In 2004, I moved to North Carolina to found the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). My goal was to bring a new approach to computationally mediated problem solving, one rooted in multidisciplinary teams and focused on important and vexing societal problems – health, environment, society, and economics. In a phrase, to be a catalyst for innovation.
RENCI started ab initio — with just an idea and a single office. By the time I left for Microsoft in late 2007, RENCI had grown to a team of roughly one hundred staff, faculty, and students, spanning multiple locations, and engaged in a wide variety of projects. Over the past twenty years, this vision has endured, one continually brought to life by passionate and talented individuals.
This is a personal reminiscence on the RENCI origin backstory, along with one significant “might have been” missed opportunity.
The Renaissance Vision
The name RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute) reflected my desire to animate a vision of renaissance teams, where collaborative groups bring their disparate and complementary skills to bear on complex problems whose solution is beyond the capabilities of any one individual or organization. Our mission statement was direct and to the point:
To bring together scientists, technology experts, educators, artists, humanists and business and government leaders to address today’s most challenging multidisciplinary problems. By applying technological expertise and the world’s best computing, networking and data resources to these issues, RENCI strives to lead the effort to create a collaborative 21st-century problem solving environment that will spur economic growth and lead to the next generation of transformative discoveries.
That mission presciently focused on using university resources to serve the public good. Universities, particularly public ones, exist to help people. We lose sight of that objective at our peril, as today’s questioning of the higher education value proposition illustrates. (See Public Higher Education: A New Social Compact for Innovation.)
Building the Foundation
Before deciding to come to North Carolina, I spent months in periodic conversation with the three Research Triangle academic leaders – James Moeser (UNC Chapel Hill), Nannerl Koehane (Duke) and James Oblinger (North Carolina State) – asking what we might imagine and do together that could elevate the state and its people. The three universities each have differential, world-class strengths in health and medicine, engineering and agriculture, environmental sciences, and socioeconomics.
The three leaders all understood, and I received political and financial backing from all three. Most notably, Chancellor Moeser put the full faith and credit of UNC Chapel Hill behind the RENCI vision, making it the university’s top legislative request, with political ground support from the indefatigable Kevin Fitzgerald. For that personal and financial support, I shall be eternally grateful. Beyond ongoing support from the three academic institutions, this stream of state funding gave RENCI wings, allowing it to focus on both small and large projects with varying timelines.
My first and wisest RENCI hire was the wise and thoughtful Alan Blatecky. Alan brought years of vital North Carolina insights and connections, as well as kindness and common sense, as we built RENCI. He and I spent many days dreaming, brainstorming, and planning RENCI’s launch from a single, shared office. We were later joined by Karen Green (Communications), Stephenie McLean (Education and Outreach), Ray Idaszak (Collaboration), Rob Fowler (HPC), David Knowles (Economic Development), and the wonderful Margaret Buedel (Executive Assistant).
Finally, I must acknowledge the insight of my brilliant friend and Illinois collaborator, Donna Cox, for her passionate advocacy for renaissance collaborations. It was a groundbreaking idea ahead of its time, one I embraced for RENCI. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.)
Selling the RENCI Vision
RENCI was intentionally neither a traditional computing center nor an academic research institute, but rather one focused on marshalling resources to solve societal problems. Computing and research were not just curiosity driven but also shaped by desired outcomes.
It took a while for people to understand the idea that we were seeking talent and partnerships, regardless of institutional affiliation. It was a lesson I was reminded of constantly, in subtle and not so subtle ways.
A humorous early example arose when I – a new, albeit senior, faculty member with appointments at all three triangle universities – sought to get business cards with the three university logos. Alas, I was rebuffed by all three university print shops, each with some variant of “You want our rival’s logo on your business card? Naw, we don’t do that.”
I was ultimately forced to print the business cards privately. It was a vivid, pragmatic example of the ingrained rivalries, ones that extended beyond that holiest of holies, ACC men’s basketball. The same provincialism existed across the University of North Carolina system, where some believed RENCI was all about UNC Chapel Hill, a misperception I repeatedly addressed by highlighting the statewide collaboration opportunities.
