Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Technology
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Goldilocks, Porridge and Science: Getting It Right
It is now incumbent upon us to rethink how we facilitate discovery and innovation in this brave new world of large data, for practitioners of both small and large science. Simply put, we must reconsider how we fund, construct, manage and operate scientific data repositories.
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Ubiquitous Communication
I have posted a few thoughts on the coming Internet of Things and the implications for cognitive communication over on the Microsoft on the Issues blog. Everywhere, anytime communication is a notable result of recent computing advances, but it’s dependent upon available bandwidth, and that bandwidth is finite. Spectrum is, in many ways, like a…
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Intellectual Amplification via Computing
As the recent performance of IBM’s Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! Illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing is opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush’s 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.
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Disruptive Innovation: Changing Lives
In a world of exponential technological change, with its concomitant social and economic disruptions, it is all too easy for the intelligentsia and technorati to pontificate glibly on macroeconomic trends, demographic shifts and global talent flows while speaking sotto voce, if at all, about the human cost of technological future shock. I confess that I…
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Works in Progress: MIA
I bemoan the seeming demise of the technical report, long a fixture in academic research circles.It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing’s history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. Perhaps we could even ban wireless devices to ensure participation. After gestation, ideas conceived at those workshops might…
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Social Leadership: Empty Seats at the Table
In the Information Age, computing researchers are well placed to be bilingual, translating computing technology trends and capabilities into the language understood by policy makers and other influentials, and, in turn, relating policy desires to other researchers. However, I am repeatedly struck by the relatively small number of computing researchers who are engaged in the…