Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Higher Education in the 21st Century

N.B. In rapidly changing, global knowledge economy, social, cultural, and economic advantage accrues to those societies that cultivate, nurture, and empower all of their citizens via advanced education, freeing each person to pursue their individual dreams, to the mutual betterment of all. 

On May 12, 1780, John Adams, then in France as part of a diplomatic delegation for the still nascent United States, penned a poignant letter to his wife, Abigail, in which he described the manifold and beguiling beauties of Paris.  Anyone who has strolled down the Champs-Élysées or visited the Palace of Versailles knows instinctively and immediately why Adams was so impressed.  (Mind you, that other modern wonder, the Louvre Museum, did not open until 1793, long after Adams had sailed home.) 

In a forward nod to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Adams resignedly acknowledges that his duty and commitment to an aborning country then struggling for its very existence must take precedence over his personal interests and desires. No matter how much he might yearn for different circumstances, immediate necessity must triumph over the desired:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Across more than two centuries, Adams’ lament still rings true, albeit with amendments to embrace equity for all. The luxuries of time and resources, made possible by the successes of previous generations, afford their blessed progeny to pursue intellectually and emotionally rewarding endeavors of all kinds – art, music, literature, science, engineering, medicine, business – beyond those dedicated to immediate sustenance and survival.

Adams elegant characterization of the seeming dichotomy between present exigencies and an imagined, better future is now manifestly and explicitly visible in our debates about higher education as a public good accessible to all or a private benefit to only those willing and able to pay, as a birthing place for thoughtful and discriminating citizens of a democratic society or a workforce training and skills delivery system in a globally competitive world.

In a perfect world, each child would be educationally empowered and free to live a life defined by the content of their character, the scope of their talent, the reach of their dreams, and their willingness to work. Sadly, we do not live in that perfect world.  We must do better and do so now.

The circumstances of birth, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and a host of other factors all too often circumscribe a child’s future, with opportunity crushed and dreams stillborn. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.  We must do better and do so now.

Life’s Challenges and Exigencies

The students of our public research universities are neither socioeconomically, culturally, nor ethnically homogeneous. In that diversity lies both our strength – we all better when we both learn from others and respect and value our differences – and our educational challenge, for not all begin their educational journey on an equal footing.

For the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful, college is a place for maturation, exploration, and education. They have the freedom to stumble and recover, secure in the safety that societal status and money provide. The path for others is more narrow and difficult, even for the increasingly financially challenged middle class. Whether first generation, immigrant, underrepresented, or poor, college can be both a rare chance and a desperate struggle. As poor, first generation college student, on this I speak from some personal experience. (See Transforming Lives Via Public Higher Education and A Taste of Sherbet.)

Far greater than my own, students of color face compounded challenges alien to most and unimaginable to many. Biases – implicit and explicit – can and do make them feel marginalized and unwelcome, carrying social and cultural burdens that majority students neither see nor feel but sometimes themselves foster, whether intentionally or unintentionally. First generation students, regardless of background, often experience imposter syndrome and lack the social support networks common in families for whom college has been a multigenerational experience, with no familiar place to seek counsel and support when challenges arise.

Finally, life has a way of intruding in expected and unexpected ways. Despite our national angst over student debt and graduation rates, many students who fervently hope to finish a college degree never do, and an even larger fraction lack the opportunity to try. The reasons are myriad and diverse, including poor educational preparation from underfunded primary and secondary schools, lack of finances to pay tuition and housing, a multigenerational family needing support, feeling unwelcome and out of place, or simply not seeing curricular relevance to their personal objectives and needs. 

The American Dream was built on the shared principles of economic opportunity and upward mobility. The idea that everyone deserves a fair shot – not a guarantee, but a fair shot – to better their socioeconomic circumstances through hard work and determination is a central tenet of the American social contract.  Today, the lifeline of higher education and successful pursuit of the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for a growing fraction of the U.S. population.

Recognition of higher education’s importance to our nation’s future is not a partisan issue.  Multiple U.S. President’s from both parties have repeatedly convened august bodies to recommend ways to improve K-12 and post-secondary education, beginning with the 1946 Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy, commonly known as the Truman Report.  That report recommended expansion of federal financial aid for college students and the creation of a community college system, noting

If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets, the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.

Despite these stentorian calls for action, a large fraction of children born in poverty still remain there, and less than 15 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic bracket earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four. No euphemistic intellectual legerdemain can hide the ugly truth of our current situation. It is neither unfortunate nor regrettable; it is morally and ethically wrong. Beyond educational opportunity as an ethical imperative, it has deep and profound justifications on economic and competitiveness grounds.  (See The Hopes of Parents and the Dreams of Children on the importance of giving every child a chance.)

Change in the Wind

Public research universities are in the business of helping people. This is especially true in times of accelerating and disruptive change.  Compounded by the consilience of globalization, each year now brings disruptions that once defined generations. In an earlier time of rapid change, the land-grant universities, authorized by the 1862 Morrill Act, were created to spread new agricultural and mechanical knowledge and “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”  In modern parlance, the objective was to educate an underserved population, one whom extant higher education neither welcomed nor served.

Similarly, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 – the G.I. Bill – brought millions of veterans to college and university campuses, and it firmly rooted the graduates in the expanding middle class when many feared a post-war slide into recession. The G.I. Bill, along with post-World War II government investment in academic research, further expanded during the Cold War via the National Defense Education Act of 1958, reshaped academia and created the modern research university. Finally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 broke down further legal and economic barriers to educational access, though we have by no means eliminated those impediments.

Today, urbanization, global communications, artificial intelligence, talent mobility, and the global knowledge economy are reshaping social expectations. These changes are disrupting the historical web of interconnected economic sectors, while rendering some professions superfluous and creating demands for new skills in others.  A recent McKinsey report, The Future of Work in America, discusses regional economic stratification and the anticipated changes in workforce needs in the next decades.

The National Science Board, of which I am a member, recently issued two reports raising similar concerns.  The first of these, on The Skilled Technical Workforce, emphasizes the need for greater investment in community college technical training. The second, on The State of U.S. Science and Engineering, paints a worrisome picture of the position of the United States relative to its international competitors.

Our world is changing rapidly, and public higher education must adapt and engage as active and honest participants in renegotiating the societal compact.  Any compact reification begins with identifying the irreducible core – the essential values that define public research universities. Quite clearly, these are unfettered discovery (original scholarship and research), transference (student education and training) and fulfillment (societal engagement and services). Put another way, public research universities create new knowledge, transfer insights and ideas, and deliver solutions to societal problems. 

