Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years

terrapyn writes "Infoworld is reporting: 'A group of British computer scientists have proposed a number of grand challenges for IT that they hope will drive forward research, similar to the way the human genome project drove life sciences research through the 1990s.' Did they get it right? What are some other worthy computing challenges?"

Comments

How about an OS as good as VM/370 with a GUI?

[Anonymous Coward]

VM/CMS with a GUI would ROCK!

Re:How about an OS as good as VM/370 with a GUI?

[saden1]

Solve one, jus one, NP-Complete Problem.

Just ONE request...

[Thunderstruck]

A battery, a really good battery. Something that'll make my laptop last as long as my Palm. Or maybe power a light-saber... But really all we need for our dreams to come true is a good battery.

Re:Just ONE request...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a request for IT. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.

It is a request for ET Engineering Technology. .segmond

Re:Just ONE request...

[danheskett]

What we really need someone to do is design a laptop from the ground-up for maximum battery life. And I don't just mean the processor.

Look at every function, every component, and remove/reduce everything unnecessary. Combine anything possible. Strip it down to nothing. Give me an old school screen. And I mean that. I don't even care if its an old gas plasma or monochrome display.

I am talking about a laptop that will run with average use for 2 weeks between charges. I don't even care if it's a refined 486/25. Whatever it's speed/capabilities, I'll find an OS to run with it. If that means a console only Linux distro, I'm fine with that.

The fact that you can't get a laptop that can truly run for more than 8 hrs off of battery without insane power saving options is nuts.

Give me a 1 lb 1/2 inch think laptop with a low-power "486 level" processor, minimal graphics card, 1 gb flash card instead of a harddisk, optical disk and wireless network adapter. I don't need no stinking parallel port, no freaking COM ports, S-Video out, no ability to display two video displays at once, no freaking docking ports, maybe a USB port if its not too much trouble, no firewire, no infrared, no onboard ethernet, no onboard modem and definately no line input/microphone jacks. I don't need to no high-powered speakers, a head-phone jack and 16-bit 2-channel stereo sound will do just fine. A 10" screen will do fine, an optional mechanical backlight switch will do fine. Color is nice if you can have it, otherwise, give me a 256-shades of gray and 800x600 resolution.

If someone could persuade a hardware manufacturing plant to make a non-name version of this laptop I am sure it would sell. With the best battery you can buy and this unit you could probabl sell them retail for $399 and make a decent profit. If you can get a CPU down to a low-enough voltage and wattage - and it doesn't have to be an x86 processor mind you - I could see a life of 24 hrs continuous being plausable. Whatever you can get that's low wattage (4 Watts? What's reasonable? My P4 takes an insane amount.. what, 90 Watts all by itself, without anything else in the box? pfft).

Enough of this diatribe. This should be a no brainer. You could sell millions of these units easily. Put together a nice tightly integrated suite of tools - simple e-mail, simple web-browser, simple office suite, etc and you'll be making millions.

Who knows what will happen

[chris09876]

They're setting these as goals for the next 15 years... but who really knows what's going to happen 15 years from now? If Moore's law holds (and we have no reason to think it won't), we'll have almost 2^10 times the computing power we do today. That's a huge number!! Setting these goals is a nice idea..., but who knows what the world has in store.

Re:Who knows what will happen

[rbarreira]

No surprise considering that applications are getting heavier and heavier... Most programmers no longer care about optimizing their code, as they used to (and had to) some years ago.

Re:Who knows what will happen

[psetzer]

Processing power doesn't drive innovation as some claim a lack of it drives efficiency. Even if, in fifteen years, we've got computers with a thousand times the circuitry, programs will run just as fast as they do today, and what we use it for will generally be the same. What innovations do occur seem to be folded back into existing technology, making it better. This looks at innovations that do more than just make a better search engine, and change how we look at the computer.

