The Power Of Deep Computing

IBM's announcement that it was funding a Deep Computing Institute made news on the Web when it was announced on May 24, but little offline. That's a shame. Deep Computing is a hugely significant convergence of technology, deep corporate pockets, the open source software model, artificial intelligence, powerful new 3-D visualization programs, a new generation of supercomputers and some of the best researchers in the world. This won't solve all the world's problems, but it will sure tackle them in a radical new way. Especially the ones whose solutions have been beyond reach.

Think what Hollywood?s late and loopy sci-fi producer Ed Wood ("Plan 9 From Outer Space", "Night of the Ghouls" and other spectacularly dreadful classics) might have done with the idea of a Deep Computing Institute. It would probably be in a gothic tower filled with giant machines like the Johnniac that sits in the old computer museum in a Silicon Valley NASA station, a monstrous thing with bulbs, tubes and heavy metal casing. At some point the machines would surely run amok, vaporize everybody in sight and take over the minds and power systems of the world.

Sometimes it seems that computing is outrunning the imagination of sci-fi writers and producers. Reality is constantly overtaking them.

We now do have a Deep Computing Institute (DCI). This week, one of the biggest technology stories of the year - perhaps in several years - the institutionalization of deep domputing by one of the most powerful corporations on earth -- was buried deep inside the news pages of most of the country?s newspapers, if it was reported at all.

This has always been media?s big problem with technology - the less significant the story (pornography, for one), the more disseminated it is. That?s why 80 per cent of Americans actually believe the Net was partly to blame for Columbine, that cyberstalkers are likely to pounce on their children, or that video games turn kids into killers.

As a result, people are continuously blindsided. When it comes to technology, Deep Computing is a blockbuster of an idea.

Typically, hardly any Americans even know what was reported all over the Web Tuesday -- the world?s largest computer maker is creating Deep Computing Institute (see Slashdot Tuesday and [http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/),4586,2264162,00.html], an evolutionary movement in technological and computing history that could affect many more people?s lives than online pornographers.

Deep computing techniques involve the use of supercomputers, advanced software, complex mathematical formulas and a consortium of researchers who try and take on some of the world?s most complicated and elusive challenges - the weather, for one, and business problems like complex airline personnel and flight scheduling.

Supercomputing isn?t some Utopian fantasy, and is vastly more significant than the raging hype about Internet stocks. NASA and the National Weather Service have been using supercomputers for several years (so presumably, has the NSA and CIA). Instead of saying there?s a 40 per cent chance of rain tomorrow afternoon, the NWS can now say it will rain from 2:15 to 3:30 p.m. Instead of making forecasts for standard 30-kilometer grids, supercomputers can narrow them to one kilometer (the storm will be in Queens, not the Bronx).

It?s logical that Deep Computers will be asked to consider some of the world?s most intractable social as well as business problems, especially in an era when politicians would much rather investigate people?s sex lives than even discuss serious issues.

Perhaps, and blessedly, the politicians won?t have to. The world is getting a potent new tool for problem solving and decision making.

The UN or other international monitoring agencies might use supercomputers to predict famine or natural catastrophes. They might spot, even foresee the spread of dread plagues like AIDS. Failing that, they could great accelerate the search for cures.

William Pulleybank, director of the new DC institute, says deep computing will use extensive computation and sophisticated software algorithms to tackle problems previously beyond reach. Pulleybank said he thinks its time to use scientific modeling for decision making. Super computers could, for example, help utilities plan power plant use and daily trading strategies in the spot market for electricity.

Semi-super computers have already been used to reduce crime in cities like New York by collating vast amounts of data, tracking police reports and incidents, and predicting where serial attackers and robbers might strike again. The DCI?s will be a lot bigger.

In the digital age, information really is power, and the DCI will have an enormous chunk of it, plus the means to sort and visualize it. IBM is spending $29 million to set up the DCI, which will be linked up to an advisory board selected from universities, government labs and corporations.

Deep Computing brings a number of technology?s most significant contemporary forces together: artificial intelligence, the growing power of computers to store and analyze vast amounts of data, even the open source model of distributing software. Unthinkable just a few years ago, OS is becoming synonymous with rapid innovation and creativity, even among the world?s most powerful corporations.

As part of IBM?s project, the DCI will publish the IBM Visualization Data Explorer on the Net. This is a powerful software package that can be used to create three-dimensional representations of data. The underlying programming code for Data Explorer will be given away as open source software to researchers at the Institute?s Web site, beginning May 25. The site will be located at http://www.research.ibm.com/dci/software.html

The creation of the DCI is a big move for IBM, as well as computing, partly because it?s an expensive risk, but even more so because it reflects the kind of creative risk-taking so rare among big corporations. The term "deep computing" was inspired by the company?s Deep Blue chess-playing computer, which defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in l996.

Futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Freeman Dyson frequently cite the chess match as a landmark date in the evolution of AI (artificial intelligence), the first step towards computers being able to inevitably match the human brain in memory storage and decision making.

Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) expects computers to store as much information as the human brain (and pass the Turing Intelligence Test) early in the next century. IBM is positioning itself and its institute as the premier center of this advanced kind of problem-solving supercomputing, a far more visionary step than anything Bill Gates (who has tons of cash in the back, and is - unlike IBM?s executives -- slobbered over in the media continuously as a Millenial visionary) has ever advanced.

If Kurzweil and other inventors are right, supercomputers are about to become a lot more super.

Deep Computers might help us sort through still confusing statistics on issues like homelessness: how many and where? Or spot famines, monitor population overcrowding, pollution, global warming, asthma and de-forestation, all problems shrouded in confusing statistics and conflicting data. They could track job opportunities and co-ordinate a changing economy with educational and training institutions.

If some of the most specialized existing data on the planet were focused on specific medical problems, treatment and research be greatly accelerated. Supercomputers could collect and visualize medical research on cancer and other dread diseases, even as thousands of disparate researchers are inching towards various possibilities for a cure in hundreds of different places?

Perhaps supercomputing could do to ethnic and regional warfare what it does to weather: warn us about where it?s likely to occur. Is political unrest - Rawanda, Kosovo - cyclical or predicable in some cases, like crime has been found to be?

Human behavior is, in many ways, less predictable than weather and power needs. Deep computing can?t present miraculous cures for humanity?s problems, but it just might permit society to approach it?s biggest problems in a new way as networked computing is beginning to do in so many other areas of American life.

IBM has also further legitimized the open source model of distributing information and programs. "Where open source really works," Pulleybank says, "is where you build a community to accelerate innovation. And we think this advanced visualization application will attract that kind of community."

The kind of community Pulleybank is describing - some of the world?s best researchers choosing tasks and problems for an ever powerful new generation of supercomputers and rapidly speeding up research, collating and problem solving while giving anybody who wants it free access to visualization software - is amazing, if it actually comes to be.

The DCI could be a sort of digital Los Alamos running globally and openly, working continuously with some of the best minds in the world to go after problems whose solutions have been beyond reach.

What a big and fascinating story. What a shame so few people will get to read or see it.

Some questions: Will the DCI really accelerate research and problem solving? How powerful to computers have to be to use IBM's visualization software? Can this model really approach problems in a completely different way?