How universities do those things and in what measure are the subject of debate and negotiation. After all, the practices of a modern public research university span less than a single human lifetime. Some of the options will be new, and some will undoubtedly be philosophically challenging. (Remember that many feared the G.I. Bill would destroy U.S. higher education by bringing battle hardened veterans into academe.)

While protecting the irreducible core – the defining verities of academia – I believe we must be more organizationally nimble and flexible, more financially accountable and economically savvy, more societally engaged and responsive, more collaborative and transdisciplinary, and more team oriented. 

We face deep societal challenges – poverty, inequality, injustice, health and wellness, environmental sustainability, and economic uncertainty – and it is tempting to embrace a psychology of diminished expectations. But we also have unprecedented opportunities to unleash the creativity and talent of our citizens.  A university frees successive generations of human minds to realize their potential. We must not waiver in our commitment to the future of our students and our society.

Educational Futures: Beyond Degrees

The intellectual dichotomy between lifelong knowledge and near term skills is a canard, patently and demonstrably false, but the economic and social dilemma is very real. Our students arrive with manifestly different constraints and needs, and we must meet each of them where they are and respond accordingly. Put another way, one educational model and approach does not fit all.

I believe we must move beyond undergraduate degree completion as the sole, simplistic, and arbitrary metric of educational success. Degrees matter, but all education is valuable. It is neither a simple, linear process with a single terminus nor is it synonymous with an immediate continuation beyond secondary school. Degrees matter, but only insofar as they are talismans – social currency and indicators of our true objective, which is bettering the lives of our students.

If a student completes a single course and comes away with a deeper perspective on our world, we have added value to their life.  If another completes a certificate, gains a demonstrated competence, and achieves meaningful new employment, we have changed their economic circumstances for the better.  If we have informed and enlightened a community group, we have enriched our society, even if it were just a weekend seminar and discussion.

I believe we in academia must step back, and live up to our intellectual principals and ideals, remembering that no matter how high the academic ivory tower, its foundation and that of all public higher education, rest on a repeatedly renegotiated societal compact. The history of U.S. higher education is one of punctuated equilibria, with long periods of stability separated by brief interregna of extraordinary change, each coincident with shifting societal norms and expectations for broader access.

We must be more flexible in responding to the heterogeneity of student expectations and needs, while concurrently disintermediating knowledge delivery, certification of completion, and socialization across time and space. (See Pinball, War Games, and Universities.) I believe this means offering a smorgasbord of educational delivery modalities, content packages, and success models, each tailored to differing needs and constraints:

• Traditional degrees. The traditional undergraduate degree is the sine qua non of higher education, tested and proven, but adapting and adaptable to a rapidly changing world, preparing students for careers that do not yet exist, and educating them as critical thinkers and thoughtful communicators steeped in knowledge and wisdom.

• Stackable certificates. Not all students learn the same way, nor do they have similar motivations and objectives. Certificates, both credit and non-credit, organize a coherent body of knowledge with a demonstrable applicability and outcome, ranging from perspective on one of the liberal arts to concrete technical skills. If organized wisely, a combination of credit-bearing certificates can lead to a degree, though the certificates need not be completed sequentially, and they may be delivered either online or via traditional classroom modalities.

• Credit, non-credit, and convertible credit. The goal of educational delivery is the transfer of knowledge and recognized certification of that knowledge. Traditional credit with a transcript grade, earned on completion of an academic course, is the internationally recognized metric of accomplishment. It need not be and increasingly is not the only one. What matters is trusted validation of knowledge and competence. Non-credit certificates and badges are rising in importance as alternative validations.  Today, non-credit programs are often viewed as ancillary, second class activities on most campus; this must change. More importantly, students who acquire skills via non-credit mechanisms and later decide to pursue certificates or degrees may want to convert those accomplishments into academic credit.  We need more flexible mechanisms to establish knowledge and recognize that knowledge as credit.

• Competency certification. Not all knowledge is acquired in the virtual or physical classroom, nor is course completion fully synonymous with demonstrated competence. Life and work are themselves valued teachers. There are a variety of ways to prove and accept competence in lieu of course credit, ranging from academic and professional service testing through probationary credit to work experience

• Mixed online and placed-based education. Synchronous cohort learning on academic campuses will remain part of the educational ecosystem, both for student socialization and access to specific facilities and instrumentation, but it will be complemented by and in some cases replaced by online content delivery that is asynchronous from academic calendars. Online, asynchronous content delivery both allows students to participate based on personal schedules and also allows them to begin classes when the need arises. (See Online Higher Education for some lessons from the history of technology mediated education.)

• Lifelong/lifewide and just-in-time education. The time has long past when the knowledge and skills acquired before age twenty-five could serve one for a lifetime. Today’s worker can expect technological and economic shifts to render many of their skills obsolete every few years. The persistent skills are reasoning and communication, coupled with a desire to learn and relearn throughout life. We must move from a model of “education then life” to lifelong and just-in-time education that delivers new knowledge and skills as needed, via a variety of modalities and mechanisms, recognizing that many will be unable study in situ on an academic campus. For a few, this education will result in new degrees, but for most it will be by securing new credentials, badges, and certificates.

Some might say many of these educational roles and responsibilities are the proper function of community colleges and comprehensive universities.  That is true, in part.  Higher education is a system, with differentiated and overlapping, but complementary roles for community and technical colleges, comprehensive universities, and public research universities. 

However, in a rapidly changing world, public research universities are the critical incubators of intellectual discovery and translation, with national and international stature and partnerships.  They also attract a faculty and student talent base in part distinct from all others. As such, they bear unique responsibility as educational thought leaders and innovators, with the resources and capability to conduct educational experiments at scale. They are also charged with ensuring the economic competitiveness of our citizens and industry in a global knowledge economy.

University of Utah Analysis and Actions

As a flagship public research university and a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the University of Utah is a leader in basic research, knowledge creation, and scholarship.  It is also unwaveringly committed to educational access, broad-based liberal arts education, workforce skills training, and economic development.  

A University of Utah Student Success and Educational Futures Taskforce, composed of seventy five students, faculty, and staff members, assessed the current state and future needs of higher education in Utah, based on a charge to consider our changing world and the needs of Utah’s citizens.  Composed of six working groups – facilities and infrastructure; financial analysis; enrollment management, marketing and communications; student success and services; educational delivery and partnerships; and graduate student success – the taskforce outlined a series of recommendations intended to reduce student costs, expand educational access, and deliver targeted, just-in-time training. Common themes from the recommendations include:

• Diversifying pathways to student success by developing alternative credentialing options, improved pathways for transfer students, expanding undergraduate student experience roadmaps, improving support for graduate students and programs, and developing strategic partnerships with employers.
• Expanding online offerings and, where appropriate, using technology to increase educational accessibility, affordability, and inclusiveness.
• Utilizing the University’s physical infrastructure to its fullest by increasing student and mixed-use housing, improving transportation options, and optimizing the allocation of classrooms and teaching facilities.
• Ensuring students have a sense of belonging through individualized attention and support, deeply engaged learning experiences, a robust and inclusive campus community, on-campus career opportunities, and coordinated health and wellness programs.
• Continually revising and adapting initiatives to ensure consistency with the University’s core values: student success and engagement, research and teaching excellence, diversity, sustainability, global vision and strategy, community, and leadership.