Ubiquitous computing is an interesting completely transformational view of how we look at computers. Back in the early 1900s, people bought accessories for their electric motors. They were simply too expensive to put a seperate one in each appliance, so if you wanted a vaccuum cleaner, you'd buy the attachment that turned your motor into a vacuum cleaner. Now, you buy something with an electric motor, and odds are that they don't even mention one's in there. The difficult part of ubiquitous computing isn't cheap, powerful computers; that's solved. The difficult part is getting everything to work together and handle stuff that doesn't want to work together nicely. What do you do when you are given some request that you don't know how to handle? Do you ignore it, or do you pass it off to someone who knows how to handle it? If it's something that you've never even heard of before, then would you know who to hand it off to? What you need is some sort of protocol that's expandable, universal, and standardized, and a computing framework that's capable of handling it.

No matter what anybody says, XML isn't sufficient. Objects in the framework need to be capable of broadcasting their capabilities, and other objects need to know how to use those capabilities. It would be nice if we even had that in an individual computer right now. If something needs to show a picture, it should be able to find the program that does that without the user needing to tell it that. Figure that out, and the world will beat a path to your door.

DATA DATA DATA

[Ars-Fartsica]

We are being buried in data and are just beginning to adapt the crudest methods for organizing it and mining it. If in 20 years we have not solved the problem of dealing with giant piles of data, then IT will become a cost instead of a benefit.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[nine-times]

I'll agree with this one. I look at my company's servers, and it seems like we just keep having to add more hard drives. Some of it's because people are disorganized, but sometimes people are disorganized because of the massive amounts of data that they're dealing with.

I have users with multi-GB mailboxes that can't quite be deleted, but archiving it doesn't really solve the problem either, it just makes it harder for the user to find what he's looking for.

So, it's a basic problem. Every day, we're generating more data. The amount of data (in bytes) is going up every day, as computers are more easily able to deal with higher resolution pictures and movies. But what do we do with all this data? Just keep writing it to tape and storing it in bunkers? After we accrue enough data, what's the point of keeping it?-- you won't be able to find anything anymore.

It's a real problem for me, both as an IT pro and personally. When dealing with so much data, how do you:

1. keep everything you want
2. make it easy to find what you want when you want it
3. make it easy to access what you want when you want it
4. throw away everything you aren't going to want

And how do you do all that with:

1. a solution a non-techie can deal with (grandma needs her data safe, too)
2. security from unauthorized access
3. security from data loss (off-site backups?)
4. an affordable price (both corporate and personal solutions)
5. without spending the amount of time on this that only an obsessive compulsive would consider acceptable

I haven't seen an acceptable solution yet.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[joshsnow]

I seem to remember, from my university days, being told that meaningful information (as opposed to "data") must be relevant, timely, structured and domain specific.

I agree, we are being buried in data but perhaps that's because the emphasis is on collecting data rather than managing information.

IT will continue to be a benefit so long as we focus on precisely what we're gathering and structuring data for.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[Cassanova]

My simplistic solution from what I have observed personally, would be two steps:

1. Archive data older than n days to backup/removeable storage, delete backedup data from your main field of view (desktop/folders etc from wherever they came) so you now have a fresh slate to begin with. This ensures less clutter.

2. Destroy backedup data after y days. Yes, quite simply destroy it. Make y sufficiently large that you can always get something back if you really wanted it. Of course y is >> x (significantly larger than). If you want something put in cold storage forever, explicitly move it into a "cold storage archive" in step 1 above. I'm guessing there will be very little stuff deserving this status so storing it will be manageable. This step ensures that unneeded data does not last forever and ever.

A lot of clutter is built up by having the notion that you will "need it *someday*" - thats a fallacy - you mostly end up never touching 80% of your stashed stuff so they can be safely deleted.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[nine-times]

-- sure you will want to wrap it into some kind of GUI for you grandma ;)

Yeah, but part of my point was, not every grandma has a me to set *anything* up. I don't want to have to build a Unix system and write a custom solution for my grandmother anyway. I am not a one-man full-time tech-support staff for everyone I know. When I talk about a solution, I mean something that comes with the computer or is an easy-to-install add-on that grandma can do herself. I mean something that I can point out to some know-nothing and say "Buy this. It'll take care of your problems."

