Killer applications and architectures have
commonly been invented by user communities who perceive a need and satisfy it
in a straightforward fashion, rather than by computer scientists who “solve the
problem right.” Sometimes, this modus
operandi has truly led to simpler and more practical solutions, but it has also
led to a view that most problems can be solved quickly by the few or the
garaged. This short-term approach calls
into question the motivation for computer science Ph.D. programs and related
long-term research.
However,
ambivalence towards computer science research may soon change to renewed
excitement, motivated by the fascination, the necessity, and the feasibility of
solving key challenges: some traditional
and some new. This renewed focus will
be motivated particularly by (1) real needs of an ever-broader base of computer
users, (2) nearly always connectivity of everything, (3) the need to apply a
broad collection of techniques to solve some truly hard problems, and (4) raw
power resulting from rapid advances in underlying technology.
This
presentation will quickly make this case and then focus on a few
interesting research problems that could have profound implications on many
aspects of life: from the way we
organize our society to the design of the drugs and foods we ingest. For example, if we assume the utilization of
shared societal resources such as transportation links, restaurants, and
theaters can be monitored in real time and allocated efficiently in accordance
with utility functions unique to each individual, there are enormous
opportunities to improve urban life.
But the problems to be solved are massive and interdisciplinary in
nature. There are similarly complex
problems in simplifying computer users’ experiences. The presentation will conclude with a summary of some of the
pitfalls in computer science research that we must avoid if our research is to
be effective.
About the speaker:
Dr. Alfred Z. Spector is vice president of Services and
Software at IBM Research responsible for setting IBM’s worldwide services and
software research strategy. For the
year ending August 2000, Dr. Spector was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia
University's Computer Science Department and Senior Technical Strategist in
IBM's Application and Integration Middleware (AIM) business, which has
responsibility for a number of IBM software product families including CICS,
WebSphere, MQSeries, and Visual Age.
Previously, Dr. Spector was the general manager of Marketing and Strategy for IBM's AIM business, and the general manager of IBM's Transaction Systems business. Dr. Spector was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Spector received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Married and a father of three young children, Dr. Spector is an avid runner.
Contact information:
Dr. Alfred Z. Spector
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
30 Sawmill River Road
Hawthorne, NY 10532
914-784-7504
914-784-6147
aspector@us.ibm.com