In response to the taskforce recommendations, the University is launching several initiatives, including:

• For Utah The For Utah Scholarship creates a fully funded path to a University of Utah degree by covering four years of tuition and fees for Pell Grant-eligible Utah residents. As a result, the fall 2020 entering class was the most diverse in the University’s history, though we still have far to go to ensure broad access.

• Inexpensive all online degree completion. The University of Utah offers lower cost tuition for students taking all classes online as part of a qualifying online undergraduate degree program. This special all-online tuition rate help students who have started college finish their degrees and graduate, even if they cannot return to the campus. (Sadly, we were forced to temporarily defer this program during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

• Expanded credit and non-credit certificates. The University is rapidly expanding its suite of both non-credit and for credit certificates, targeting domains with where there are critical job shortages across Utah. Examples include software development, data science, and entrepreneurship.

• Integrating continuing education and online learning. Reflecting the continuum of learning objectives and the need for fluid transition between non-credit and for credit learning processes, this integration is enabling coordinated management of all aspects of non-traditional education, under the supervision of an Assistant Vice President/Dean.

• Predictive intervention and support. The best time to help students is before they fail, allowing time for recovery from early academic missteps. While protecting and respecting privacy, data can support powerful analytic and predictive interventions, allowing advisors and instructors to work with students while there is still time to recover, both in individual courses and in certificates and majors. This will rely on a combination of commercial software (e.g., Civitas) and local software and data.

• Storefront and electronic services. A large and growing fraction of students are “non-traditional” – they have lives, jobs, and families outside academe, and many lack the flexibility to visit academic support offices during normal business officers. Moreover, the born digital generation expects anywhere, anytime access.  The University of Utah plans to offer advising and consulting services at multiple sites.

• Skill and aptitude assessment. Accurate assessment of student knowledge and skills, via leading edge measurement tools can help students understand their aptitudes and preparations for study emphases and reduce the time needed to complete degrees and certificates by validating extant competencies. The University seeks to adopt and adapt assessment tools that can maximize student success.

• Enhanced student support. A sense of community and belonging is key to student success, enabling students persevere in the face the inevitable challenges students face.  Among many other programs, the University of Utah has created Student Ambassadors who share their experiences with prospective students and parents, Student Success Advocates who serve as peer mentors and advisors, Living Learning and Theme Communities where students share common courses and deeply engaged learning experiences that offer practical and collaborative opportunities to engage communities and the world.

• Faculty mentoring and inclusion. Expanded faculty onboarding and training are essential to preparing new faculty and new administrators to respond effectively to shifting student needs.  These services include (a) training search committees in best practices for recruiting and hiring a diverse faculty, (b) sharing best practices for student mentoring and advising, (c) and support and training for new faculty and new administrators in culture and processes – leadership, education, research and scholarship, and service.

• Corporate and business partnerships. Regularly upgrading the skills and degrees of employees is in the best interests of employers, as it provides the insights, training, and perspectives that allows employees to grow and adapt to changing business circumstances. The University seeks to partner with Utah and national companies on certificate and degree programs for employee and corporate benefit.

Coda

In the Christian tradition, the New Testament (Acts 16:9-10) says a vision appeared to the Apostle Paul  in the night, “A man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them.”

The world gospel is an Old English translation of the original Greek word, εὐαγγέλιον, meaning “good news.” The preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge are defining attributes of our civilization, and our educational system is an embodiment of the ever-expanding 21^st century “good news.” Education transforms lives, lifts generations out of poverty, nurtures our democracy, fuels innovation, and creates our future.

Our citizens are pleading; we must come help them, without judgment and in partnership. All education, regardless of scale or scope, is valuable. There is no dichotomy between knowledge and skills, but the guilt of our dilemma and our failure to act are very real.

My Balm in Gilead

COVID-19 has disrupted our lives in so many ways – commerce and trade, personal livelihoods and economic vitality, family and social interactions, health and wellness (obviously), mobility and travel, and education, to name just a few. This global pandemic has also exposed deep social inequities in new ways, convolved with political disarray and often dysfunctional government processes.  (See On the Etiology of Heroes for a few thoughts on a way forward that calls on our best to address the challenges before us.)

Meanwhile, cue theme music over a video montage of transformed academia – grassy quadrangles devoid of human activity, sparsely populated classrooms denuded of desks, and research laboratories accessible only by those in personal protective equipment (PPE).  As the music fades, the final cut shows me sitting in my home office, dressed in stereotypical Zoom attire – a business shirt and tie, visible on camera, complemented by off-camera sweatpants and slippers.

In this morality play, my character is a balding, myopic, astigmatic university provost navigating the ship of academe through the iceberg filled waters of these uncertain times, seeking to ensure fair and equal access, facilitate student academic success, promote faculty research and scholarship productivity, and safeguard staff wellness. It’s not an easy thing, and I have lain awake many nights, agonizing over decisions and their unexpected consequences.

About that balding thing; it’s neither an appellation nor a sobriquet, simply an attribute. A few years ago, I sent a saliva sample to 23andMe, curious what I might learn from my SNPs and the company’s database of expressed traits. Like Captain Renault, I was shocked, shocked, I say, when the report showed there was some ever so slightly elevated probability that my genetic profile might be consistent with male pattern baldness.  LOL, who knew?  It’s a cogent warning to consider carefully insights a modern GWAS can sometimes reveal. But I digress, lest I also pontificate on my childhood surprise, when glasses first let me see leaves on trees, rather than just a green blur atop a gray one.  Now back to the scene of the balding provost …

In my provost role, I regularly counsel faculty, staff, and students that successfully navigating this pandemic requires constant vigilance, determined collaboration, committed partnerships, and mutual support. A yearlong pandemic is an emotional and logistical marathon, not a sprint, and in the midst of unremitting stress, each of us must allocate some time and space to focus on our individual mental health and engage in activities that bring happiness and serenity.  In the spirit of “physician, heal thyself” where have I sought my own balm in Gilead?

