Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Author: Dan Reed
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Dan@Microsoft.com
On December 3, I will embark on the next installment of my own future, which will place me in the center of the ever-evolving computing revolution. On that day, I will be joining Microsoft to head a new research initiative (see the Microsoft Research press release and RENCI/UNC press release) in scalable and multicore computing.
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KAUST IT Summit Reflections
From discussions, it is really clear is that the success or failure of KAUST will depend on Saudi Aramco’s ability to recruit world-class faculty to Saudi Arabia. As I noted in my closing comments, the old Zenith marketing slogan remains apt: “The quality goes in before the name goes on.”
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KAUST: A New University
KAUST was created with a $10B endowment. To put that number in perspective, it is the sixth largest university endowment in the world. KAUST is intended to serve as a catalyst for a knowledge economy in Saudi Arabia.
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Life in the Clouds
Diverse computing services, backed by massive data centers, are now being delivered not just to businesses but to individuals and their mobile devices. Life in the clouds is here, primitive but evolving rapidly in response to powerful social and economic forces.
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Mind to Mind: Building Innovation
My friend, Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s chief architect, relates a wonderful story about his undergraduate experience, when he worked as part of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Innovation: The Plane of Excellence
My friend Thomas Sterling once posed a rhetorical question whose answer still haunts me, “In which year of birth (1930 or 1970) would one have had the higher probability of walking on the moon?” Putting aside the Cold War dynamics of the race to the moon, which were both real and complex, Sterling’s question is…