Information Technology Innovation Resurgence, Confluence, and Continuing Impact (2020) / Chapter Skim
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5 Reflections on Confluence
5 Reflections on Confluence
Pages 62-94
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From page 62... ...
Today, a focus of attention of the public and the research community is understanding and addressing algorithmic and training data bias.27 Moreover, given the potential for misuse, much attention is being given to ethical and governance frameworks for their development and use. The automotive industry in general is a significant producer and consumer of computer vision methods, applied to such problems as pedestrian detection, auto mated parking, and autonomous vehicle navigation.
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From page 63... ...
This report refers to this interweaving pattern of IT research with industry transformation as confluence: when fundamental advances in information technology first lead to increased economic impact in an industry sector, often through increased connectivity, scale, and optimization, and then, over time, lead the way to transforming that sector. This transformative impact derives from fundamental qualities of information technologies and IT research leading to new ways of delivering products and services, new manufacturing processes, new tools for engaging customers, and even new ways of computational thinking and discovery.
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From page 64... ...
economy, paying attention to the recurring pattern of confluence, the breadth of impact played by tracks of innovations in IT, and the growing transformative role of these capabilities. One long-standing industry sector that has been fueled by a steady stream of academic and industry research is entertainment media -- spanning computer anima tion, special effects, and electronic games (see Box 5.1)
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From page 65... ...
The automotive industry exemplifies how IT first penetrated the industry to augment and scale decades-old mechanical design and manufacturing processes that were the hallmark of the industrial revolu tion. Over time, the automobile itself, manufacturing facilities, and even the act of selecting and purchasing a car have been heavily supplanted with digital technologies, robotics, and Internet-driven e-commerce.
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From page 66... ...
Generating 60 full-frame images of a complex 3D scene each second requires more and specialized hardware. Early academic research explored using custom VLSI "smart memory" chips to combine pixel storage with appropriate processing (University of North Carolina, 1981)
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• Ray tracing. Ray tracing renders an image by tracing rays corresponding to each pixel from the eye, through the pixel, to the first intersection with an object in the scene.
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From page 68... ...
On the surface, an industry sector such as agriculture seems far removed from IT, and yet farmers and the rest of the agriculture sector are increasingly using robots, sensors, machine learning, and novel communi cations technologies to address food and sustainability challenges across the globe. Although each confluence narrative is unique, there are some effects that have contributed to more than one of the advances.
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From page 69... ...
• Human experience. Once relegated to highly trained users, the human expe rience of computing has massively blossomed through innovations such as the World Wide Web, graphical interfaces, mobile devices, social media, and more.
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A key opportunity is creating research programs that expose the challenges and opportunities in industry sectors, such as health care, agriculture, education, and transportation, to multidisciplinary research and innovation. New models regularly emerge, both in the United States and abroad, and warrant study to gauge their effectiveness.
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From page 71... ...
And, of course, the most powerful sensor of all is the video camera coupled with image processing to recognize items, scenes, faces, and so on. 1 Wikipedia, "Linear Predictive Coding," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_predictive_coding, accessed July 1, 2020.
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From page 72... ...
Concerns of critical "congestion collapse" events prompted the development of essential protocol algorithms that permitted vast, scalable expansion. In 1989, NSF began the process of transferring the backbone of the still-emerging Internet to commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
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From page 73... ...
. By 1995, commercial Internet traffic was allowed and encouraged; the transfer of the Internet from federal research agencies and universities to industry service providers solidified this continuous stream of federal research investments to scale to today's ubiquity.7 And when your smartphone or laptop browser connects to Amazon.com, what you see on the screen is being delivered from one of dozens of massive data centers, each containing hundreds of thousands of networked servers.
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Origins of the modern public key infrastructure derive from theoretical computer science research. Where mathematics and logic had long been concerned with what mathematical functions are computable, com plexity theory was concerned with how hard they are to compute.
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11 G.J. Simmons, "RSA Encryption," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/RSA-encryption, accessed July 1, 2020.
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Many of the techniques used today were well established in research by the 1980s, including recommendation, speech recognition, natural language processing, neural-networks, and reinforcement learning, but these algorithms could not achieve the effectiveness, ease, and interactivity needed for a satisfying experience until we were able to train on the immense data assets of our connected, digitalized world using the vast computing, communications, and stor age of the cloud. This is the self-reinforcing nature of our connected world today -- our natural speech interfaces, maps and vehicle navigation, predictive manufacturing and logistics, etc. -- all work only because they are extremely widely used.
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Similarly, AI and data science have been used in drug discovery and spread modeling during this unprecedented pandemic. Tracking IT Innovation in Health Care Almost all aspects of core computing and IT have had an impact on health care (see Figure 5.2)
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19 See the Suki website at https://www.suki.ai, accessed July 1, 2020.
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, in the past decade, attention has turned to address the gaps between science-driven technology research and mission-driven health research, resulting in programs such as the Smart and Connected Health research program shared by NSF and NIH.