So Many Books, So Little Time

In differing times and places, I have, unlike Poe, found books to provide a surcease for sorrow. Books can teleport one into the mind of another’s memories and knowledge (non-fiction) or imagination and fancy (fiction). That a string of stylized symbols can record the thoughts of another, sometimes long dead, whose insights and ideas reach across time and space to illuminate and inspire, is itself an extraordinary thing, one that still fills me with unabashed wonder.

Arguably among humanity’s greatest inventions, these things we call language and writing are perhaps rivaled only by fire, agriculture, and science in their importance. In their embodiment via books and libraries, ideas and knowledge accumulate and set ready for transmission and uptake by successive generations of willing and malleable minds.

It’s no surprise then, that books were one of my first and most joyous childhood discoveries, a precursor to that other abiding love, science. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) With a good book, I could, then and now, sit transfixed for six, twelve, or even eighteen hours, oblivious to my surroundings, transported into worlds unknown and challenged by ideas beyond the reach of my experience and current understanding, each page crackling with enlightenment.

Emboldened, seeking meaning in an oft-confusing world, I sometimes try my own, feeble hand at the mystic art of writing, finding comfort and refuge in the feel of words and their juxtaposition to ruminate and communicate ideas. (Yes, I was a geeky kid who read dictionaries for pleasure, savoring both the etymology and the denotation. No surprise – myopia and astigmatism came early; baldness reared its sunburned head somewhat later.)

In a world of eight second sound bites and enervating ad hominem social media attacks, when Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame seems like the imprimatur of immortality, meditative reflection and long-form written discourse now seem like lost arts. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication and Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)

At its best, writing is a contemplative Zen state where words and phrases spring unbidden from the recesses of your mind, bound by a set of unspoken rules and imagined mores and shaped by a lifetime of intellectual and emotional milieu. Part puppeteer, part curious observer, you are a transcriber of events in real and imagined worlds seen only through the uncertain lens of your mind. It is an exhilarating and sometimes frustrating art, at its best, informed by experience, wisdom, and passions. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)

Some of my writing samples are archived on this website (www.hpcdan.org), and some others are shared only with select friends. You now hold one such weak musing in your digital hands. Those writers with the greatest gifts can touch our naked souls, but none of us can ever truly master the form. I know I never will, though I continue to try, and perhaps that is, in the end, enough. 

Pure Thought Stuff

Of late, I have returned to one of my other teenaged and lasting loves, the art of software.  (See A Feeling for the Code.)  As in any creative medium, there are hacks, artisans, and artists of the highest gift. Hence, I use the word art with thoughtful intent, for well-written software has an austere and ethereal beauty all its own, and like writing, it can bring joys unknown to all but the most committed and talented acolytes.

In his wonderful book, The Mythical Man Month, my friend and former colleague, Fred Brooks, writes elegantly of the joy of software and why it is so enthralling:

The Programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. ... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

When fully immersed in the code, you hold in your mind an abstract world of your own creation, defined by the rules of logic, but mutable and capable of evolving in complex and unexpected ways, just as an author’s fully formed characters can take on lives of their own, sometimes surprising even their creator. In these moments, pure thought-stuff becomes incarnate and nested causal chains glisten with beauty like raindrops on a spring flower.

Reconciling the perfect world as imagined and the inevitably flawed creation then becomes an exhilarating and encompassing quest. Why did this happen?  How can that be true?  Inspired and chagrined by unexpected behaviors and sometimes subtle clues, the creator becomes detective, seeking insights and remediations that return the code to a state of grace.  The magic of myth and legend, indeed.

It can take hours to load one’s working memory with such a virtual world of software, and doing so necessarily pushes all other concerns from one’s mind. As Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix, you must “free your mind” from all other thoughts, perspectives, and assumptions and follow the code. During that oneness, there are no other actors, no other concerns, and one can abide in the bliss of total immersion.  It is intellectual joy that unexpectedly changed our world. (See Reluctant Revolutionaries, the Trolley Paradox, and Ender’s Game.)

Such creativity and full cognitive loading brooks no exceptions and tolerates no distractions.  It can be broken by such mundane events as an unexpected telephone call, a colleague’s doorway interrogative, or an unwelcomed text message. In that momentary interruption, connections can disappear, insights can fade, and perspectives can be lost. That too is a fall from grace. (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany.)

In the past few months, I have sought solace in the beauty and logic of such software, incarnated as the end-to-end development of a wireless environmental sensor network. As a potential extension to the SAGE research project of which I am a part, it offers a path to citizen science empowerment and real-time response to environmental change. The terms of art – ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Jetson, JSON, MQTT, InfluxDB, Grafana, LoRaWAN, TensorFlow – matter only to those in the discipline.  For me, the beauty and the cognitive load can, for just a few hours of the nights and weekends, free my mind, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, that too brings me peace.

Coda

Our culture and our future rest on mutual respect, sharing insights, ideas, and knowledge, and the empowerment of human minds and their ingenuity.  In the crucible of the pandemic, we must support and draw strength from one another. As I have noted before, these simple things matter most of all. (See The Simple Things Matter, Most of All Now.) Ultimately, that is humanity’s sustainable balm in Gilead.

Geek Gifts for the Holidays

The holiday season is here, with lights and festive celebrations of all kinds. Normally, I am loathe to offer holiday product endorsements, perhaps because, like you, I’ve been jaded by too many marketing campaigns and late night infomercials. (See The Ghosts of Holiday Shopping: Past, Present and Future.) Other than filing my taxes on time, acting before midnight tonight has never changed my life.  However, in a spirit of beneficence, I do make one exception to aid two connected, but suffering groups. I speak of course of geeks and their gift giving friends and family.

Let’s be honest; it’s hard to buy for geeks. Few would know that a signed copy of The Art of Computer Programming is a rare and precious thing, perhaps exceeded in value only by a Knuth reward check.  A copy of a Big Bang Theory DVD or a word of the day calendar just isn’t the same, though it helps if it is Klingon. 

So what’s a friend or family member to do when your geek smiles wanly and says thank you – for the socks? Fear not; even though the holidays are here, it’s not too late to trade those socks for a gift that will bring a delighted grin to your geek’s face, whatever their age.

Turing Tumble: Logic Is Child’s Play

Maybe you have a young geek, one interested in all things science related, and computing in particular. They may be too young for “the talk,” where you explain the dangers of unprotected ports, the subtleties of functors and futures, or the central dogma of the Church-Turing thesis, but they are still old enough to avoid specious logic, develop algorithms, and create working code.  (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)

Turing Tumble ($69.95, ages 8+) is a game where players can build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles.  In the spirit of LEGO-powered Turing machines, Turing Tumble exposes the logic of computers in a tangible way.  Developed by University of Minnesota professor and backed by a Kickstarter campaign, Turing Tumble is the real deal, combining marbles, levers, gears, and bits to teach logic and algorithms in an accessible way.  Just don’t let the adults play with it, or your child geek may never get it back.  And yes, I’m playing with mine over the holidays.

