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Continuing Innovation in Information Technology (2012)

Chapter: Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
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Appendix B

Transfers of Ideas and People and Other
Impacts Since 2003 Added to
Figure 1

Table B.1 gives some examples of the many transfers of ideas and people and other impacts that occurred as the fields of computing and communications progressed, and it provides annotation for events depicted by arrows in Figure 1. It is not meant to be a comprehensive description of the history of the research in any of the areas listed.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×

TABLE B.1 Transfers and Other Impacts Since 2003 as Indicated by the New Arrows Added to Figure 1


Research Track and Events

      Origins

      Impact


Digital Communications

Multiple-input and multiple-output

Closely related university research pre-1996; industry R&D (Bell Labs BLAST) in 1998

A fundamental enabler in today’s wireless communications, including WiFi, WiMax, 4G, LTE, and others

Radio-frequency complementary metal-oxide semiconductor integrated circuits

Basic research and some serious engineering efforts in universities throughout the 1990s

The foundational device technology for WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and others

Wireless locating

Industry R&D in the early 2000s, with subsequent university research

Fundamental to some wireless systems, and an energy-saving supplement to GPS for mobile devices; now a foundation for growing location-based services

Bluetooth

Ericsson and open SIG 1994, with participation by industry and university; based on earlier research in spread-spectrum radio

Now the industry standard for very-short-range secure networking; used primarily for local connectivity of devices

MACA channel access protocol

University and industry research starting in 1990 and continuing to 2000s

The foundation for collision avoidance on shared physical network links, particularly for wireless networks

Computer Architecture

Adaptive branch predictors

Two-level adaptive branch predictors started in academic research around 1992

Significant influence on subsequent research, as well as influence on modern processor designs

Memory-dependence predictors

Both university and industrial research, emerging in practical form around 1996-1997

Fundamental to enabling aggressive out-of-order execution in practice, affecting research in compilers and architectures, and commercial products

Multicore

Early university-based developments, such as Stanford Hydra and MIT RAW, circa 2002; later, industry R&D such as Sun’s Niagara, around 2005

Fundamental to all processor architectures on the market today; furthermore, the problems of parallel computing have become central in research

Stream-based image-processing architectures

University-based research on stream-processing for image and signal processing, leading to developments such as Imagine, circa 2002

The foundation for today’s GPUs; today there is considerable research and commercial development on applications that go far beyond graphics processing

Graphical processing unit in iPhone

Industry 2007

Present in mobile computers for some time, now considered de rigueur, given the user-experience advantages demonstrated by the iPad/iPhone

Advances in parallel computing applied to commercial product development

Continued university work on parallel computing in 2000s and earlier

Collaboration by top computer architecture researchers in academia and movement between the university and industry communities

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×

Research Track and Events

      Origins

      Impact


Software Technologies

Modern virtual machines

A long history of university research, with recent practical developments such as DISCO in 1997, and companies like VMware in 1998

A fundamental building block of cloud technology, allowing more effective provisioning of data-center services and security

Modern buffer overrun protections

Universities and industry throughout the 2000s

Operating systems starting to incorporate dynamic methods for improving security

Web 2.0

Industry, 2004

A fundamental shift in thinking in the operating system research community, as a new layer of distributed application infrastructure emerges

Multitouch appears in iPhone

Industry, 2007

New research thrusts in gesture-based user interfaces and some re-thinking of system architectures

Kinect

Industry, 2010

Originally designed as a game controller, then adopted by researchers as a new core sensor for many applications

Networking

Content distribution networks

Early foundations developed in universities, contributing algorithms, systems concepts, and people to companies such as Akamai, 1998

A fundamental part of how the Internet works, essential to provision of services such as YouTube, news sites, and many others

Multiprotocol label switching

Early developments in companies such as Ipsilon Networks, circa 1996

Had a fundamental influence on subsequent university research in networking

GigaScope and others

Industry and university research, in particular AT&T Labs around 2003

Stream-based measurement and traffic analysis on large networks (and the Internet)—a fundamental tool for today’s research

OpenFlow

Stanford University, 2008

Issued as a standard in 2011

Parallel and Distributed Systems

Map-Reduce

Fundamental ideas date back to the 1960s, but made practical at scale by Google in 2004

