Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Information Technology
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Smart Grids: Getting Personal
How many electronic devices do you own? Here’s a simple experiment that will (quite literally) illuminate the truth. Some evening, after darkness has fallen, turn off all the lights in your house, walk from room to room and count the number of lighted power indicators, blinking LEDs and glowing screens. I suspect you will be…
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The World Is Small
There was a time, not that many years ago, when international travel meant one was largely inaccessible to colleagues at home, wherever home might be. Today, I struggle to stay afloat in a deluge of email, regardless of my international location.
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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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Language Shapes Behavior: Our Poor Cousin, Data
One of the major lessons from web search and cloud data centers is the power of truly massive scale, near real-time data analysis. When anyone with a cheap cell phone and a web browser can extract data and insights from a non-trivial fraction of the human knowledge base, behavior and culture are transformed. I would…
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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…