I suspect that banks will start providing safes for data soon - with some kind access like ssh

For grandma, they'd better have a better interface than CLI SSH. Maybe a program that uses SFTP, but with a nice GUI, but again, I'm not writing my own programs here.

Categories, I put as keys are always fixed for me and I'm getting paths to them immediately without need to make find/grep each time

No offense intended, but you're still spending far more time than I'm talking about. Setting up unix servers with huge raid drives, finding an out-of-state site to stash it, setting up secure data transfers, devising your own method of assigning metadata to files or some kind of personal database file system....

I understand, for a geek, this isn't a rediculous expense of time, since it's also a hobby and a source of fun and entertainment. However, to grandma (and even me) it's just too much.

When I talk about making photos "easy to find", I'm talking "easy" like Apple's iPhoto is still a bit too complicated, in that you have to assign keywords and ratings manually, which many users aren't going to bother with after a certain number of photos.

When I talk about easy to access, I'm talking about the process being relatively transparent, i.e. easier than connecting to an FTP site. Like you wouldn't need to know that it's "not on your computer".

When I talk about affordable, I'm talking about something like $100 total, or a $10 a month service (for personal use).

In case I'm not being clear, I'm not asking, "What's a good, cheap backup solution, available today?" I'm saying, the state of data management technologies is not currently sufficient for our ever-expanding set of data. We need better search methods for all sorts of data (not just text). We need transparent backup and archival methods (transparent both in the backup and the restore). We need more than solutions for businesses who can employ a big staff and thousands in hardware, and more than solutions for geeks who can roll their own. We need solutions so that Joe Schmoe can take digital photos to his heart's content, can create a digital music library as large as he wants, and not need to worry about sorting through the data or losing it.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[Fareq]

please forgive the obvious here:

You are correct. That is why it's not called Data Technology.

However, I think the key is that people want information and computers store only data. "Data Mining" is the science of extracting a small amount of information from a mountain of data. I guess it's a bit of a misnomer.

Gold Miners mine through a mountain of quartz looking for gold.

I don't know what kind of structures silver is in, but its the same deal, Silver miners are seeking silver.

The last thing Data Miners want to find is more Data. They want to extract the Information. After all, when was the last time you saw a Dirt Mine?

How about

[cubicledrone]

Keeping people employed for more than five weeks?

Call me paranoid...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I do not think that having having every device being able to interface with every device is a good idea.

I can see some day in the future where one device decides to mess up and take down all the devices it can touch, be it virus or glitch. I would hate for my toaster to be able to mess with my heart monitor. Also If all these devices are talking, what I do on my Palm could be transmitted through my blinky running shoes to Nike for them to "monitor me better". I for one like some incompatability.

Also the comment that all devices work the way we want them to is a pipe dream. There is no perfect device. There is always a feature that will be added that will be easy for some and hard to interface with for others. I think having a set of standars is a more reasonible dream.

Re:I'm still waiting for things promised by Y2K

[Anonymous Coward]

Video phones exist, and have for ages.

The problem is that people don't WANT videoconferencing. Sure, you might, and maybe a few geek friends, but it's not something that the majority of people really want. That is, no one really sees any value in it.

If they did, it would have happened ages ago. God knows we have the bandwidth and technology to do it.

Simulated Sex should be our next challenge...

[stephanruby]

Simulated sex should be our next challenge, sex has already helped us, and will continue to help us, in pushing the limits of what's technologically possible.

Re:Nothing new here

[SupremeTaco]

Yes, the descriptions are vague, and I think necessarily so. It's a challenge to possibly develop new technologies that will do these things, or perhaps make them obselete or un-needed. Also, sometimes the end result is boring, but the technology needed to get there is pretty exciting. A lot of people are bored now when you talk about putting a satellite in orbit, or exploring the bottom of the ocean, but when you start to break down the technology that it takes to make it there, you kinda go "WOW!"

Setting the goal is the easy part. Making it happen should be fun.

