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Technology Science

Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years 449

Posted by michael from the things-to-sink-your-teeth-into dept.
terrapyn writes "Infoworld is reporting: 'A group of British computer scientists have proposed a number of grand challenges for IT that they hope will drive forward research, similar to the way the human genome project drove life sciences research through the 1990s.' Did they get it right? What are some other worthy computing challenges?"
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Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years More

Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years

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  • Just ONE request... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:53PM (#11473552)
    A battery, a really good battery. Something that'll make my laptop last as long as my Palm. Or maybe power a light-saber... But really all we need for our dreams to come true is a good battery.
    • True.. that's one thing they left off their list. Battery life hasn't increased at the rate as I'd like it to. Id would be a beautiful thing if I only had to charge my PDA once/month, or my laptop could go a week without charging

    • Re:Just ONE request... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is not a request for IT. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.

      It is a request for ET Engineering Technology. .segmond
    • My palm lasts for ever and so does my laptop though the laptop is more fun, but neither requires batteries, the mail order did not have a battery operated auto model ... ooops you meant computers

    • Re:Just ONE request... (Score:4, Informative)

      by plover ( 150551 ) * on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:11PM (#11473778) Homepage Journal
      Fuel cells.

      They already have prototypes small enough to power a cell phone, and they're approaching the marketplace. Cost is unknown, but you can expect them to be expensive at first. And if they take platinum as a catalyst, costs will of course stay high.

      It will remain to be seen if people will accept carrying volatile fluids around with them, but I'm betting they'll come out with a "clean change" cartridge system that people will like. Just think: no recharging time. A small reservoir will probably allow for a hot-swap of the cartridge as well, meaning not even any down-time.

      Next problem?

      • Rechargeable? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ironsides ( 739422 )
        I thought fuel cells weren't rechargeable. As in rechargeable without pumping more Hydrogen into them. If it's not possible to recharge them as easily as you can a battery, it's not gonna succede very well. I don't think people will want to have to "Hydrogen up" their batteries like the "Gas up" their car.

        • Re:Rechargeable? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by plover ( 150551 ) *
          You're correct in that they're not "rechargeable", they're "refillable."

          Fuel will probably be available in cartridges that are shaped to fit the manufacturer's equipment. Replacing them will need to be as easy and fast as changing batteries. Don't forget that current fuel cells are designed with on-board cracking of methanol, which allows for liquid fuel rather than having a pressure tank of pure hydrogen. It will make things much more convenient, although at the possible expense of some size/weight, a

    • Mobile power (batteries) is the only thing restricting us from having amazing portable machines. Lion tech is getting old and unable to power our society. With processor speeds reaching 4ghz soon, the battery "industry" is lagging way behind. Hell, we had like 386's when Lithium ion came out.
    • That's funny...I usually like it better when my Palm outlasts my laptop. The other way around just gets too frustrating.
  • Make Windows secure.

  • Nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)

    by MAdMaxOr ( 834679 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:54PM (#11473566)
    I didn't see anything that hasn't already been proposed many times before. Also, the article was short, and the descriptions were very general and boring.

    **yawn**
    • Yes, the descriptions are vague, and I think necessarily so. It's a challenge to possibly develop new technologies that will do these things, or perhaps make them obselete or un-needed. Also, sometimes the end result is boring, but the technology needed to get there is pretty exciting. A lot of people are bored now when you talk about putting a satellite in orbit, or exploring the bottom of the ocean, but when you start to break down the technology that it takes to make it there, you kinda go "WOW!"

      Set
    • This was an open call that you could have participated in if you had better to offer. Instead you chose to heckle from afar - from Slashdot where such a vacuous criticism can be rated 'informative'... ha!

