCG). The opinions expressed above are his, not necessarily those of Microsoft or any government. Contact him at [email protected] or read his other musings at www.hpcdan.org

Innovation Via Client Plus Cloud: Microsoft-NSF Partnership

Update

Here is a bit more background and news coverage:

• New York Times article
• NSF-Microsoft press conference
• Inside HPC article
• Microsoft's own PR article

Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF's merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and scope via the cloud.

I am very excited about this, as it is the fruit of nearly two years of planning and collaboration across Microsoft product and research teams, as well as many discussions with researchers, university leaders and government agencies. As part of this project, a technical computing engagement team, led by Dennis Gannon and Roger Barga, will work directly with NSF-funded researchers to port, extend and enhance client tools for data analysis and modeling. We also appreciate the support of the Microsoft Dreamspark, Technical Computing, Windows Azure, Azure Dallas, Public Sector, education and evangelism (DPE) teams, among others, to build and deliver this capability.

By extending the capabilities of powerful, easy-to-use PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, our objective is to broaden researcher capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery by shifting the focus from infrastructure to empowerment. This is a potentially profound shift in how we innovate in the 21^st century.

21^st Century Innovation

The brief history of computing is replete with social and technological inflection points, when a set of quantitative and qualitative technology changes led to new computing modalities. I believe we are now at such an inflection point in computing-mediated discovery and innovation, enabled by four social and technical trends:

• Massive, highly efficient cloud infrastructures, driven by search and social networking demands
• Explosive data growth, enabled by inexpensive sensors and high-capacity storage
• Research at the interstices of multiple disciplines, conducted by distributed, virtual teams
• Powerful, popular and easy-to-use client tools that facilitate data analysis and modeling

The first two of these are well documented, and I have written about them before. (See Beyond the Azure Blue and Language Shapes Behavior: Our Poor Cousin Data.) The late Jim Gray also lectured and wrote perspicuously about data-intensive scientific discovery, which he called The Fourth Paradigm. As a logical complement to theory, experiment and computation, the fourth paradigm is based on extracting insight from the prodigious amounts of social, business and scientific data now stored in facilities whose scale now dwarfs all previous computing capabilities.

Climate change and its environmental, economic and social implications; genetics, proteomics, lifestyle, environment, health care and personalized medicine; economics, global trade, social dynamics and security – these are all complex, multidisciplinary problems whose exploration and understanding depend critically on expertise from diverse disciplines with differing cultures and reward metrics.

As our research problems rise in complexity, the enabling tools must rise commensurately in power while retaining simplicity. I have seen far too many multidisciplinary projects founder on the rocks of infrastructure optimization and complexity, when they should have focused on simplicity, familiarity and ease of use.

As Fred Brooks once remarked, "We must build tools so powerful that full professors want to use them, and so simple that they can." Simplicity really, really matters. It is for this reason that Excel spreadsheets, high-level scripting languages and domain-specific client toolkits are now the lingua franca of multidisciplinary innovation, the harbingers of invisibility.

Invisible Simplicity

Any successful technology ultimately becomes invisible, enabling and empowering while user knowledge of the technology's underlying theory and operation declines. This is success, for it allows all but the technology experts to focus on the raison d'être for computing or any other technology: enabling and expanding the human experience. By that metric, technical computing and its subset – high-performance computing— have experienced a long adolescence.

Sadly, our technical computing experiences have been dominated and shaped by a focus on technology and infrastructure, rather than empowerment and simplicity. We talk routinely of data and software repositories, toolkits and packages; of cyberinfrastructure and technology roadmaps. In our technological fascination, it is all too easy to lose sight of the true objective. Infrastructure exists to enable. If it is excessively complex, cumbersome or difficult to use, its value is limited. The mathematician Richard Hamming's admonition remains apt: "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

Empowering the Majority

To address 21^st century challenges, we must democratize access to data and computational models, recognizing that the computing cognoscenti are, by definition, the minority of those who can and should benefit from computing-mediated innovation and discovery. Instead, we must enfranchise the majority, those who do not and will not use the low-level technologies – clusters, networks, file systems and databases – but wish to ask and answer complex questions. Remember, most researchers do not write low-level code; nor should they need to.

I believe we must focus on human productivity, not cyberinfrastructure, and leverage popular and intuitive client tools that hide infrastructural idiosyncrasies. This means deploying tools like Excel that can manipulate data of arbitrary size, reaching into the cloud to access petabytes of data and executing massive computations for epidemiological analysis as easily as one might balance a checkbook. It means coupling multiple, domain-specific toolkits via a script of a dozen lines, and launching a parametric microclimate study as easily as one searches the web. Perhaps more importantly, it means rethinking public and private sector partnerships for innovation, identifying and leveraging core competencies.

It all comes back to simplicity and invisibility. Technical computing can and should be an invisible intellectual amplifier, as easy to use as any other successful consumer technology. Now is the time; and Microsoft is committed to making it a reality. We look forward to working with the community.

Don’t Be A WIMP!

I once was a five feet two inch (1.57 meter), 98 pound (44 kilogram) weakling. Without a doubt, I was a wimp, complete with black plastic eyeglass frames and the stereotypical thick lenses. In my defense, I was ten years old, and the only sand I saw kicked around was in the grade school playground.

