Information
Technology
Innovation
Resurgence, Confluence, and Continuing Impact
Committee on Depicting Innovation in Information Technology
Panel on Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, DC
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This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under award number IIS-1748756. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization or agency that provided support for this project.
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-68420-0
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Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.17226/25961
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Suggested citation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Information Technology Innovation: Resurgence, Confluence, and Continuing Impact. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25961.
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COMMITTEE ON DEPICTING INNOVATION IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
ELIZABETH MYNATT, Georgia Institute of Technology, Chair
DAVID CULLER, NAE,1 University of California, Berkeley
ODEST CHADWICKE JENKINS, University of Michigan
TOM MITCHELL, NAE, Carnegie Mellon University
GREG MORRISETT, Cornell University
SHWETAK N. PATEL, University of Washington
MARGO SELTZER, NAE, University of British Columbia
ROBERT F. SPROULL, NAE, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
PANEL ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
TOM MITCHELL, NAE, Carnegie Mellon University, Chair
ERIC HORVITZ, NAE, Microsoft Research
ODEST CHADWICKE JENKINS, University of Michigan
FEI-FEI LI, NAE, Stanford University
DANIELA RUS, NAE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BART SELMAN, Cornell University
Staff
JON EISENBERG, Senior Board Director, Study Director
KATIRIA ORTIZ, Associate Program Officer
SHENAE BRADLEY, Administrative Assistant
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS BOARD
FARNAM JAHANIAN, Carnegie Mellon University, Chair
LAURA M. HAAS, NAE, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Vice Chair
DAVID E. CULLER, NAE, University of California, Berkeley
ERIC HORVITZ, NAE, Microsoft Research
CHARLES ISBELL, Georgia Institute of Technology
ELIZABETH MYNATT, Georgia Institute of Technology
CRAIG PARTRIDGE, Colorado State University
DANIELA RUS, NAE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
FRED B. SCHNEIDER, NAE, Cornell University
MARGO I. SELTZER, NAE, University of British Columbia
NAMBIRAJAN SESHADRI, NAE, University of California, San Diego
MOSHE Y. VARDI, NAS2/NAE, Rice University
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Acknowledgment of Reviewers
This Consensus Study Report was reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in making each published report as sound as possible and to ensure that it meets the institutional standards for quality, 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:
Ruzena Bajcsy, NAE1/NAM,2 University of California, Berkeley,
Byron Cook, Amazon Web Services,
Edward Frank, NAE, Brilliant Lime, Inc.,
Shane Greenstein, Harvard Business School,
James Kurose, NAE, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
Rico Malvar, NAE, Microsoft Research,
Ivan Sutherland, NAS3/NAE, Portland State University,
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1 Member, National Academy of Engineering.
2 Member, National Academy of Medicine.
3 Member, National Academy of Sciences.
Peter Szolovits, NAM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Turner Whitted, NAE, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Although the reviewers listed above provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations of this report nor did they see the final draft before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Phillip M. Neches, NAE, Enterprise Roundtable Accelerator. He was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with the standards of the National Academies and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content rests entirely with the authoring committee and the National Academies.
Preface
In 1995, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine produced the report Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation’s Information Infrastructure.1 A graphic in that report, often called the “tire tracks” diagram because of its appearance, produced an extraordinary response by clearly linking investments in academic and industry research to the ultimate creation of new, multibillion-dollar revenue, information technology (IT) industries. 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 how much industry instead builds on government-funded university research, sometimes through long incubation periods of years and even decades. It also compellingly illustrates the complex nature of research in the field and the interdependencies between various subfields of computing and communications research.
The figure was updated in the 2002 report Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government2 and again in the 2003 report Innovation in Information Technology, largely through the addition of tracks in important new areas such as entertainment and data mining. The 2003 report also distilled key lessons from eight prior CSTB studies about the nature of research in information technology—including the
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1 National Research Council (NRC), 1995, Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation’s Information Infrastructure, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.17226/4948.