  • Who knows what will happen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chris09876 ( 643289 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:54PM (#11473567)
    They're setting these as goals for the next 15 years... but who really knows what's going to happen 15 years from now? If Moore's law holds (and we have no reason to think it won't), we'll have almost 2^10 times the computing power we do today. That's a huge number!! Setting these goals is a nice idea..., but who knows what the world has in store.
    • This is like going "Hey lets build an electric power space rocket!". It's fine and dandy having the power to do it, but you need the powers behind it to make them work. Hell just turn off your electric for a day and you'll see my point.
    • Well, think about what's happened in the last 15 years ... and consider that while we certainly have lots of cool stuff now that we didn't have in 1990, the fact is that the outlines of the modern computing world were well in place at that point. If anything, as much as I appreciate the power of modern computers, I'm disappointed that we haven't seen more revolutionary stuff come down the pike.
    • Processing power doesn't drive innovation as some claim a lack of it drives efficiency. Even if, in fifteen years, we've got computers with a thousand times the circuitry, programs will run just as fast as they do today, and what we use it for will generally be the same. What innovations do occur seem to be folded back into existing technology, making it better. This looks at innovations that do more than just make a better search engine, and change how we look at the computer.

      Ubiquitous computing is a

  • DATA DATA DATA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:54PM (#11473571)
    We are being buried in data and are just beginning to adapt the crudest methods for organizing it and mining it. If in 20 years we have not solved the problem of dealing with giant piles of data, then IT will become a cost instead of a benefit.

    • Re:DATA DATA DATA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:15PM (#11473829) Homepage
      I'll agree with this one. I look at my company's servers, and it seems like we just keep having to add more hard drives. Some of it's because people are disorganized, but sometimes people are disorganized because of the massive amounts of data that they're dealing with.

      I have users with multi-GB mailboxes that can't quite be deleted, but archiving it doesn't really solve the problem either, it just makes it harder for the user to find what he's looking for.

      So, it's a basic problem. Every day, we're generating more data. The amount of data (in bytes) is going up every day, as computers are more easily able to deal with higher resolution pictures and movies. But what do we do with all this data? Just keep writing it to tape and storing it in bunkers? After we accrue enough data, what's the point of keeping it?-- you won't be able to find anything anymore.

      It's a real problem for me, both as an IT pro and personally. When dealing with so much data, how do you:

      1. keep everything you want
      2. make it easy to find what you want when you want it
      3. make it easy to access what you want when you want it
      4. throw away everything you aren't going to want
      And how do you do all that with:
      1. a solution a non-techie can deal with (grandma needs her data safe, too)
      2. security from unauthorized access
      3. security from data loss (off-site backups?)
      4. an affordable price (both corporate and personal solutions)
      5. without spending the amount of time on this that only an obsessive compulsive would consider acceptable
      I haven't seen an acceptable solution yet.

    • Re:DATA DATA DATA (Score:4, Insightful)

      by joshsnow ( 551754 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:31PM (#11474011) Journal
      I seem to remember, from my university days, being told that meaningful information (as opposed to "data") must be relevant, timely, structured and domain specific.

      I agree, we are being buried in data but perhaps that's because the emphasis is on collecting data rather than managing information.

      IT will continue to be a benefit so long as we focus on precisely what we're gathering and structuring data for.

      • Re:DATA DATA DATA (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Fareq ( 688769 )
        please forgive the obvious here:

        You are correct. That is why it's not called Data Technology.

        However, I think the key is that people want information and computers store only data. "Data Mining" is the science of extracting a small amount of information from a mountain of data. I guess it's a bit of a misnomer.

        Gold Miners mine through a mountain of quartz looking for gold.

        I don't know what kind of structures silver is in, but its the same deal, Silver miners are seeking silver.

        The last thing Data Mi

    • Re:DATA DATA DATA (Score:3, Informative)

      by Linker3000 ( 626634 )
      I'd actually put it another way - many organisations are only beginning to realise that they need to do something (or can do something) with all the information they are gathering and/or that there is value in what the information can tell them about their customer base (internal or external) and business workings.

      To imply that we're only just working out what to do with all our information is not quite right because the principles of Knowledge Management are well established - for example one of the often
  • How about an OS that doesn't suck?

  • I'm still waiting for things promised by Y2K (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:57PM (#11473604)
    What about all the fanciful things we were supposed to have "By the year 2000!"?