AWS DeepRacer: Start Your Engines

If you have an adult geek, particularly one who writes code for a living, this is the gift for you. AWS DeepRacer is a bit pricey at $399, but it’s the only gift your adult geek will want or need. AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18^th scale model car and Amazon Web Services (AWS) reinforcement learning toolkit to train your car for competition in either a real or a virtual racing league.

The DeepRacer can be also be driven manually via a joystick, and with an Intel Atom processor, HDMI port, and Ubuntu Linux, it can double as a serviceable, albeit somewhat slow, desktop computer. (Pro tip: Your GPU-accelerated Jetson Nano ($89 from Nvidia) is a great offline reinforcement learning training tool.)

If your geek is throwing around words and phrases like TensorFlow and generative adversarial network, while railing about deep fakes and social responsibility, relax.  Even if you think Sagemaker is the nom de plume of the family matriarch and her secret stuffing recipe, your geek knows that a reward function is more than a second helping of gravy and stuffing.  I will be racing mine in the living room tomorrow.

PDP-11 Emulator: When Nostalgia Reigns

If your geek’s native language is FORTRAN and they speak wistfully of the days when toggling absolute binary into the computer front panel was a rite of passage, you have an aging geek. They are likely to grow pensive when someone mentions the Great Editor War, modality, and meta keys. Viva Emacs; viva vi; those were heady and difficult days, when friends were forced to choose sides, and flames filled the nascent Internet. (See You Might Be a Computing Old Timer If …)

The PIDP-11 ($250) is a Raspberry Pi emulation of the iconic PDP-11/70, complete with hardware front panel lights and switches. If you want to impress your geek friends, comment on the orthogonality and beauty of the PDP-11 instruction set and smile knowingly. Even better, tell them the simh software supports all the old PDP-11 operating systems your geek knew and loved – RT-11, RSTS/E (my favorite), and UNIX V5, V6, and V7.

With the PIDP-11, you can toggle in code, or boot your operating system of choice, play with all the old system software tools, and even write or run old code. TECO lives!  (Warning: Some soldering is required to assemble the front panel, or you can skip the kit and do everything in software, albeit without that heady joy of blinking lights and toggle switches.)  Mine is on order.

Save the Detritus

Now it is possible you live in one of those increasingly rare places where the gray fog of nothingness lurks in the distance and same day or overnight package delivery is not possible. However, you still have the raw materials in your possession needed to satiate the emotional and intellectual yearnings of a nascent Time Lord, Dungeons and Dragons role player, Skywalker acolyte, or wannabe Gandalf.

Wired’s 2011 review of the All Time Best Toy Ideas ($0) exposes the truth: the detritus of your gift wrapping, along with some yard debris, holds the key to happiness.  Stick (Glamdring), box (TARDIS), string, cardboard tube (lightsaber), and dirt, these are the enduring toys for geeks and the rest of you, though the purist might insist on the addition of rock, hole, and mud puddle.

I’d explain more, but a launch window has been posted for my LEGO Saturn V.  I need to finish the LEGO launch gantry before the Mobile Launcher Platform can roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39A. If you were a geek you would understand why that is important.

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.

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.

The Magic behind the Curtain: Hardware and Software

The Wizard of Oz is a beloved and widely watched movie that brought us Technicolor, several memorable songs, and lasting cultural memes – “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” “There’s no place like home,” and “Somewhere over the rainbow.” In the movie, Dorothy’s dog, Toto, pulls aside the curtain, revealing the great and mighty Wizard as a mere mortal projecting the trappings of power through indirection and abstraction.  Attempting to continue the charade, Oz proclaims, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Deception once revealed, however well intentioned, is mere artifice.  Accordingly, magicians guard the secrets of their tricks assiduously. After all, it is how they earn a living. More importantly, a trick’s mystique makes it both alluring and intriguing. The legerdemain in a coin’s disappearance may still bring a smile to one’s face, but familiarity with the French drop lessens its mystery.

In my experience, a distinguishing feature of researchers and scholars is their interest in not just in the “trick,” but how the trick is created and performed. These are the people peering around the corner, dissecting the art and engineering beneath each Disney World^TM theme park ride

Hence, some seek the truth, whereas others treasure illusion and, sometimes, their own self-deception. As Morpheus says in The Matrix, “You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Segue alert! Every teacher wants his or her students to take the metaphorical red pill and explore the rabbit hole. It is about challenging beliefs, perspectives, and illusions with new ideas and approaches.  I have reflected on this dichotomy since my very first teaching experience, when I looked back at aspiring young students with both anticipation and trepidation.

As a teacher, there is no greater joy than seeing understanding in the eyes of students, when seeming magic is at last replaced by holistic insight. In short, it is about illumination and understanding, pulling back the curtain on apparent magic to reveal an unbroken chain of insights.

Architectural Magic

As a computer and computational scientist, I long ago realized that introductory computer architecture is the transformative place where computing prestidigitation becomes intellectual engineering. It is where varied computing insights unite in the big reveal – how an idea and the abstraction of an algorithm embodied in code becomes an instantiation in logic, hardware, and device physics.

Make no mistake, the rabbit hole runs unbroken from quantum mechanics through undecidability, the Church-Turing thesis and Turing machines to computability theory and formal language theory (Chomsky hierarchy). It touches the very nature of what it means to think.

First, let’s step back and remember how the intellectual puzzle pieces form the big reveal.

By the time most undergraduate students study basic computer architecture, they have often received an intellectual dose of electricity and magnetism (E&M), perhaps via the latest edition of the same Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick (and now Walker) that I studied as an undergraduate over forty years ago. Conductance, capacitance, inductance, wave/particle duality, and quantum tunneling; it is all there. (I so treasured the joy of my E&M course that I have saved my lecture notes and worked problem sets across multiple moves and several decades.)

An introductory class in device physics, transistors, and digital logic often follows E&M. There, the rudiments of semiconductor devices and VLSI design include field effect transistors (FET) (See gate, source, and drain), MOSFET NAND gates, and flip-flops. From there, it is just a hop, skip, and jump to circuit design and logic minimization. At this point, students have architectural Lego^TM blocks and some vague notion these are intellectually sufficient, but microprocessor architecture remains as aspirational and unattainable as a Lego Empire State Building.

