Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Education
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Presentations, Humor and Memes
I have been reflecting on the nature of technical presentations. The motivations are manifold, the potential audiences are diverse, the expected outcomes varied, and there are so many ways to sink irretrievably into the quicksand of somnambulant soliloquy.When done well, however, public speaking is a form of performance art. Enjoy it, and help your listeners…
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Innovation Via Client Plus Cloud: Microsoft-NSF Partnership
Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and…
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Consilience: Innovation Enabler
In this era of hyper-specialization, it is important to remember the combined power of generality and specialization, lest we render true the old joke that education teaches one more and more about less and less until finally one knows everything about nothing and is eligible for a Ph.D. After all, Ph.D. is an abbreviation for…
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Impact, Not Indicators or Artifacts
N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog. Publish and/or perish; proposals and reports; research, teaching and service: these are the “death and taxes” equivalents for life in major research universities. Success — or at least promotion and tenure – is normally measured…
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Bridging Cultures for Collaboration
One group was dressed in t-shirts, shorts and sandals and would have blended nicely with the nearby beachgoers. The second group was dressed in conservative business suits that would not have drawn a second glance in the corporate world. Imagine my surprise when I saw members of both groups entering the building where I was…
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NITRD Reauthorization: Enabling the Future
As a computing researcher, as chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and as a former member of the President’s IT Advisory Committee and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), I have spoken and written repeatedly about the state of computing research in the United States, the importance of long-term, strategic…