Too bad they're impossible

[Wylfing]

Unfortunately, none of these aspirations will materialize. IT in the U.S. and Europe is going to stagnate for the next 10-15 years, because the RIAA and MPAA (and their European equivalents) will continue doing everything they can to bring technology back to 1996 levels; and patents on algorithms and business methods will confound any new technology ventures.

Re:Too bad they're impossible

[mmkkbb]

Oh come on, there's more to IT than personal computers.

Web applications

[fiannaFailMan]

The PDFs were getting a little slashdotted so I couldn't fully RTFA, but here's what I see as an exciting area: Getting the richness and usability of the desktop application in a web-based application. The metaphor of the submitted 'form' and requested 'page' is very limiting. Imagine using Word in such a way that you had to destroy and patiently reload the page every time you wanted to embolden a bit of text or reformat a paragraph. The reach of applications has taken a step forward with the web, but in terms of usability a giant step was taken back.

This is where technology like Macromedia Flex comes in. I've seen this stuff in action, and the process of creating complex applications is so easy it's unbelievable. A field of sortable and stretchable columns can be generated with about three lines of code, and the data that goes into it can come from any application server you like.

Sure, anything that uses the Flash player gets a hammering on Slashdot, but I sense that times are a changing around here and more people are starting to wake up to the potential of this stuff, even if it goes a little against the open source ethos of the place.

BTW, if you're a member of the "Flash sucks and I hate it because some people used to abuse it by making annoying animations with it" brigade, see my journal where I've already refuted your half-baked criticisms.

Re:Web applications

[fiannaFailMan]

It never ceases to amaze me that the anti Macromedia brigade so quickly rolls out their rebuttals along the lines of "Oh but if you do a week's worth of DHTML coding, use a few iFrames here and there, throw in a bit of server-side trickery, and anything else you can do in SVG, what could be simpler?" while casually ignoring that Flash or Flex can do all of this in a single easy-to-use package.

In any case SVG doesn't have half the abilities of Flash and it definitely doesn't have anywhere near the same level of browser penetration, hence the maturity of Flash. I remember someone telling me two years ago about how SVG was going to render Flash obsolete. Two years later and I have still yet to see a single SVG file rendered in my web browser, to say nothing of a job ad asking for this skill.

One thing missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I didn't see "convincing everyone that websites are made with HTML and not bloody PDFs" on the list. Seriously - those lists are over half a meg each. Is it any wonder they are suffering from the Slashdot effect? How much smaller would they be if it was normal HTML?

Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[SashaM]

Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools? Two words - Halting Problem.

Re:Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[SashaM]

Maybe you'd care to expand on those two words to explain why you don't think that there are classes of computational processes for which classes of specification can be proven as met, or why you don't think this is useful...

There most certainly are such classes and classes, but the proving cannot be automated (except for non turing-complete languages). A computer can verify that a "proof" is indeed a proof, but it cannot produce such a proof itself.

Perhaps if every binary came along with a proof of its correctness, a verifying tool could check that the proof is correct. This would, however, just shift the burden to the developers, who would have to prove everything they write is correct. Maybe some language or tool could make proving correctness easier, but I don't see how it could make it significantly so, since, again, it could never be automated (and I take something that can't be automated to be difficult).

Re:Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[SashaM]

This is all well and nice, but the halting problem is just one small example of an undecideable problem. In fact, every nontrivial, semantic problem about computer programs is undecideable ("semantic" means that the answer only depends on what the program does as opposed to depending on the program itself. "nontrivial" means that the answer isn't the same for all queries).

This narrows the set of decideable problems to ones that are either:

• Non semantic - does this program compile? Does this program use recursion? etc. But then we've been solving such problems (automatically) for a long time.
• Trivial - these really aren't interesting problems.
• Not about computer programs - but we're talking about computer program verification here, so these programs may not be written in a Turing complete language. There are interesting non Turing complete languages (regular expressions for example), but they're not something you can write "real" programs in.

Basically, the point is that by restricting yourself to something verifiable you've restricted yourself way too much.