Meanwhile, most students have also been learning new programming language(s), efficient algorithms (quicksort), and associated data structures (balanced binary trees). Years ago, the programming languages of choice would have been C or FORTRAN. (I first learned FORTRAN in the 1970s, using WATFIV; see A Feeling for the Code). Today, most introductory computing courses teach Python, with its large sets of libraries, tools, and IDEs.

What really happens when one writes a loop or invokes a procedure? Is it just an incantation, an intellectual sacrifice offered to the machine? Therein lies the reification magic of compilers, which translate code in a high-level language such as C or FORTRAN into equivalent sequences of machine instructions. (The nuance of interpreted languages such as Python is a topic for another day.)

I have found manually translating a simple piece of code (e.g., a loop that sums a set of numbers) into a sequence of assembly language instructions small enough to fit on a single piece of paper is by far the best pedagogical technique. Those symbolic assembly language instructions then map directly and intuitively to individual machine language instructions, each defining a specific hardware behavior (add, read, write, branch), but whose collective describe the intent of the high-level language code.

Trust me; we are now nearing the French drop, but there is nothing up my sleeve …

Computer architecture is where code meets hardware, and the seemingly disparate Lego pieces become a dazzling whole. (It is not turtles all the way down.) Constructed using only those elementary logic gates (aka Lego blocks), the conceptual execution of machine instructions for a simple, non-pipelined stored program computer (superscalar, out-of-order, and parallel are topics for another day) can be traced easily using only pencil and paper. (Computer Organization and Design by my friends Dave Patterson and John Hennessy is as legendary in introductory computer architecture as Halliday and Resnick in physics.)

Simple, yet elegant, these designs embody the core ideas of the von Neumann architecture and its fetch-decode-execute instruction cycle. To test their designs, many a budding computer architect has also trekked to Radio Shack (RIP) or Fry’s (one stop shopping for potato and DRAM chips), or let their fingers do the walking online, for parts to breadboard simple computer components. The more ambitious and adventuresome also stuffed circuit boards and sported solder burns as a point of pride.

The great reveal, the denouement is now at hand. From electrons through transistors and gates to architecture, and from algorithms and code to machine instructions on architecture, it all comes together.  It is all there, the magic of ideas – the abstraction that is code – is now manifest in architecture, hardware, and physics. That is the “Aha!” moment, when students truly appreciate the intellectual construction, like Chartes, that both dazzles and inspires. The true wonder is that one can explain it all on a single whiteboard!

Deep and Open Questions: Not All Is Yet Revealed

The amazing construction that is modern computing rests on many scientific and engineering insights, a few of which are now feeling the strain of their age. The von Neumann model, for all of its elegance and simplicity, increasingly limits future innovation (See Nothing Lasts Forever), and the future of semiconductor technology – 7 nanometers and below – is economically and technologically uncertain. The Landauer principle and low energy (operations/joule) or even reversible computing beckon.  Quantum computing labors in an uncertain aborning, brain-inspired neuromorphic computing is in its infancy, and DNA-based storage and computing are nascent.

Perhaps, the most important intellectual question of all, one deeply related to the nature of computational complexity and the partial recursive functions lies open. Does P=NP? (i.e., is the class of problems where verifying a solution requires non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) the same as the class of problems where computing the solution requires polynomial time (P))? Put another way, if the solution to a problem can be verified in polynomial time, can it also always be found in polynomial time? Most think not, but resolving the question has bedeviled the some of the best mathematical minds of the last century. (If you think you have a proof, sketch it in the margin and claim mathematical immortality.)

Make no mistake, the rabbit hole goes deep, connecting two of the greatest intellectual edifices of the last hundred years – decidability, computability, and complexity united with quantum mechanics and the standard model – via algorithms, software, and computer architecture. The rabbit hole reaches to the very foundational question of what it means to think and share information. There is undeniable magic inside, and that magic continues to transform our perceptions and our world.

Given a choice, always follow the rabbit hole. Scrutinize the man behind the curtain. Seek the big reveal. See the whole whiteboard. Therein lies magic.

As Far as the Eye Can See

In 2016, while Vice President for Research and Economic Development (OVPR&ED) at the University of Iowa, I invited faculty from across the university campus to author essays, sharing what attracted them to their field, why they had devoted careers to exploring big questions, and what research and scholarship have contributed to the world. The indefatigable Stephen Pradarelli, communications director in the Iowa OVPR&ED, skillfully edited the faculty contributions. Last week, I was privileged to be back in Iowa City for the unveiling of the resulting book.  Stephen and I co-wrote the introduction, an abbreviated version of which I have reproduced below.

Few scientists in the history of the University of Iowa embody the American spirit of discovery and innovation as vividly as the late James Van Allen. Born on a small farm near Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Van Allen was fascinated by mechanical and electrical devices, and he was an avid reader of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. In the 1990 issue of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Van Allen wrote that he loved to tinker as a child, building elementary electrical motors, crystal radios, and, once, to his mother’s horror, a Tesla coil that discharged foot-long electrical ribbons and “caused my hair to stand on end.”

That tinkering led, in time, to Van Allen making some of the most important 20^th century discoveries in space science while a researcher at the University of Iowa. A device he designed and helped build for Explorer I—America’s first satellite—enabled him to detect a zone of energetic charge particles that originated from the solar wind and were held around Earth by its magnetic field. The finding of what was later dubbed the Van Allen Radiation Belts landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1959, when the United States badly needed a PR boost after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched Sputnik. It also led to the establishment of a new research domain, magnetospherical physics, and demonstrated that brilliant scholarship takes place in big cities and small, coastal Ivy League institutions and Midwest public universities. 

In the same way that the 31-pound Explorer I needed a rocket to reach space, researchers—scientists and scholars—depend on financial and public support to seek answers to the universe’s most intriguing questions and to explore and elucidate the human condition. With public and political backing, universities have blazed a path of discoveries over the past fifty years that have reshaped the world, translated basic research and scholarship into new cancer treatments and smartphones, life-changing public health policies and social science insights.

The universal human drive of curiosity—the thirst not just for information, but for deep understanding—has survived all manner of challenges over the centuries. That is certainly true at the University of Iowa, whose medical research, writing programs, and space exploration have been providing fresh insights into the nature of the universe and the human experience since the school’s founding in 1847, just 59 days after the state of Iowa was admitted to the Union.

This book highlights some of the current research and scholarship at the University of Iowa, not just from an academic perspective, but from a human one. We asked the contributors to write about their work in language accessible to a general audience, to help readers understand why such work is important to the public, and to share what attracted them to their chosen fields of study. Research is about the systematic exploration of the unknown. Of course, not every line of inquiry leads to a great breakthrough; in fact, there is value in having one’s expectations confounded. As James Van Allen has said about science, “pure investigation has enormous benefit. I can't tell you what this might be good for, but learning about nature is important. And lovely things turn up.”