Changed the research thinking in distributed computing; a foundation for many cloud systems

Hadoop

Open-source development, around 2006

Had immediate influence on university research, including not only distributed systems but also areas such as machine learning and databases; increasingly the base for commercial offerings

Message passing interface

A university and industry standards development, around 1994

The standard mechanism for programming high-performance computers

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×

Research Track and Events

      Origins

      Impact


Parallel and Distributed Systems
(continued)

Parallel virtual machine

Originated at Oakridge National Laboratory and university around 1990-1991

A key foundation for programming a networked collection of computers as a single system, for both research and practical applications

Peer-to-peer

Open community, picking up steam around 2004

Significant influence on a wide variety of widely used systems, such as Skype

Databases

Researchers leave Stanford to found Google

University to start-up, 1998

Google

Data integration technologies

University and industry R&D throughout the 2000s

Fundamental impact on the “big data” movement, as seen in technologies such as Google Fusion Tables (2009)

Data-stream management systems

Industry R&D in the early 2000s

A key driver and enabler for both research and commercial developments in “big data”

XML

Broad community process in 1997; earlier SGML late 1980s

A key foundation for representation of online content on the Web and other IT-based systems

Computer Graphics

Poisson image editing

Industry R&D, 2003

A major advance in image editing, now a core of image-processing tools (like Photoshop) and associated algorithms

Image stitching

Industry and university research, circa 2005

Omnipresent, from its use in mapping services (e.g., Google Maps) to modern filmmaking and panorama features in cameras

Spherical harmonic shading

Universities, around 2002

A major advance in (relatively) low-overhead realistic shading and shadowing in computer graphics

LightStage real-time capture

Universities (especially University of Southern California), in 2002

A foundation for today’s digital image capture, used widely with particular impact in moviemaking and recognized recently with an Academy Award

Stable fluids and related methods

Universities, around 1999

The core of all image and video rendering for realistic smoke, water, and so on

Disney/Pixar labs

Industry-university partnership, in 2007

Similar to the Intel “lablet” model, for closer collaboration between industry and university research

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×

Research Track and Events

      Origins

      Impact


AI and Robotics

Incremental heuristic search

Universities, around 2004

A building block for a wide array of data mining and search technologies, as well as a foundation for basic research

Hidden Markov models for biology, speech, and the like

University and industry R&D throughout the 1990s

A major step in the general reduction of problems outside of core computing (genomics, speech processing, and so on) to algorithmic problems

Recommender systems

University and industry R&D, circa 1994

A core element of today’s e-commerce systems

Bayesian methods applied

University and industry R&D throughout the 1990s

Fundamental to the major shift toward more statistical approaches to machine intelligence

Kinect audio and vision

Microsoft, 2010

The most rapidly adopted consumer electronics device of all time


Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×
Page 27
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×
Page 28
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×
Page 29
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×
Page 30
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Transfers of Ideas and People and Impacts Since 2003 Added to Figure 1." National Research Council. 2012. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13427.
×
Page 31
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Information technology (IT) is widely understood to be the enabling technology of the 21st century. IT has transformed, and continues to transform, all aspects of our lives: commerce and finance, education, employment, energy, health care, manufacturing, government, national security, transportation, communications, entertainment, science, and engineering. IT and its impact on the U.S. economy-both directly (the IT sector itself) and indirectly (other sectors that are powered by advances in IT)—continue to grow in size and importance.

In 1995, the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) produced the report Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure. A graphic in that report, often called the "tire tracks" diagram because of its appearance, produced an extraordinary response by clearly linking government investments in academic and industry research to the ultimate creation of new information technology industries with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Used in presentations to Congress and executive branch decision makers and discussed broadly in the research and innovation policy communities, the tire tracks figure dispelled the assumption that the commercially successful IT industry is self-sufficient, underscoring through long incubation periods of years and even decades. The figure was updated in 2002, 2003, and 2009 reports produced by the CSTB. With the support of the National Science Foundation, CSTB updated the tire tracks figure. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology includes the updated figure and a brief text based in large part on prior CSTB reports.

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