2 NRC, 2002, Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government, The National Academies Press. Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.17226/10355.
unpredictability of and synergy among research results; the roles of government, industry, and academia; and the social returns from research. A 2009 report, Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem: Retaining Leadership in an Increasingly Global Environment,3 reproduced the 2003 update to the diagram and explored related themes. The 2012 report Continuing Innovation in Information Technology4 further updated the figure. At a 2016 workshop, leading academic and industry researchers and industrial technologists used the framework of the 2012 figure to describe key research and development results and their contributions and connections to new IT products and industries.5
Computing research and its impacts have continued to evolve and blossom. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a new committee of the National Academies has revisited past themes, identified important additional themes, and prepared this report, which includes an expanded and updated figure. The task of the Committee on Depicting Innovation in Information Technology was to identify emerging research areas and significant new industries, products, and firms and depict the interconnections across research areas and with the creation and evolution of IT industry sectors using a graphical approach similar to that used in 2012. A panel focused on the subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) augmented this discussion by contributing the material that appears in Chapter 4, which describes key examples of developments, research outcomes, and the flow of people and ideas. Box P.1 provides the full statement of task.
The committee held two in-person and over a dozen remote meetings and collaborated extensively online to develop the present report and new “tire tracks” figure. In creating the new version of the figure, which appears in this report as Figure 2.1, many features of the previous figure were retained, and several new elements were added.
Chapters 1 and 2 of the report provide an overview of the broad impact of IT research and the university-industry-government partnership that has long yielded U.S. leadership in IT. Unless otherwise indicated in the notes, the primary source for Chapters 1 and 2 is the 2012 report Continuing Innovation in Information Technology—updated as appropriate with more current information and recent examples. The chapters that follow contain new material illustrating two important concepts identified by the committee to characterize IT innovation. Chapter 3 provides a new
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3 NRC, 2009, Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem: Retaining Leadership in an Increasingly Global Environment, The National Academies Press. Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.17226/12174.
4 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2012, Continuing Innovation in Information Technology, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.17226/13427.
5 NASEM, 2016, Continuing Innovation in Information Technology: Workshop Report, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.17226/23393.
set of examples of resurgence, where new ideas or capabilities reinvigorate a field after years of slow progress and diminished attention, leading to a significant, often unanticipated, impact. Chapter 4 describes several areas of AI research that have experienced this resurgence phenomenon. Chapter 5 provides examples of confluence, where the interweaving of IT research and business transformation advance an industry sector, often through increased connectivity, scale and optimization, and then, over time, lead the way to transforming that sector. Chapter 6 considers the risks of diminished innovation without sustained investment in IT research.
The committee drew on the earlier CSTB work, the committee’s own knowledge of key research contributions and results, and presentations at committee meetings in October and December 2019. The committee is grateful to the following presenters for their insightful remarks: Nicholas Bell, General Motors (retired); Randal E. Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University; Ranveer Chandra, Microsoft; Byron Cook, Amazon Web Services; Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University; Chandra Krintz, University of California, Santa Barbara; Susan McCouch, Cornell University; Matt Might, University of Alabama, Birmingham; John Reid, John Deere; Bart Selman, Cornell University; William W. Stead, Vanderbilt University Medical Center; and Alex Waibel, Carnegie Mellon University. The committee also acknowledges the contribution of the following researchers who provided input on specific research areas: Nina Amla, NSF; Bob Blakley, Team8; Byron Cook, Amazon Web Services; Henry Fuchs, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Erwin Gianchandani, NSF; Siva Jayaraman, Georgia Institute of Technology; Henry Kautz, NSF; Butler Lampson, Microsoft Research; Susan Landau, Tufts University; John Launchbury, Galois, Inc.; Steven LaValle, University of Oulu; Steve Lipner, SAFECode; Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University; Larry Rosenblum, NSF; Jim Waldo, Harvard University; Mary Whitton, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Jie Yang, NSF.
The committee extends special thanks to David Forsyth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for his contribution to the computer vision section of Chapter 4. Finally, the committee thanks Raul Perez, Horizon Imaging, for his expert design assistance in realizing the committee’s vision for Figure 2.1.
Elizabeth Mynatt, Chair
Committee on Depicting Innovation in Information Technology