My wish is that this collection of essays builds understanding about the value of academic inquiry and inspires hope for the future. If nothing else, you should take away a sense of the passion, dedication, and vision University of Iowa’s researchers and scholars bring to work each day.

Happily, for those of us who parlayed youthful curiosity about the world into a lifelong profession, there is no end of mysteries to solve. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead, author and longtime Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty member Marilynne Robinson wrote, “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” Indeed.

To solve some of the most challenging mysteries and to better comprehend and celebrate what it means to be human—understand how the world works, explore how and why we respond to it in the ways we do, and express the fruit of those inquiries in bold and creative ways—we need public trust, support and vision for the role of public research universities like ours.

May this book help persuade you to join us on this journey of discovery.

A Feeling for the Code

Each individual’s professional path from past to present is defined by an oft-unexpected and uncertain trajectory.  As the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard once remarked, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." For some, the path is clear and straightforward – a simple gradient ascent, or more sadly, descent. Alas, life, like most multivariate functions, is rarely globally convex. Rather, it is filled with a seemingly random distribution of local minima, each of which can become an unwitting trap, and time rarely permits an exhaustive and deterministic global optimization. Instead, one must be satisfied with limited stochastic optimization. As best, life is a bounded simulated annealing, making each decision potentially transformative. (See One Life to Live.)

Canto One: Geek in a Small Town

Why might I ramble inanely about the dubious duality of life and optimization theory? Perhaps because my life path and its objective function were changed by a single experience.  As Peter Medawar wrote in his delightful book, Advice to a Young Scientist, “I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.” From an early age, I too felt that calling – my childhood dream was to be a scientist, and by my teenage years, more specifically, to be a physicist.

In my naiveté, I knew mathematics was the language of physics, but my small high school’s mathematics curriculum ended with plane geometry. Haltingly, with borrowed library books, I began teaching myself trigonometry and elementary differential calculus. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) By backing one of my high school classmates into the water fountain while expounding excitedly about limits, derivatives, and the slopes of tangent lines, I finally and irretrievably branded myself the left-handed, myopic geek I truly was, a seemingly singleton set in a small town.

Canto Two: Finding Others

Just after this, I was thrilled to spend a summer at the University of Arkansas in a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) program. As a term of art, STEM gained currency much later; I simply basked in the opportunity to do something amazing – stretch my talent and expand my limited knowledge with a group of likeminded physics students.

Ensconced in Fayetteville, I repeated the double slit experiment, which left me pondering wave-particle duality and the uncertain nature of reality. More importantly, in that small academic community nestled in the Ozark mountains, I met people who shared an academic passion to know and to discover. For the first time, I did not feel alone, and for that, I will be forever grateful.

During that summer, I also received a brief introduction to digital logic and a crash course in FORTRAN IV. Less powerful than today’s smartphones, computers were then multimillion-dollar behemoths, housed in secure facilities, their use limited to a select few. Now instructed in obscure, digital incantations, I was now privileged to offer subservience to the great machine. In the 1970s, this was heady stuff for a young boy from the backwoods.

Somewhat coincidentally, I was soon to read The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster’s chilling meditation on technological dependence, However. I was in no way sufficiently prescient to imagine our future dependence on these computing machines.  Excuse me; Alexa, set the temperature to 68 degrees. Siri, where is the nearest grocery store? Cortana, just who was E. M. Forster?  However, I digress, distracted by our digital surroundings.

Canto Three: Computing Life

At the time, the University of Arkansas had an IBM 360/50 system, and spira mirabilis, a Calcomp pen plotter that could generate graphs of computational outputs. Therein lies the second part of my transformative life experience.  Armed with rudimentary FORTRAN knowledge and a paperback copy of Waterloo’s WATFIV manual, I hastened to an IBM 029 cardpunch to write my first program. Of course, it did not initially work as expected, which then introduced me to the fine art of debugging, further honed when I foolishly attempted to write a chess program.

With ambition that exceeded my skills, that first program brought my simple mathematics to life in a wondrous way. It also forced me to think more deeply, as I built a mental model of its bifurcating execution paths. (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany.)  I was rewarded when the static equations on my textbook pages took life; they danced and moved, revealing their secrets in rows of printed numbers and simple line plots. Deus ex machina!

Later, I learned of universal Turing machines, computability theory, and the Entscheidungsproblem, but with that first program, I knew immediately and instinctively that well-written code had an ethereal elegance and a haunting subtlety, and that breathtaking complexity – and beguiling beauty – could emerge from its simple rules and mathematical incantations. (Is there a computer scientist anywhere who has not been enthralled by Conway’s Game of Life and its cellular automata, fully Turing complete?)

Without doubt, I had found the calling of a lifetime, all that and more in a feeling for the code – the transfiguration of hypotheticals, the reification of concepts, and the instantiation of the imagination – code as both science and art.

Since then, I have marveled at intellectual haiku, brief code sketches that amused and illuminated. I have shuddered at abominable monstrosities, code assembled and then brutally modified by teams over decades, intellectual Frankensteins unleashed to sow destruction.  I have seen masterpieces of minimalist, yet surpassing beauty, where form inexorably illuminated function, crafted by artists of the first order. It is all there in the code.

Throughout, I have been privileged to collaborate with scientists across diverse disciplines, from astronomy and quantum physics though genetics and gene expression to weather analysis and severe storms, all via the universal intellectual amplifier that is computing.  (See Intellectual Amplification via Computing.) Each time there is excitement; there is wonder; there is discovery; there is insight, as ideas come to life.

A thing of transfixing beauty, the code pirouettes gracefully, dancing in my mind, conjuring the possible; it always will.

Finally, about that geek thing?  I have always been at peace with it.  Professional optimization complete; global maximum found. 

Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind

N.B. This essay was motivated by a conversation with Alberta Comer, Dean and Director of the University of Utah's Marriott Library.

From my earliest days, I have sought to plumb its great depths, gleaning knowledge here, seeking meaning there, and always, encountering fellow explorers on their own intrepid quests. I speak, of course, of that extraordinary thing we so prosaically call the "public library." Beyond mere edifice, a library is the embodiment of an ancient idea – that knowledge and its representations can and must be protected, preserved, and transmitted to future generations, that access to knowledge is not limited to merely the rich or the powerful, but available to all who seek insight and understanding.