Early RENCI Collaborations
Collaborate we did, building centers on all three campuses to explore complex problems. These included, among many others:
- Coastal Hazards Modeling. Working with Rick Leuttich and his collaborators, we enhanced floodplain models and storm surge models to predict the effects of severe storms and hurricanes on an increasingly densely populated coastline. At the time, I told the team I wanted to be able to open my laptop, ask a member of the state legislature where they went to the beach with the children or grandchildren, and show them their risk. The models were also intended to arm local leaders with data for disaster response planning and enable them to respond wisely to coastal development proposals. In the intervening years, this tension between coastal development and severe weather has increased dramatically
- Disaster Response. Our interests went beyond prediction to mitigation. We also wanted to respond to and help mitigate disasters. RENCI also prototyped disaster response infrastructure – mobile wireless communications and semiautonomous drones – to support first responders, and we launched the NC-First web portal and first responder training program. Recognizing that communication was critical for first responders and that cell towers have limited battery backup, we built a mobile communications center. As shown in this photograph, it included a backup generator, a tethered balloon, and a satellite relay station for line-of-sight Wi-Fi communications. We also explored semi-autonomous model helicopters with cameras to survey disaster areas. (Of course, today, we would rely on a Starlink base station and inexpensive drones; technology has evolved over the past twenty years.)
- Genomics and Ethics. Kirk Wilhelmsen and I launched genome-wide association studies (GWAS), funded by an NIH grant, to identify the genetic basis of disease and the ethical, legal, social issues (ELSI) with use of genetic data. All this occurred just after the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. Like others, we learned that complex diseases rarely caused by a small number of genes, rather by the up and down regulation of thousands of genes.
- Mobile Biomedical Computing. We also worked with the Triangle medical schools, developing mobile health and environmental monitoring devices, leveraging the emergence of wireless communications and nascent smartphones. In one project, we developed an Out-patient Health Monitoring System (OHMS) for air quality monitoring for use by patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The goal was to alert patients to dangerous conditions and arrange primary care BEFORE they were forced to seek expensive, emergency treatment.
- Biology Gateways. Given the high level of biological and biomedical research at the three Research Triangle Universities, we focused on development of an early science gateway for biological computations and data analysis. Led by Lavanya Ramakrishnan, the North Carolina Bioportal supported workflow development and execution on both local clusters and national resources.
- Holocaust Survivor Archive Access. Hosting a copy of the Shoah Foundation testimonies of Holocaust survivors and developing educational tools that will allow NC universities and secondary schools to use the archive in the classroom.
To support these and other projects, we also deployed research computing, data analytics, and visualization at a scale previously unseen in North Carolina, including a system ranked 25th on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers, the latter working with UNC Research Computing. I also brought my portfolio of high-performance computing research projects from Illinois.
Big Tobacco Influence
It’s almost impossible now to overemphasize the historical dominance of tobacco in American life. Nowhere was that more true than in North Carolina.
Even after the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General report warned of the health risks of tobacco, cigarette advertising remained common, cigarette vending machines were ubiquitous, ashtrays abounded in public places and airplanes, and smoking habits were measured in packs per day.
My Arkansas father was a two pack a day Winston man (“Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”). Addicted to nicotine, he ultimately switched to chewing tobacco (another deadly delivery vehicle), but it was too late. Smoking ultimately killed him via a combination of emphysema and lung cancer; it’s a sad and difficult way to die, gasping for breath.
My mother would occasionally indulge childhood emulation of my father and buy candy cigarettes at the four aisle Piggly Wiggly in our little Arkansas Ozarks town. I still remember swaggering out of my house after a stiff drink (grape Kool-AidTM), with a Winston (candy) cigarette dangling from my lips, wearing six-guns (cap pistols) on both hips. Six years old, I was ready to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, riding my stick horse, Marlboro man style.
The Evolving North Carolina Economy
When I arrived in North Carolina in 2004, the economy was in great flux, change that has only accelerated since then. The mainstays of the old economy – tobacco, textiles, and furniture – were in rapid decline, albeit for different reasons. The result was a growing economic divide.
Given its global prevalence, tobacco had long been a huge part of the North Carolina culture and economics, with thousands employed raising, curing, and processing tobacco. Cigarette brands like Winston and Salem were named after the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Durham lent its name to Bull Durham smoking tobacco, as well as the eponymously named Bull Durham movie. The decline of tobacco due to health risks and shifting cultural norms was North Carolina’s first economic blow.