Re:Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[SashaM]

Oh, and I think you're a bit confused about Goedel, but then so am I, so I won't comment on it ;-)

Re:Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A computer can verify that a "proof" is indeed a proof, but it cannot produce such a proof itself."

I'm afraid that you're quite wrong. Proof search is a classic problem in artificial intelligence, and one for which many various solutions are available. Take a look at ACL2, HOL, PVS, and so forth and you'll find that computers are indeed being used to find proofs, not only to check them as you suggest.

In fairness, you probably meant that computers cannot find complicated proofs automatically (after all, even computation is proof in a sense). But, the systems I mentioned above allow the user to develop proof strategies (sometimes called "tactics") for finding new proofs. The ACL2 user, for example, guides the prover through adding lemmas which the prover can then call upon to prove future theorems. In a sense, they teach the prover how to reason about a new domain, ideally enabling the prover to automatically (or with minimal additional guidance) prove new theorems in that domain.

"This would, however, just shift the burden to the developers, who would have to prove everything they write is correct."

Where should the burden lie? You imply that the developer should not be responsible for verifying that their code is correct. An engineer must provide evidence that their bridge is sufficiently strong for its required load. Surely a programmer should be held to the same standard. Of course, the level of evidence can vary widely based on the verification need (who cares if tetris is correct, but I'm not running your code in my nuclear power plant just because it compiles without an error).

That said, today's verification software typically requires some (perhaps much) effort by the developer to write code in such a way that it is easier to verify. In addition, most verification software provides some kind of "out" where the user can escape the system and "just write code" without verifying it. In this way, one can hope to gradually verify more of the program, while still being able to use unverified code where time does not permit full verification.

Rechargeable?

[Ironsides]

I thought fuel cells weren't rechargeable. As in rechargeable without pumping more Hydrogen into them. If it's not possible to recharge them as easily as you can a battery, it's not gonna succede very well. I don't think people will want to have to "Hydrogen up" their batteries like the "Gas up" their car.

Re:Rechargeable?

[plover]

You're correct in that they're not "rechargeable", they're "refillable."

Fuel will probably be available in cartridges that are shaped to fit the manufacturer's equipment. Replacing them will need to be as easy and fast as changing batteries. Don't forget that current fuel cells are designed with on-board cracking of methanol, which allows for liquid fuel rather than having a pressure tank of pure hydrogen. It will make things much more convenient, although at the possible expense of some size/weight, as well as lower energy density of the fuel.

Probably the biggest drawback will be that each manufacturer will likely specify somewhat different shapes with patented, incompatible fittings in order to "maximize brand loyalty" (lock you in to their refills.) As far as I can see, making it inconvenient would be the quickest way to kill off adoption, but manufacturers usually see things differently than I do.

Solve the spam problem

[menscher]

Seriously. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but it is. So let's solve it already!

Biggest Problem in that Scenario

[Inhibit]

You forgot

- Get the patient to take the antibiotic all the way through

That's the crucial missing step that's let the nasty bugs get this far :).

The worthy challenge

[reshin]

Save the environment; most other things can be delayed. Discover efficient alternative energy sources to plant and fossil fuels; develop the materials and processes to implement these alternatives; build more detailed environmental models to aid in the study of the effects of pollution and the effects of tearing down natural habitats.

Brute force AI timeline

[Anonymous Coward]

We know to some extent how the human brain functions, at least at the level of neurons and synapses. A sufficiently accurate simulation of 10^11 neurons and 10^14-10^15 synapses should produce a human level intelligence by brute force. Clever AI software design may require less than this, but I claim that it is an upper limit.

The exact computation required to simulate a neuron sufficiently accurately is not known exactly, but we can put some reasonable estimates to it. I use 1 synapse firing = 1 bit +- factor of 30, which leads to a human equivalent = 3,000 Tflops (range 100-100,000 TFlops).

I will take as a proxy for 'largest computer available for AI research' the 500th computer listed in the top500.org list of most powerful supercomputers.

The trend has been for the #500 machine to grow at 93% per year in performance. A factor of 30 uncertainty in required performance thus only leads to a 5 year unceratinty in date.