This simple notion of knowledge preservation and transmission is a noble idea for which many a person has given their very life to defend. The burning of the great Library at Alexandria is an enduring lesson on the dangers of cultural loss. More recently, Ray Bradbury's dystopian account of book burning in Fahrenheit 451 is itself a cautionary tale of censorship and the dangers that lurk when the free exchange of ideas is suppressed, something we would do well to remember today.

Books have always been my friends. From my earliest days, my parents read to me, as I nestled in their laps. Then, when I could read myself, they took me to the local library. In our case, it was a humble, small town, Arkansas library with just a few thousand books. Nevertheless, for me, it was a magical place, filled with extraordinary things.

My new University of Utah colleague, Alberta Comer, the Marriott librarian, tells a similar story of her rural Oklahoma childhood and the transformative power of the library. Alberta's parents drove her many miles to reach the traveling bookmobile, where she discovered a world unknown. Decades later, her eyes still glisten with the memory as she tells the tale. My own eyes moisten, as I too remember and understand.

As a young boy, I remember staggering up to the library's checkout counter, arms filled with all the books I could carry. Looking up at the library clerk, I struggled mightily to set the stack on a counter that was above my head. In turn, the clerk looked down at me, smiled, and asked in the adult voice every child instinctively knows, "Are you sure you can read all of these?"

The implication of the library clerk's interrogative being, of course, that I had selected more books than a young boy could possibly read in the allotted time. I thought, but dared not say, for even children sometimes understand the power and importance of deference and discretion, that I was limited by the length of my arms, not by my reading ability. Given the choice – and longer arms – I would have taken twice as many books. Instead, I simply smiled and said, "Yes, I can."

I knew what the librarian did not. I had already set myself on a book a day habit that was both highly addictive and in equal measure, emotionally and intellectually satisfying. I neither knew the pronunciation nor the etymology of the word autodidact, but I intuitively understood its meaning. I could not delay; fierce urgency drove my actions. I had to hurry – there were so many books, so many things worth knowing, and so, so little time.

In that small town's store of humankind's intellectual treasure, I found transformative ideas. In those books, I felt the warp and woof of history; I saw the power of scientific revolutions; and I marveled at the extraordinary experiences of individuals both living and dead. I read of people, places, and things that once were and are no more, of those that never were but could be, and of those that lived only in the fecund imagination of others.

Like an idea-driven junkie craving an endorphin high, I read omnivorously – books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. From aardvark to zyzzyva (I still haven't seen either one in the flesh), I read it all. I devoured popular books, some fluffy intellectual cotton candy, momentarily satisfying, but of little import. I read tomes that were as intellectually deep as they were physically weighty, laboring over each page. In that sense, Francis Bacon was right: "Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

I read books whose content was well beyond my years – poetry, literature, history, economics, and science – some of which I fully understood – and others whose full import exceeded the capacity of my limited life experience to appreciate. (Reading books on the My Lai massacre at age thirteen comes to mind.) Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison, Heinlein, and Browning, Chaucer, Doyle, Golding, Lewis, Shakespeare, I savored them and many others, an intellectual cornucopia that filled me with both knowledge and wonder.

In time, I came to recognize both the wisdom and the practical truth of Desiderius Erasmus' words, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." At times in my life, I have unhesitatingly made that explicit choice – spending my last dollar on education – then subsisting on canned vegetables until my job provided enough to purchase a more varied diet. One can live for weeks or months on a meager diet, but a life without books, without ideas, is unimaginable.

From impassioned and zealous acolyte, I finally came full circle, having belatedly learned the most important lesson of all – I truly know nothing – having realized that true knowledge begins with the humility of ignorance. We are all ignorant, each in different ways. Recognizing that, we approach new opportunities as humble supplicants, seeking knowledge and insights from any who would teach.

Make no mistake, books have power, for they contain both knowledge and ideas. Knowledge transforms society; ideas change minds. And it all happens in a library, for books are still the best way to upload new ideas into the wetware of willing minds.

As Plutarch noted, "A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." Libraries blaze, but not, I pray, with the burning of books. Rather, libraries set minds afire, and those minds illuminate the darkness that is our collective ignorance.

The future is always burning with possibilities; it begins with each enlightened mind. Books and libraries are the kindling.

Heading West: To the University of Utah

I am delighted to share some news. Effective July 1, I will be joining the University of Utah as its Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (SVPAA). You can read the announcement at this link (https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/new-senior-vice-president-for-academic-affairs/) or below.

I am both humbled and filled with anticipation.

Daniel A. Reed named Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah

Computational science scholar and former Microsoft executive brings unique mix of academic and economic development experience to the U's top academic position.

April 30, 2018 – Daniel A. Reed, Ph.D., has been named senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah. Reed, who currently serves on the faculty at the University of Iowa, will start on July 1.

"Dan is an exceptional addition to the university's leadership team and the thought leadership of our state," said university President Ruth V. Watkins. "He is a talented scholar and administrator, and the perfect fit in our efforts to become one of the country's premier public universities. I look forward to working closely with him in the years ahead."

At Iowa, Reed holds the university's computational science and bioinformatics chair and is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering and medicine. From 2012 through 2017, he served as the school's vice president for research and economic development. Reed is a former corporate vice president and technology policy leader at Microsoft, the founding director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

"Utah is a great public research university with a deep commitment to student success, breakthrough research and scholarship, effective economic development, and insightful partnerships that serve our society and health, and improve our world," said Reed. "It is a university with an even more extraordinary future. As they say on campus, it truly is Imagine U. I am excited to partner with its students, faculty and staff, and the citizens of Utah, as we build that future."

Reed's most recent scholarship has focused on challenges and opportunities related to cloud and edge computing in both academic and corporate research settings. A graduate of Missouri University of Science and Technology, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from Purdue University.

In addition to his work on the faculty at the University of Iowa, Reed currently chairs the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee and the steering committee for the National Science Foundation's Midwest Big Data Hub. He previously served on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. He also chaired the board of directors for the Computing Research Association, which represents Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in North America, and currently serves on its government affairs committee.

About the University of Utah

Located in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah is the state's flagship university. It provides education to more than 31,000 graduate, undergraduate and professional students from all 50 states and over 100 countries. The university offers 72 major subjects at the undergraduate level and more than 90 major fields of study at the graduate level. With revenues in excess of $4.2 billion (FY17), the university is considered one of Utah's primary economic engines. The institution generates over $600 million annually for the state of Utah in nontax revenue and is one of the state's largest employers, with more than 3,300 faculty members and 33,000-plus full-time and part-time employees. The university is a catalyst for a research corridor through northern Utah that is a hotbed for technology and development activities, colloquially known as Silicon Slopes.