Continuing
Innovation
IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Workshop Report
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Continuing
Innovation
IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Workshop Report
Committee on Continuing Innovation in Information Technology
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, D.C.
www.nap.edu
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS 500 Fifth Street, NW Washington, DC 20001
This publication is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1343663. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-43724-0
International Standard Book Number-10: 0-309-43724-5
Digital Object Identifier: 10.17226/23393
Additional copies of this report are available for sale from the National Academies Press, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Keck 360, Washington, DC 20001; (800) 624-6242 or (202) 334-3313; http://www.nap.edu.
Copyright 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Suggested citation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Continuing Innovation in Information Technology: Workshop Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/23393.
Acknowledgment of Reviewers
This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the Report Review Committee. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the deliberative process. We wish to thank the following individuals for their review of this report:
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland,
Butler W. Lampson, Microsoft Research,
Kathleen Kingscott, IBM Corporation,
Robert F. Sproull, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
Edward D. Lazowska, University of Washington, and
Mark A. Horowitz, Stanford University.
Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations, nor did they see the final draft of the report before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Samuel H. Fuller, Analog Devices, who was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution.
COMMITTEE ON CONTINUING INNOVATION IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
PETER LEE, Microsoft Research, Chair
MARK DEAN, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
EDWARD FRANK, Brilliant Lime, Inc., and Cloud Parity Inc.
YANN LeCUN, New York University
BARBARA H. LISKOV, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ELIZABETH MYNATT, Georgia Institute of Technology
Staff
VIRGINIA BACON TALATI, Program Officer
SHENAE BRADLEY, Senior Program Assistant
JON EISENBERG, Director, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS BOARD
FARNAM JAHANIAN, Carnegie Mellon University, Chair
LUIZ ANDRE BARROSO, Google, Inc.
STEVEN M. BELLOVIN, Columbia University
ROBERT F. BRAMMER, Brammer Technology, LLC
EDWARD FRANK, Brilliant Cloud, Inc., and Lime Parity, Inc.
SEYMOUR E. GOODMAN, Georgia Institute of Technology
LAURA HAAS, IBM Corporation
MARK HOROWITZ, Stanford University
MICHAEL KEARNS, University of Pennsylvania
ROBERT KRAUT, Carnegie Mellon University
SUSAN LANDAU, Google, Inc.
PETER LEE, Microsoft Corporation
DAVID E. LIDDLE, US Venture Partners
FRED B. SCHNEIDER, Cornell University
ROBERT F. SPROULL, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
JOHN STANKOVIC, University of Virginia
JOHN A. SWAINSON, Dell, Inc.
ERNEST J. WILSON, University of Southern California
KATHERINE YELICK, University of California, Berkeley
Staff
JON EISENBERG, Director
LYNETTE I. MILLETT, Associate Director
VIRGINIA BACON TALATI, Program Officer
SHENAE BRADLEY, Senior Program Assistant
EMILY GRUMBLING, Program Officer
RENEE HAWKINS, Financial and Administrative Manager
For more information on CSTB, see its website at http://www.cstb.org, write to CSTB, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001, call (202) 334-2605, or e-mail the CSTB at cstb@nas.edu.
Preface
The 2012 National Research Council report Continuing Innovation in Information Technology, produced by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), illustrates how fundamental research in information technology (IT), conducted at industry and universities, has led to the introduction of entirely new product categories that ultimately became billion-dollar industries. It uses examples to depict the rich interplay between academic research, industry research, and products and indicates the cross-fertilization resulting from multidirectional flows of ideas, technologies, and people. It uses a graphic (reproduced with a correction in the introduction to this report) to portray and connect areas of major investment in basic research, university-based (and largely federally funded) research, and industry research and development; the introduction of important commercial products resulting from this research; billion-dollar-plus industries (by annual revenue) stemming from it; and present-day IT market segments and representative U.S. firms whose creation was stimulated by the decades-long research. The graphic, which is of necessity incomplete and symbolic in nature, provides a framework within which additional contributions and connections can be documented and illustrated.
At a CSTB-hosted workshop on March 5, 2015, leading academic and industry researchers and industrial technologists described key research and development results and their contributions and connections to new IT products and industries, and illustrated these developments as overlays to the 2012 “tire tracks” graphic (see Box P.1 for the statement of task). The principal goal of the workshop was to collect and make available to policy makers and members of the IT community first-person narratives that illustrate the link between government investments in academic and industry research to the
ultimate creation of new IT industries. Although the original plan was to have speakers also prepare papers, it proved more effective to prepare summaries of the workshop presentations based on a transcript of the proceedings and give the speakers an opportunity to review the summaries for accuracy and completeness.
This report provides summaries of the workshop presentations organized into five broad themes—(1) fueling the innovation pipeline, (2) building a connected world, (3) advancing the hardware foundation, (4) developing smart machines, and (5) people and computers—and ends with a summary of remarks from the concluding panel discussion. The narratives provide only a limited sample of the IT research ecosystem and cannot capture the full range of challenges, failures, or successes that are inherent to any research field. They do, however, provide compelling illustrations of how academic and industry research has underpinned innovation in IT and has had significant economic and other societal impacts.
Peter Lee, Chair
Committee on Continuing Innovation in Information Technology
Contents
1 FUELING THE INNOVATION PIPELINE
Application-Engaged Research for Computer Science
Government Funding and the Amplification of Good Ideas
Motivators and Outcomes for Government, Academia, and Industry
A Brief History of Innovation in Technology
Course Corrections and Unexpected Turns
The Implications of Motivations
Government Funding for Industry?
The Need for Research to Match Our Aspirations
Building Bridges Between Academia and Industry
In the Beginning: The Story of ARPANET
The Evolution of Enabling Technologies
Confronting Our Bandwidth Shortage
The Need to Rethink Network Design
Toward a Seamless Network Experience
The Path from Research to Innovation
3 ADVANCING THE HARDWARE FOUNDATION
Developing Disruptive Architectures
Creating the Multilingual Computer
Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds
Achievements in Artificial Intelligence
Creating the Theoretical Foundation
Impacts and Achievements of Research on Intelligent Machines
Promising Prospects for the Future
Robotics: From Vision to Reality
The User-Centered Design Renaissance
A New Way of Creating Technology
Harnessing Big Data for Social Insights