3000 Tflops for the #500 machine would occur in 2017 at historical trend rates, to which I would add 5 years for software development/AI training, so the 'danger zone' for superhuman AI starts at 2017-2027.

SETI@home runs 65 Tflops currently on a distributed network, which is barely below my low end 100 Tflops estimate, so the risk of a runaway intelligence on a distributed network is non-zero (whether malicious or well meaning). The risk from a top ranking supercomputer is lower in my opinion. The #1 machine clocks 70 GFlops, but the top ranking machines are operated in a much more controlled environment.

If I was asked what will seal our doom, I would say it's the playstation 3. It will contain a 'Cell' processor jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It's designed to be highly parallel, and it will be produced in mass quantities which will make it cheap. Thus it will will be well suited to MPP type supercomputers. I for one welcome our new Sony-based overlords...

Re:Brute force AI timeline

[divisionbyzero]

Of course, all of this assumes that human intelligence can be simulated by computation, in the classical sense. By simulation, I mean that a machine would demonstrate human-like intelligence. I don't think this is the case, but I don't see why we shouldn't pursue the brute force strategy, at least to rule it out. I don't really buy your guess on the number flops that would be necessary either, even if I assume that computation could simulate human-like intelligence. Every few years the number gets bumped up by an order of magnitude. If you look ten years ago, they were saying all we would need is 3 Tflops. Obviously, that's not true unless the problem is software-based. The real fundamental problem is that we do not even understand what intelligence is. It's hard to simulate something that you don't understand.

As for thought itself, I seriously doubt it works in the same way that a hardware simulation that you are describing would work. Think about how much energy would be required and how much heat would be generated compared to a human brain. Biology simply doesn't work in that way. Look at protein folding. It's extremely computationally intensive to determine the way a protein will fold, but biologically the process of folding is relatively simple. It's the same with thought. If we could figure out how the brain works, then we could probably simulate it with hardware that we could make now.

Re:Brute force AI timeline

[Finuvir]

Intelligence, true intelligence, may not require consciousness. We don't know. Consciousness, qualia, the feeling of awareness is the aspect of mind we know least about (and most about in another way I suppose). A human-like intelligence may well be harder to achieve than another sort of intelligence, however you might decide on that. But when you get right down to it, we know that machines can be made that have human intelligence. They're called humans. Unless we resort to superstition to "explain" our intelligence and awareness it's clear that AI is in principle possible.

Re:Brute force AI timeline

[divisionbyzero]

You might be referring to glial cells, but, anyhow, computation is computation. Thought *may* be something that cannot be simulated by computation. See the problem with most computation is that it goes from one determinate state to another. It's somewhat like a deductive system. One deduction follows from another inevitably. Humans don't think that way. Clearly some forms of thought can already be simulated to a certain degree, logic, mathematics, and even to a certain extent science. For the most part these are very much based on rules and do not require what I would consider "creative" thought. In other words, developing the axioms from which deductions would be made, developing new kinds of maths, designing new experiments, or coming up with it's own rules.

Incidentally, the robot that can do science is the most interesting to me because it seems to be the most creative. It even comes up with new experiments. http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/012804/Robot_au tomates_science_012804.html
Yet it has no idea what it is doing and it is only following rules. It can't create it's own rules. This example is the one that seems to indicate the immediate future of AI to me.

Of course, you never know. It could be that thinking can be simulated perfectly fine with computation, but I don't think it is an obvious conclusion, nor are the similarities between the brain and a computer that great. I definitely think it is worth researching, but I just don't think it will end up turning out that way. But that's just a hunch. I don't think there is definitive evidence either way because, like I said, we don't know how the brain works.

A controlled bomb

[DigiShaman]

What you're advocating is a controlled "bomb". No seriously, do the math and you will find the energy density is rather tight.

BTW, I used to work at Dell in the safety division. I've seen video footage of laptop batteries explode. Now mind you, these were 3rd party batteries people of bought off e-bay and the like. So technically, these issues are NOT cause by Dell. None the less, it is something to be concerned about.