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Current Challenges
The UKCRC launched the exercise in Grand Challenges in Computing research at the GCC04 Conference in Newcastle, following extensive preliminary work which began with a workshop in Edinburgh in 2002.
Steering Committee: Wendy Hall (chair), Robin Milner, Karen Sparck-Jones
Up to GCC06 there were six proposals for Research GCs; each is the subject of a separate report (below). The sessions at GCC06 on the Research Challenges were intended first for reviews on what has happened since 2004, and second for breakouts with subsequent feedback on next steps. Thus each report below is in two sections, headed Progress and Discussion.
No citations are given; these can be found on the individual Challenge websites, reached by links from Grand Challenges in Computing Research.
It is evident that there has been much and varied activity since 2004 including workshops, document production and the development of communities, in some cases with specific The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) network funding and with international involvement.
This activity has helped to build a platform for further research effort, with proposals in preparation, for example for specific foothill projects or specially-promoted programmes. Some particular research projects falling within the scope of particular Challenges are already being funded in the usual way.
There is some evidence that the Grand Challenges Exercise succeeds in attracting attention, and effort, towards long-term research aspirations.
However, the final discussion session of the conference was on the requirement, implied by the notion of 'grand challenge', to step up research ambition and effort, and on the mechanisms that might encourage this. Grand challenges are by definition tough, they depend on a critical mass of research to make significant progress, and to keep their ideas ahead of the rapid technological progress that characterises ICT.
The message of the final session is that, after the initial two years' preliminary activity, each GC should seek in the next two years to define a 'step up' action, or set of related actions, that will clearly represent a serious attack on its Challenge, to which its communities is committed and on which it has begun to work.
Some of the possibilities were illustrated by the common task programmes supported by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and similar bodies in the US, which have the key property that the tasks are hard, but not out of reach, and performance is measured. Where appropriate, each GC should develop a particular version of this protocol to suit its individual character.
Reports
- In vivo−In silico (IVIS) lays down a major challenge to computing scientists: to model living organisms. It is a pressing problem that is becoming just feasible.
- This challenge proposes to develop ubiquitous computing by tackling social, technological, engineeing, and foundational questions in a closely coupled manner.
- This challenge is about the majority of people being able to efficiently manage their information stream, and all of us benefiting from our digital memories.
- This is concerned with the attempt to understand and model natural intelligence at various levels of abstraction, demonstrating results of our improved understanding in a succession of working robots.
- The vision of GC6 is of a future in which all computer systems justify the trust that society increasingly places in them. Dependability is a multi-faceted notion which includes fault tolerance, requirements engineering and verification amongst other topics.
- This challenge seeks to explore, generalise, and unify all the many diverse non-classical computational paradigms to produce a fully mature and rich science of all forms of computation, that unifies the classical and non-classical (natural) computational paradigms.