    What a joke that turned out to be. I'm still making calls with an audio-only phone and I have yet to come across a practical hover-car.
  • a decent IT system that can manage the projects we've been waiting for. Namely, the flying car and Duke Nukem Forever. One day we'll see this future materialize.

  • Cell phones (Score:3, Funny)

    by Reignking ( 832642 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:57PM (#11473614) Journal
    I think we need to develop cell phones that can cook, clean, and drive my car. For $25. Oh, and I guess they need to be able to send and receive phone calls.
    • I think we need to develop cell phones that can cook, clean, and drive my car. For $25. Oh, and I guess they need to be able to send and receive phone calls.

      Talk about being married to your cellphone...

    • Don't worry. Your cell phone will cook, clean, and drive, and it will be free with a 2-year contract. Sadly they'll give you 10,000 cooking minutes per month but only 15 driving minutes. The wireless companies will lobby to outlaw new flying cars that would cut down your drive time and cost them money in overage charges.
  • The problem of keeping memories for life isn't one of technology. Its one of fire, theft, vandalism, keeping your files on a usb flash drive in your shirt pocket as you bend over the toilet.

    I have data that is still intact from 1980, 25 years ago, because I have taken care to keep copying it to backup media, current media (tapes to CDs to DVD, etc.)

    Point being, we can keep data for as long as we're interested in investing the time and money to do it right. Just because some fool can't learn how to backup

  • Speaking of simulating life... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rewt66 ( 738525 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:58PM (#11473618)
    Here's a challenge: A patient comes into a doctor's office with a bacterial infection. Worse, it's one of those antibiotic resistant bugs. What we need to be able to do is:
    - sequence the bacteria's DNA right there in the doctor's office (this part isn't really an IT challenge)
    - from the bacteria's genetics, determine which antibiotics (out of all known ones) can effectively kill it
    - if none can effectively kill it, ship the DNA sequence information off to the CDC's supercomputers, and have them automatically develop a new antibiotic that will kill the bug.

    I figure that this is a challenge for the next forty years, not just for the next twenty.
    • Biology/DNA Algorithms.
    • Biology/DNA != Algoritms

      (Poorly-written Slashdot HTML filter...)

    • Biggest Problem in that Scenario (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Inhibit ( 105449 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:35PM (#11474060) Homepage Journal
      You forgot

      - Get the patient to take the antibiotic all the way through

      That's the crucial missing step that's let the nasty bugs get this far :).
    • One way this might be accomplished would be via antisense DNA - you make a DNA strand that is the compliment to a critical gene of the bacterium. Inject into the patient.

      The bacteria take up the DNA, which then binds to the gene when it is attempting to make the mRNA to synthisize its protein, thus blocking mRNA formation and killing the bacterium (or at least slowing it down enough for the patient's immune system to kill it.)

  • Most important goal... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:58PM (#11473625)
    Come on people, we need to break the one million mark on the number of different text editors for unix based systems!

  • How about (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cubicledrone ( 681598 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @04:59PM (#11473633)

    Keeping people employed for more than five weeks?

  • nonclassical methods (Score:3, Funny)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <k4_pacificNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:00PM (#11473651) Homepage Journal
    From TFA: "Journeys in nonclassical computation: Classically, computation is viewed mathematically in terms of algorithms, but there are other ways to look at it. These include rethinking the rigid classification schemes computers use and turning to others based on family resemblance or on metaphor"

    I know! I'll develop a new type of database that is indexed by the degree to which the primary key sounds either "woody" or "tinny" when spoken. I'll make millions!!

  • This was interesting from page 13 of the linked BCS report:

    Vision: applications
    There are numerous applications of Memories for Life. In the next 5-10 years, we expect that the most progress may be made in systems that help people retrieve and organize their memories. For example, such a system might help a person find all memories, regardless of type, about his or her holiday in Germany two years ago; and also help organize these memories by time, location or topic.

    Nice for someone who has Alzheime

  • How about this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:03PM (#11473695)
    A computer system that will pass the Turing Test [wikipedia.org].
    • Systems that come close enough to the Turing Test that its terms have to be clarified and refined are already with us. Furthermore the type of results we get from funding those kind of AI goals are drying up. These are both reasons why we need new challenges...

