Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. All of the award recipients were selected via NSF’s rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international…

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.

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.

Like many of you, I give lots of public (and not so public) presentations, on a variety of topics. A couple of those were recently captured and placed on the web.