The UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) recently polled the UK
computing community in order to try to define the "Grand
Challenges" which computing research must address in the next
couple of decades. The idea of a Grand Challenge is a research
target which it is widely agreed we should meet, which we're not
near now, but which we can imagine reaching in 15 years. If we can
provide a clear statement to other scientific fields and to the
broader population about what our research is *for*, why it's
valuable, and of course why it's hard, we stand a much better
chance of persuading the general population why it should be
supported.
Proposals from the community were discussed at a workshop in
December, and narrowed down to a few draft proposals which we hope
represent valuable challenges to the research community. In order
to find if they do, we need to hear from active researchers in the
field, so a discussion forum has opened at
http://umbriel.dcs.gla.ac.uk/NeSC/general/esi/events/Grand_Challenges/Pr
oposals/index.html
Your input is really important to make this process represent more
views than those of the hundred or so researchers whose proposals
went into the initial process.
The vision people present were mostly involved in preparing the
challenge in the area of human-oriented computing, which is called
"Memories for life" (or "dealing with data" for short). The
challenge is to research techniques for taming the enormous quantities
of
multi-format information with which people are increasingly
overloaded. Of course, some of this is done -- google and
citeseer index my own papers better than my memory can, but we need
to manage images and audio at least as well as we can currently
deal with text.
Please look at the proposals on the above webpage, and criticise,
support or otherwise comment. Your input may have a lot of
influence on how computer science is perceived in the UK. You
can post directly to mailto:[log in to unmask] once you've
looked at the challenge.
Andrew Fitzgibbon
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