  • Simulated Sex should be our next challenge... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:04PM (#11473696)
    Simulated sex should be our next challenge, sex has already helped us, and will continue to help us, in pushing the limits of what's technologically possible.

  • A Slashdot Dupe Checker (Score:5, Funny)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:04PM (#11473697) Journal
    Should be easy right? Never the less it has stumped slashdot editors for many many years.
  • I see the future using a lot more distributed computing and distributed technologies.

    More programs like at distributed.net. Also cancer reseach, mapping the human genes, and SETI.

    I see more distributed software technologies. Microsoft itself wanted to try "download and run" schemes, where you purchase a piece of software and then download some code chunk that allows you to run the program for only a single session.

    In gaming Bit Torrent is a popular medium for patching games and Steam is certainly going t

  • Too bad they're impossible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wylfing ( 144940 ) <brian AT wylfing DOT net> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:06PM (#11473720) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunately, none of these aspirations will materialize. IT in the U.S. and Europe is going to stagnate for the next 10-15 years, because the RIAA and MPAA (and their European equivalents) will continue doing everything they can to bring technology back to 1996 levels; and patents on algorithms and business methods will confound any new technology ventures.

    • So far the British Phonographic Industry has had little to say about the concurrency theory research in ubiquitous computing or models for non-classical computation.

      (Whether you meant 'IT' beyond the scope of the article I don't know, but suggest that you read it...)
    • And you expect that all such advancements will come from the U.S. and/or Europe? I say you're either disillusioned or biased. China, India, Russia, and other such countries will be the ones meeting these challenges in an environment that is virtually void of such limits and restrictions.

    • Oh come on, there's more to IT than personal computers.

  • Web applications (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fiannaFailMan ( 702447 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:07PM (#11473734) Journal
    The PDFs were getting a little slashdotted so I couldn't fully RTFA, but here's what I see as an exciting area: Getting the richness and usability of the desktop application in a web-based application. The metaphor of the submitted 'form' and requested 'page' is very limiting. Imagine using Word in such a way that you had to destroy and patiently reload the page every time you wanted to embolden a bit of text or reformat a paragraph. The reach of applications has taken a step forward with the web, but in terms of usability a giant step was taken back.

    This is where technology like Macromedia Flex [macromedia.com] comes in. I've seen this stuff in action, and the process of creating complex applications is so easy it's unbelievable. A field of sortable and stretchable columns can be generated with about three lines of code, and the data that goes into it can come from any application server you like.

    Sure, anything that uses the Flash player gets a hammering on Slashdot, but I sense that times are a changing around here and more people are starting to wake up to the potential of this stuff, even if it goes a little against the open source ethos of the place.

    BTW, if you're a member of the "Flash sucks and I hate it because some people used to abuse it by making annoying animations with it" brigade, see my journal where I've already refuted your half-baked criticisms.

    • Too bad for the macromedia fanboys that the answer to your problem is called "SVG+XML+Xforms".
      • It never ceases to amaze me that the anti Macromedia brigade so quickly rolls out their rebuttals along the lines of "Oh but if you do a week's worth of DHTML coding, use a few iFrames here and there, throw in a bit of server-side trickery, and anything else you can do in SVG, what could be simpler?" while casually ignoring that Flash or Flex can do all of this in a single easy-to-use package.

        In any case SVG doesn't have half the abilities of Flash and it definitely doesn't have anywhere near the same lev

  • Here's a challenge... (Score:5, Funny)

    by joshsnow ( 551754 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:08PM (#11473752) Journal
    What are some other worthy computing challenges?

    Making Firefox on Linux as quick as Firefox on Windows... ;-)

  • Idea for Linguistic Intermediate Language (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rie Beam ( 632299 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:14PM (#11473821) Journal
    How about an intermediate computer linguistic language for translations?

