Inventing The Future: The Magic Carpet Ride
Inventing The Future: The Magic Carpet Ride
Presentation by Dr. Daniel A. Reed
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Time: 6:00 PM (Pizza) 7:00 PM (Presentation)
Microsoft Building 99
Room 1919
14820 NE 36st Street
Redmond, Washington 98052
Ten years – a geological epoch on the computing time scale. Looking back, a decade has brought the web and consumer email, digital cameras and music, broadband networking, multifunction cell phones, WiFi, HDTV, telematics, multiplayer games, electronic commerce and mainstream computational science. It has also brought spam, identity theft, software insecurity, globalization, information warfare, blurred work-life boundaries, distributed sensors and inexpensive storage and clusters.
What will another decade of technology advances bring to scientific discovery? As Yogi Berra famously noted, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Without a doubt, though, scientific discovery, business practice and social interactions are moving rapidly from a world of homogeneous and local systems to a world of distributed software, virtual organizations and cloud computing infrastructure. In science, a tsunami of new experimental and computational data and a suite of increasingly ubiquitous sensors pose vexing problems in data analysis, transport, visualization and collaboration. In society and business, software as a service and cloud computing are empowering distributed groups.
This talk reflects on current practice, lessons learned, a vision and an approach to solving some of today’s most challenging scientific and societal problems using powerful new computing tools. Dr. Reed’s unique leadership position at the forefront of Computing and Information technology will provide the best insight into upcoming technological trends and direction. This vision will hopefully allow engineers, entrepreneurs and business leaders to position themselves ahead of the pack for the great opportunities these upcoming technologies have to offer.
Daniel A. Reed is Microsoft’s Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategist, responsible for re-envisioning the data center of the future. Dr. Reed’s research focuses on the design of very high-speed computers and on providing new computing capabilities for science, engineering and the humanities, as well as business and society.
Dr. Reed is a member of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) which provides advice on information technology issues and challenges to the President, a former member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and the chair of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association.
Amongst the positions he has held are Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Director of Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), leader of the National Computational Science Alliance and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.