1. Introduction1.1. Exponential Growth Means Constant Radical Change.1.3. Cyberspace is a New World1.4. This new world needs explorers, pioneers, and settlers1.5. Pioneering research pays off in the long-term1.6. Long-term research is a public good1.7. The PITAC report and its recommendations.2. Long Range IT Systems Research Goals2.1. What Makes a Good Long Range Research Goal?2.2. Scalability: a sample goal2. Long-term IT Systems Research Goals3. Turing's vision of machine intelligence3.1 The Turing Test3.2. Three more Turing Tests: prosthetic hearing, speech, and vision.4. Bush's Memex4.1 Personal Memex4.2 World Memex4.3 Telepresence5. Charles Babbage's Computers5.1. Trouble-Free Systems5.2. Dependable Systems5.3. Automatic Programming.6. Summary7. References1 What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals Jim Gray June 1999 Technical Report MS-TR-99-50 Microsoft Research Advanced Technology Division Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 980522 What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals1 Jim Gray Microsoft Research 301 Howard St. SF, CA 94105, USA Abstract: Charles Babbage's vision of computing has largely been realized. We are on the verge of realizing Vannevar Bush's Memex. But, we are some distance from passing the Turing Test. These three visions and their associated problems have provided long-range research goals for many of us. For example, the scalability problem has motivated me for several decades. This talk defines a set of fundamental research problems that broaden the Babbage, Bush, and Turing visions. They extend Babbage's computational goal to include highly-secure, highly-available, self-programming, self-managing, and self-replicating systems. They extend Bush's Memex vision to include a system that automatically organizes, indexes, digests, evaluates, and summarizes information (as well as a human might). Another group of problems extends Turing's vision of intelligent machines to include prosthetic vision, speech, hearing, and other senses. Each problem is simply stated and each is orthogonal from the others, though they share some common core technologies. 1. Introduction This talk first argues that long-range research has societal benefits, both in creating new ideas and in training people who can make even better ideas and who can turn those ideas into products. The education component is why much of the research should be done in a university setting. This argues for government support of long-term university research. The second part of the talk outlines sample long-term information systems research goals. I want to begin by thanking the ACM Awards committee for selecting me as the 1998 ACM Turing Award winner. Thanks also to Lucent Technologies for the generous prize. Most of all, I want to thank my mentors and colleagues. Over the last 40 years, I have learned from many brilliant people. Everything I have done over that time has been a team effort. When I think of any project, it was Mike and Jim, or Don and Jim, or Franco and Jim, or Irv and Jim, or or Andrea and Jim, or Andreas and Jim, Dina and Jim, or Tom and Jim, or Robert and Jim, and so on to the present day. In every case it is hard for me to point to anything that I personally did: everything has been a collaborative effort.. It has been a joy to work with these people who are among my closest friends. More broadly, there has been a large community working on the problems of making automatic and reliable data stores and transaction processing systems. I am proud to have been part of this effort, and I am proud to be chosen to represent the entire community. Thank you all! 1 The Association of Computing Machinery selected me as the 1998 A.M. Turing Award recipient. This is approximately the text of the talk I gave in receipt of that award. The slides for that talk are at http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/Talks/Turing2.ppt3 1.1. Exponential Growth Means Constant Radical Change. Exponential growth has been driving the information industry for the last 100 years. Moore’s law predicts a doubling every 18 months. This means that in the next 18 months there will be as much new storage as all storage ever built, as much new processing as all the processors ever built. The area under the curve in the next 18 months equals the area under the curve for all human history. In 1995, George Glider predicted that deployed bandwidth would triple every year, meaning that it doubles every 8 months. So far his prediction has been pessimistic: deployed bandwidth seems to be growing faster than that! This doubling is only true for the underlying technology, the scientific output of our field is doubling much more slowly. The literature grows at about 15%, per year, doubling every five years. Exponential growth cannot go on forever. E. coli (bacteria in your stomach) double every 20 minutes. Eventually something happens to limit growth. But, for the last 100 years, the information industry has managed to sustain this doubling by inventing its way around each successive barrier. Indeed, progress seems to be accelerating (see Figure 1). Some argue that this acceleration will continue, while others argue that it may stop soon – certainly if we stop innovating it will stop tomorrow. These rapid technology doublings mean that information technology must constantly redefine itself: many things that were impossibly hard ten years ago, are now relatively easy. Tradeoffs are different now, and they will be very different in ten years. 1.3. Cyberspace is a New World One way to think of the Information Technology revolution is to think of cyberspace as a new continent -- equivalent to discovery of the Americas 500 years ago. Cyberspace is transforming the old world with new goods and services. It is changing the way we learn, work, and play. It is already a trillion dollar per year industry that has created a trillion dollars of wealth since 1993. Economists believe that 30% of the United States economic growth comes from the IT industry. These are high-paying high-export industries that are credited with the long boom – the US economy has skipped two recessions since this boom started. 1.E-061.E-031.E+001.E+031.E+061.E+091880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000doubles every 7.5 years doubles every 2.3 years doubles every 1.0 yearsops per second/$Figure 1: Graph plots performance/price versus time, where Performance =
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