    Let's say there's a chatroom with a guy from Poland, a girl from Japan, and a duck (this is not a serious example, obviously, and why they are in this chatroom is left to the user's imagination). The duck sends his message, and it gets scrambled into the intermediate language. This language can now be translated directly into any local dialect, without having to translate the message for each seperate language being used, or without the user having the know the language. Just imagine - a user from Russia chatting with a user from Mexico, and neither knowing the other is anything but their native tongue. Of course it's not meant to be a cultural mask or anything - certain language / cultural barriers would of course be present, but at least this is better than having to run to Babelfish every few seconds.

  • Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SashaM ( 520334 ) <msasha&gmail,com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:15PM (#11473825) Homepage

    Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools? Two words - Halting Problem [wikipedia.org].

    • Halting Problem
      Maybe you'd care to expand on those two words to explain why you don't think that there are classes of computational processes for which classes of specification can be proven as met, or why you don't think this is useful...

      • Maybe you'd care to expand on those two words to explain why you don't think that there are classes of computational processes for which classes of specification can be proven as met, or why you don't think this is useful...

        There most certainly are such classes and classes, but the proving cannot be automated (except for non turing-complete languages). A computer can verify that a "proof" is indeed a proof, but it cannot produce such a proof itself.

        Perhaps if every binary came along with a proof of its

  • It's the 21st Century - we're supposed to have flying cars already. But we can't even make a crummy phonecall anymore without getting ulcers. How about meeting the challenge of asking (by speaking their name) to speak with someone, any time, anywhere, and immediately being told either "hello!", or to wait a minute while they get free, or to leave a message, or to call back, or that the recipient is unknown (even if that's an anonymizing lie)? Reciprocally, how about getting told that someone (by name) is ca

  • Solve the spam problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdot@@@uiuc...edu> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @05:32PM (#11474019) Homepage Journal
    Seriously. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but it is. So let's solve it already!
  • I am still waiting for some of the big problems from the 1950s, whose solutions were "just around the corner". These include:
    - Automated language translation.
    - Self-programming computers.
    - Natural language understanding and interfaces.
    - Image understanding.
    ...

    These has migrated in and out of artificial intelligence over the decades.
  • from article about the real article:

    a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run

    That sounds a lot like the problem at the heart of the Church-Turing thesis [wolfram.com], the so-called halting problem. And that one was shown to be impossible [well, "undecidable" was their exact word] because it can be mapped to Goedel's incompleteness [wolfram.com] result...What did I miss? This will be hard even for trivial programs, let alone any you would want to run.
    Besides, this correctness mirage has

  • The Seinfeld test is a special subset of the Turing test. The computer has to be able to make new and funny jokes. It has to be able to recognize humor and laugh.

  • The worthy challenge (Score:2, Insightful)

    by reshin ( 70987 )
    Save the environment; most other things can be delayed. Discover efficient alternative energy sources to plant and fossil fuels; develop the materials and processes to implement these alternatives; build more detailed environmental models to aid in the study of the effects of pollution and the effects of tearing down natural habitats.
  • Find SCO proprietary code in IBM Linux.
  • What the hell do they think has been happening all these since it's introduction.

  • They need to learn basic compsci (Score:3, Informative)

    by DunbarTheInept ( 764 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @06:53PM (#11474873) Homepage
    To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.

    This, admittedly was in the summary text in the magazine, not the article by the scientists themselves, so it could be a case of "idiot summarizing it wrong", but there just is NO WAY to do what they are talking about. No how, no way.

    To prove a program correct requires that you run it in a test environment. If you run it, and it is not correct, you get the same problem in your test run that occurs in the real run. Therefore you cannot test for a program's correctness automatically in a compiler. For example, any program trying to detect if a loop is infinite will itself end up looping infinitely when it encounters one and tries to check it.

    • just is NO WAY to do what they are talking about.

      Wrong. Machine-verified proof of correctness is quite feasible. We did it twenty years ago. [psu.edu] The DEC SRL people did a nice proof of correctness system for Java in the 1990s, before Carly shut down DEC research. It's hard to build such systems, but not impossible. The theory is well understood now, which wasn't true when we did it.

      It's not that hard to prove loop termination. You must define some measure which, for each iteration of the loop, decreases.

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