Over forty years later, I still wear glasses with thick lenses, albeit with designer metal frames, and I remain a wimpy guy. No, I'm not getting shaken down for lunch money in the Microsoft cafeteria by master programmers. I am alluding to something more worrisome, namely that we are all wimpy, due to our continuing dependence on the Windows, Icon, Menu and Pointing Device (WIMP) computer interaction model.

Since the WIMP model was developed for the seminal Xerox Alto in 1973, and then re-implemented for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, it has remained the predominate method of human computer interaction. PCs, tablets, smartphones and even most games continue to rely on variations of this technology, though it has morphed and evolved in many ways. The longevity of the WIMP metaphor is testimony to its elegance and utility, but also (perhaps) to our limited envisioning of newer and more powerful interaction models.

From GUI to NUI

It is time move beyond graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and embrace the brave new world of natural user interfaces (NUIs). As the name suggests, a NUI relies on and exploits the kinds of interactions humans use to interact with their peers, including speech, vision and gesture, as well as mood and social context. Rather than forcing the human user to adapt to the interaction limitations of the computing system, natural interfaces adapt the computing system to human interaction modes.

Today's multi-touch displays are perhaps the simplest and most widely deployed element of NUIs, allowing finger gestures on touch sensitive surfaces at multiple scales, ranging from mobile phones (e.g., the Apple iPhone) through PCs with Windows7 to large devices such as Microsoft Surface. In turn, Microsoft's Project Natal NUI for the Xbox 360 presages a new generation NUIs that exploit full body gestures and spoken commands. More broadly, the creation of NUIs relies on many years of human factors and artificial intelligence research, as well as advances in algorithms and inexpensive, though powerful, sensors, actuators and multicore processors.

Adoption of such NUIs also implies a continuing shift in our perspective, from a world where computing was expensive and scarce to one where computing is inexpensive and plentiful. As anyone who has ever spent hours studying a line printer listing to find program errors or spent weeks squeezing precious cycles from a computational simulation knows, we have historically spent prodigious amounts of human time and energy optimizing the use of limited computing resources.

That worldview shifted with the PC, when computing became sufficiently inexpensive that machines could remain idle much of the time. Today, when computing is even more inexpensive and plentiful, one can be profligate in expending computing resources to simplify human interaction.

Computing on Behalf

A plethora of computing brings a second and equally transformative opportunity, a shift from computing on demand to computing on behalf – anticipatory computing. Today, most of our computing devices sit idle unless we – quite literally – poke them. They do little or nothing unless we explicitly demand a response (e.g., by entering a search query or launching an application). If a human assistant were that unproductive, they would not last long in today's research or business environments.

In contrast, a productive human co-worker or assistant anticipates requests and begins activities in the expectation that the results will soon be needed. By analogy, computing on behalf would launch speculative activities based on context and user behavior, enriching and empowering its users. Simply put, we want our computing systems to make us smarter and more productive than we would be otherwise.

Hit the Innovation Gym

It's time for us to take charge of computing's future and stop being WIMPs. It will take concerted effort and innovation to create anticipatory NUIs. However, as they say in the gym, "No pain, no gain." No steroids and no artificial stimulants either – it's the natural way. Now if I could just do something about the thick glasses.

Technology Strategy and Policy

It seems axiomatic that technology strategy must include – drumroll please – both technology and strategy. It is all about the right ideas at the right times. We live in a world of exponential technology change, and understanding when quantitative technical change begets qualitative strategic and policy change is the essence of innovation.

Technology

Last year, Microsoft formed the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) with a charter to rethink the nature of computing at extreme scale, from alternative, quantum computing models, through the transformative effects of manycore parallelism on programming systems and architectures, to massive cloud computing designs that each drive consumer, business, research and social applications. Across all of these, security and privacy are central. Our tagline, perhaps a bit ambitiously, is "defining the future."

XCG conducts basic research, builds large-scale hardware and software prototypes, incubates new technologies for product group uptake and shapes technology adoption by Microsoft. It includes a wonderful cadre of senior researchers – individuals such as Burton Smith, Michael Freedman, John Manferdelli, Jim Larus and Dennis Gannon – as well as a host rising stars. We also have wonderful hardware engineers, software designers and system architects. XCG is part of Microsoft Research (MSR), where we report to Rick Rashid. It's a great team, and working with them and MSR may well be the most fun I have ever had in computing. That's the technology part.

Strategy and Policy

As many of you know, I am no stranger to strategy and policy, having served on the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and on the U.S. President's Counsel of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). I also chaired the Computing Research Association (CRA) board, which represents academic and industrial computing research policy interests in North America. I have also been on more ad hoc advisory and review panels, in Europe, Asia and the U.S., than I can count. (Jay Boisseau once claimed it was a million, but I think he was exaggerating just a little bit, Texas style!)

At the beginning of 2010, I will also take on an additional role helping lead technology policy and strategy for Microsoft, shaping the company's long-term vision and strategy for technology innovations and its associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. In this capacity, I will report to and work closely with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer.

Given the centrality of information technology to communication and social interaction, research and development, education and learning, health and safety, the environment and economic development –among others – such strategic technology identification and policy coordination are critical to Microsoft and our future. I am excited and humbled to be adding this role to my activities. That's the strategy and policy part.