Globalization and the 1999 World Trade Agreement later delivered similar blows to textiles and furniture manufacturing. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs when local industries were unable to compete on costs. Even more perniciously, these manufacturing jobs were concentrated in a small number of North Carolina counties. (See this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond on the fate of furniture making and this New York Times article on textiles.)
The result was deep and sustained structural unemployment for a large group of workers, many of whom had dropped out of high school to work in the tobacco warehouses, the factories, and the mills. As such, they were ill-prepared, despite state retraining efforts, to embrace the new and growing economy of information technology, biomedicine, and banking.
Meanwhile, the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) and Charlotte boomed. Tens of thousands of workers moved from the rust belt to North Carolina, so much so that natives joked that the Research Triangle Park (RTP) bedroom community of Cary was really an acronym, standing for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Concurrently, many native North Carolinians remained on the other side of the economic divide.
As a poor child of the Arkansas backwoods, I knew what it meant to be structurally unemployed and underemployed. (See A Taste of Sherbet.) This context led me to ask a fundamental question: How could the new economy help those left behind in the detritus of the old? It was precisely the kind of wicked problem Alan Blatecky and I envisioned RENCI tackling during our brainstorming sessions.
A Global Antique Shop
The answer came to me one day while walking past a small shopping center near my house in Chapel Hill. There was an antique shop, but one unlike any I had ever seen before.
Rather than a dusty and dim building filled with grandmothers’ unwanted china, paintings of dogs playing poker, or the detritus of American life, this antique store was just a small, brightly lit counter for walk-in customers, with a warehouse barely visible in the back. As I looked up at the store’s signage, with its URL displayed prominently, insight dawned. This mom-and-pop store was no longer a local reseller of low margin goods; it had become a global retailer of fine antiques.
Head spinning with an epiphany, I rushed back to share what I had seen. Here was an opportunity to give local businesses and craftspeople access to global markets, to give the unemployed but entrepreneurial an opportunity to compete and succeed in the new economy. All they needed was a compelling product or service and an e-commerce site.
The time was right. The irrational exuberance (and subsequent bust) of the dot.com boom was over. (I had seen it born with the creation of NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois.) The era of low-speed dialup was being supplanted by inexpensive cable Internet access. People were starting to feel comfortable shopping online.
However, there was an important qualifier; few entrepreneurs then knew how to build and support web sites, particularly ones accepting orders via secure financial transactions. Even if they could, the development cost was often prohibitive. Most e-commerce solutions then required custom code for payment processing, shipping, and inventory management, not to mention ongoing maintenance. Even digital cameras were still rare and still expensive, and they had yet to be integrated with nascent smartphones. Building an e-commerce site was challenging in 2004; it is so much easier now.
Excited by the possibilities, I remember making a simple plea to the powers that be – give me the money for two step vans, a few web servers, and a handful of staff. In turn, I promised to put them on the road, traveling to small towns across North Carolina. There, they would build and launch e-commerce sites for small businesses, giving them global reach and access to the 21st century knowledge economy.
It was the economic empowerment version of what later motivated me to build a mobile museum. (See NASA, the Mobile Museum, and Children’s Dreams.) Helping people means going where they are, rather than expecting them to come to you.
As I recall, my plea was received politely, but I left empty handed and crestfallen, feeling a bit like a voice crying in the wilderness. I remember wondering if I had failed to explain the vision and its implementation convincingly, or if it was too big a lift to trust this transplanted geek from Illinois.
Over twenty years later, I can still see the vans in my mind’s eye, and I imagine what could have been. This was the RENCI I envisioned, one dedicated to building a better world. Despite that failure, RENCI did (and is) making a difference.
Coda
When I was approached about joining Microsoft, it wasn’t the pitch from Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, or Craig Mundie that ultimately closed the deal, flattering though that was. Over dinner one night, Rick Rashid asked me what I was trying to accomplish at RENCI. In response, I told him I was trying to change the socioeconomic trajectory of North Carolina. Perhaps that was hubris, but it was the dream. Rick thought for a moment and said, “Aim higher. Join us, and you can help change the world.” (See Dan@Microsoft.)
That’s still my dream, a better world, not just for some, but for everyone. Sometimes it is as simple as a step van in your neighborhood, but it always starts by meeting each individual or group where they are, with compassion and understanding.
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