Fantasy Computer Science Research Lab by Philip Greenspun in March 2003 Site Home : Research : One Section



Students aren't sure what this should look like and therefore I've prepared a sample fantasy computer science research lab agenda below.





Labus Novus, a.k.a. Philip's Fantasy Computer Lab

Video-conferenced Assistant

The Labus Novus coordination system will comprise the following components:

a life-sized two-way video conferencing system; it is as if a wall in one's office is opened up to the assistant's office thousands of miles away

an information system that records everything relevant to the high-wage worker's job, including facts, reference material, contacts, correspondence, appointments, and relationships among these items [like a more sophisticated Microsoft Outlook]

robot arms and other robots within the high-wage worker's office that can be manipulated by the low-wage worker, thus enabling the assistant to pull folders from file cabinets, position papers on a desk, etc., from the other side of the planet

Outlook-on-steroids might sound straightforward but doing the job right can be as challenging as all of Artificial Intelligence. We are building support for a computer-mediated assistant rather than attempting to build a fully automated personal cognitive assistant. This does not reduce the difficulty of achieving a complete solution but it does increase the utility of an incomplete solution.

A desire to give the assistant the ability to manipulate physical objects half a world away (telepresence) justifies research in broad areas of robotic actuators and sensors.

Funding Possibilities: Phone companies are logical sponsors for this research. Telcos built a tremendous amount of network capacity in the 1990s but then neglected to offer any services besides voice communication, thus resulting in falling prices and bankruptcies. Only about 10 percent of the fiber installed through the U.S. is actually being used. Continuously active high quality video conferences have the potential to consume all of currently unused bandwidth in the networks.

Note that the system could be used domestically, yoking together a worker in an expensive crowded place such as New York City with an assistant in a low-wage uncrowded place such as Iowa.

Personal Coach

Our coach needs to be able to keep track of our goals and what we've accomplished toward those goals. For example, if our goal is losing weight the coach needs to know our most recent weight and about any food intake or exercise. The recency requirement means that we need to be able to communicate with our coach regardless of where we are, by telephone, by handheld computer, by desktop computer, or entirely passively (computer notices that we've stepped on our home scale and records the weight).

Ensuring coach availability implies research on ubiquitous wireless Internet connectivity. Making a coach that isn't too cumbersome requires a conversational speech interface, thus implying research at the very edge of current speech systems. Building a coach that is unobtrusive will require cameras mounted in homes and work places and machine vision so that the coach can figure out what you're doing (no sense interrupting you if you're in a conversation but if you're alone and reaching for the cookie jar it might be time to admonish). A world full of cameras requires research in computer and network security so that only your coach has access to your private life. The coach needs to be smart enough to learn something of your habits and thus implies research in machine learning.

If we consider the domain of health and weight coaching it is useful to build wearable low-power hospital-grade instrumentation for all aspects of the human body, thus driving research into miniature electronics and sensors. Anything that can be measured should be measured and recorded, automatically and without user intervention. At the same time we can interface computer graphics and games to exercise equipment, to motivate the coachees, thus opening the door to all of the graphics research that goes into video games (but this time aimed at making people less fat rather than more).

Funding Possibilities: the military spends a tremendous amount of money on training and physical conditioning; they ought to be willing to invest in a technology that would help each soldier be all that he (or she) can be.

Weather Forecasting

Better Avionics

Labus Novus will build its own operating system from the ground up. Academicians keep saying that safe high-level languages such as Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, ML, etc. are more reliable and result in higher programmer productivity than unsafe low-level languages such as C. However in practice nearly all computer science research is done on top of standard old-style operating systems such as Unix and Windows. If high-level languages are so great, it ought to be possible for a university or a consortium of universities to build something better and more reliable than Unix in short order.

Simulated flight is safer and more practical in the frigid Northeast than actual flight, especially for uncertificated students. Thus our goal of better avionics implies a heavy workload for the graphics researchers in our lab.

Throughout an airplane are opportunities for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), starting with the gyros used to sense airplane attitude, velocity, and acceleration.

An airplane is a acoustically noisy environment. Designing active noise-cancelling systems for airplanes can take a researcher into a wide range of computational acoustics, microelectronics, and real-time control problems.

Avionics require high-reliability high-availability databases of terrain information, instrument flight approach procedures, airspace restrictions, and airport information. This information is constantly changing and it ideally would be updated from intermittent radio contact with the Federal Aviation Administration's extensive transmitter network, thus entailing research on distributed database management.

Pilots are challenged with a flood of constantly changing information, thus opening the door to a lot of user interface and human-computer interaction research.

Funding Possibilities: the Air Force.

Meatware-based Code-breaking

Summary

speech recognition

AI

machine learning

robotics

video processing, representation, and compression

video projection

machine vision

graphics

security

high-speed wired networking

wireless networks

languages and compilers

operating systems

theory (proving programs correct)

fault-tolerant hardware design

parallel processing and high-performance computer architecture

acoustics

distributed database management systems

user interface and HCI

bio-electrical interfaces

computational biology

cryptography

Smaller Projects

Software Support for Photographers

Telephone Solicitor Interlocutor

Companion: National multi-school contest for the best system.

This is the end of the sample fantasy lab writeup.





The Playoffs

The grand prize? One year of funding, a post-doc to help with the research, and a travel budget so that the student could go to conferences and tell people about what was accomplished.

An alternative: Reality Computer Science Research Lab

Reader's Comments

I think the idea of a clearly explainable goal, or focus, of the lab is critical. I the idea that all the technical projects can fit under one umbrella that even a five year old could understand.



-- Jacob Jans, May 14, 2003