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

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...

[plover]

Fuel cells.

They already have prototypes small enough to power a cell phone, and they're approaching the marketplace. Cost is unknown, but you can expect them to be expensive at first. And if they take platinum as a catalyst, costs will of course stay high.

It will remain to be seen if people will accept carrying volatile fluids around with them, but I'm betting they'll come out with a "clean change" cartridge system that people will like. Just think: no recharging time. A small reservoir will probably allow for a hot-swap of the cartridge as well, meaning not even any down-time.

Next problem?

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.

Nothing new here

[MAdMaxOr]

I didn't see anything that hasn't already been proposed many times before. Also, the article was short, and the descriptions were very general and boring.

**yawn**

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.

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

[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.

I'm still waiting for things promised by Y2K

[bigtallmofo]

What about all the fanciful things we were supposed to have "By the year 2000!"?

What a joke that turned out to be. I'm still making calls with an audio-only phone and I have yet to come across a practical hover-car.

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

[eln]

Hover cars are redundant, since the way my wife drives, the tires rarely touch the road anyhow.

Cell phones

[Reignking]

I think we need to develop cell phones that can cook, clean, and drive my car. For $25. Oh, and I guess they need to be able to send and receive phone calls.

Speaking of simulating life...

[rewt66]

Here's a challenge: A patient comes into a doctor's office with a bacterial infection. Worse, it's one of those antibiotic resistant bugs. What we need to be able to do is:
- sequence the bacteria's DNA right there in the doctor's office (this part isn't really an IT challenge)
- from the bacteria's genetics, determine which antibiotics (out of all known ones) can effectively kill it
- if none can effectively kill it, ship the DNA sequence information off to the CDC's supercomputers, and have them automatically develop a new antibiotic that will kill the bug.

I figure that this is a challenge for the next forty years, not just for the next twenty.

Most important goal...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on people, we need to break the one million mark on the number of different text editors for unix based systems!

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.

A Slashdot Dupe Checker

[OverlordQ]

Should be easy right? Never the less it has stumped slashdot editors for many many years.

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.

Here's a challenge...

[joshsnow]

What are some other worthy computing challenges?

Making Firefox on Linux as quick as Firefox on Windows... ;-)

Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools?

[SashaM]

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

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 :).

Re:Biggest Problem in that Scenario

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Here's a very simplified explanation:

The problem is that resistance isn't either/or -- that is, it's not as simple as saying a particular strain of bacteria is resistant or it's not. All strains have greater or lesser degrees of resistance; more precisely, individual bacteria within the population have greater or lesser degrees. When you're on antibiotics, the bacteria tend to die off in, pretty much, an exponential decay curve. Once the curve drops below a certain level, the remaining bacterial population is insufficient to maintain the infection; your immune system is fighting the infection too, of course, and it can take care of the remaining bacteria, which are the more resistant ones, one the less resistant ones are killed off by the antibiotics.

So what happens when you stop taking the course of antibiotics halfway through? Well, where you previously had a bacterial population consisting of some bacteria with weak resistance, some with moderate resistance, and some with strong resistance, now you only have the latter two categories. And these are going to continue breeding, and your immune system is going to spend its resources fighting them equally, without preference as to which is more or less antibiotic-resistant -- which means more of the bacteria with greater resistance will survive and grow. OTOH, if you'd finished the antibiotics, only the most resistant bacteria would be left, and your immune system could probably finish them off on its own.

To top it off, resistance requires an expenditure of energy on the part of the bacteria -- you're quite right that many such critters have non-expressed resistance genes already in their genomes; the reason these genes aren't usually expressed is because doing so takes energy the bacteria would usually prefer to devote to feeding and reproducing. So in a patient who doesn't take antibiotics at all, the percentage of resistant individual bacteria is going to be very low. This means that taking half a course on antibiotics is the worst possible course of action: if you take the whole thing, you'll probably end up killing off the entire infection; if you take no antibiotics, you'll either get better or you won't, but either way you won't encourage the formation of a resistant strain.

And the reason that shorter courses of antibiotics are being prescribed is that, quite simply, many newer antibiotics work more quickly. That's the only reason. It has nothing to do with some magical discovery that the traditional ten-day course was longer than it needed to be.

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

[TimothyTimothyTimoth]

A deeper brute force simulation at the atomic level would be just a few more Tflops/years away. The problem of understanding at a "higher level" the thing that you are atomically scanning then modelling with basic physics is moot, especially if the full brain/body is simulated.

(That is, a good enough atomic-level brain/body simulation would still respond "don't remind me" when asked about it's last birthday, just like the human being being simulated.)

Whether anybody was home would be one for the philosophers, but such a simulation, of say a computer researcher, could work, and earn money just as well as it's original. So capitalism would pursue it. And it will rise in speed with hardware advances (which will increase correspondingly). So FOOM!

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

[saden1]

Solve one, jus one, NP-Complete Problem.