Grand Challenges in Comp. Sci.

Jan. 26, 2005 -- Here's a real interesting article that appeared in yesterday's edition of InfoWorld. (You can get the actual conference report here.)Essentially, some computer scientists from Britain outline 7 "grand challenges" in the field of IT that will be faced over the next one to two decades. This is VERY interesting, and if you are wondering what areas of research in Computer Science to get into over the next 3-5 years, you should seriously read this document.

Summarized, they are as follows:

1. In Vivo-in Silico (iViS): the virtual worm, weed and bug -- They outline the necessity of developing computer systems that behave and simulate living organisms. Their argument is that this would allow us to better understand and comprehend living organisms in ways we have yet to observe.
2. Science for global ubiquitous computing -- (Read #4. This should have been included in that section.) Realizing that computers are becoming pervasive and ubiquitous is continuing to open numerous areas of research.
3. Memories for life -- The claim is that the number of people digitizing their life is growing exponentially. (e.g. Photos, video, important documents, etc..) This is creating information overload. New areas of research are opening up to allow this enormous amount of data to be easily managed, that will tap into areas such as security, privacy, databases, information retrieval, AI, machine learning, HCI, etc..
4. Development of a global, scalable ubiquitous computing infrastructure -- Do any type of current research into ubicomp, and you'll clearly see the need for commonality in this field. The number of computers all around us is exploding. The potential areas of research is again, security, privacy, context awareness, self-configuration, seamless communication, numerous human factors (this stuff must be invisible to us, otherwise we're not going to use it), etc.
5. Better understanding of the brain and the mind -- This has more of a philosophical background of interest. We all should realize the most powerful computing machinery on the face of this earth is your brain! Some view the brain as being analogous to computing machinery and the mind as virtual software. Our brain does so much that we barely understand. Perhaps better understand of how our mind works can open opportunities in CSI.
6. Dependable systems evolution -- To me, this should have been the number one focus of the conference. Without better methodologies that allow more dependable systems, while still saving on time and money, none of the above will be able to happen. Regardless, they outline the development of a verifying compiler that can prove the correctness of the
   program before being run.
7. Journeys in non-classical computation -- It's time to go well beyond much of the traditional theory of computation as has been research and open doors to new paradigms. Classical computing, which most would agree is the Turing Machine model, is not an adequate model of reality for all notions of computing. Take quantum computing as an example...

Very cool.