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However, much of the process still involves taking a static, device-oriented approach. New advances in computing now offer the ability to frequently train new models, run tests in real-time, and process large amounts of personal health data, which, in turn, also requires new research in how we build safe and fair systems when some approaches may not be perfectly explainable.
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From page 81... ...
Just as the Ford assembly lines revolutionized the scale and production of automobiles, the growth of IT capabilities over the past decades has been absorbed into the automotive industry, including the technology integrated into automo biles, from braking to automated parking, to the business of assembling and selling automobiles across global supply chains. Over time, mechanical processes have been completely replaced by digital counterparts under the hood and inside the design and testing production teams.
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From page 82... ...
Core Computing Research Areas Major IT Impact on Automotive Innovation Networking and Communications Data Center Systems and Architecture Styling and Design Theory and Programming Languages CAD Displays and Simulation Databases and Analytics Computer Aided Engineering Security and Privacy High Performance Computing Robotics and Cyber-Physical Systems Manufacturing and Plant Floor Artificial Intelligence, Marketing and Sales Machine Learning, and Data Science In Vehicle Graphics and Simulation Driver Assitance and Human-Computer Interaction Autonomous Operation FIGURE 5.3 The impact of core computing research areas on automotive innovation. 28 Nick Bell, Chief Information Officer, General Motors (retired)
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30 improovr3, 2018, "The Use Cases and Benefits of VR In the Automotive Industry," https://www. improovr.com/blog/the-use-cases-and-benefits-of-vr-in-the-automotive-industry.
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Sonesson, 2017, "Using Virtual Reality in an Automotive User Experience Development Process," https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9e06/899d42d13dc7f257b09e82ff92c689b16 de2.pdf. 34 Nick Bell, Chief Information Officer, General Motors (retired)
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In fact, the resurgence of research and innovation depicted elsewhere in this report (virtualization, VR, and AI) have all contributed to the speed and impact of change in the automotive industry.
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From page 86... ...
Scaling further autonomous fleets will generate petabytes of data and require advanced analytics to optimize transport and supply chains. With continued research investments, there will continue to be a dynamic push of innovations in sensing, analytics, and security systems coupled with the pull of the demands of increasingly safe and autonomous vehicles.
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From page 87... ...
Similar technology is used to provide fans in-venue apps as well, providing service from Core Computing Research Areas Major IT Impact on Sports Innovation Networking and Communications Systems and Architecture Theory and Programming Languages The Fan Experience Databases and Analytics Recruiting, Coaching, and Training Security and Privacy The Weekend Warrior Robotics and Cyber-Physical Systems Fantasy Sports Artificial Intelligence, Esports Machine Learning, and Data Science Graphics and Simulation Human-Computer Interaction FIGURE 5.4 The impact of core computing research areas on innovation in sports.
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From page 88... ...
Football shoulder pads have embedded chips; race car drivers wear bio metric gloves; soccer players wear clothing with embedded sensors;39 even weekend warriors track their athletic pursuits with meticulous regularity thanks to consumer grade devices such as Fitbits, Apple watches, and smartphones with apps such as Strava. This virtuous cycle of wearable sensors and data analytics drove research as wide ranging as spaceflight to the future of fabrics and fashion.
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From page 89... ...
Safely moving that many people in and out of the stadium over the course of a few hours requires technology infrastructure akin to airports and other transportation hubs. Major sports teams utilize a host of information technologies to quickly screen attendees while camera-based systems scan for known offenders.
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From page 90... ...
Fantasy Sports The professional sports world and the nonprofessional world collide in the area of fantasy sports, where anyone can field a professional sports team. As early as the 1960s, sports fanatics gathered to create fantasy baseball teams, composed of players from the professional leagues.
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From page 91... ...
These anticipated economic returns continue to tap into long-standing, federally funded academic research programs. Looking forward, advances in player safety, from detecting concussions on the field to advanced analytics to predict injury and recovery, will be driven by computing research that also informs health care and Reflections on Confluence 91
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From page 92... ...
Although the absence of other vehicular traffic in some ways makes it easier to autonomously control a tractor than an automobile, there are additional challenges of operating in a farm field. For example, the ter rain is highly irregular, visibility is obscured by crops, and the environment is more Core Computing Research Areas Major IT Impact on Agriculture Innovation Networking and Communications Systems and Architecture Crop Management Theory and Programming Languages Micro-Climate Forecasting and Simulation Databases and Analytics Edge Computing / Private Data Stores Security and Privacy Precision Agriculture Robotics and Cyber-Physical Systems Farm Equipment (Tractors, Harvesters)
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44 S Reid, 2017, Down on the farm: Human factors psychologist Margaux Ascherl optimizes technology to make farming more efficient, American Psychological Association 48(11)
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46 University of California, Santa Barbara, "SmartFarm," https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ckrintz/projects/ index.html, accessed July 1, 2020. 47 National Museum of American History, "Electronic Cow Tag," catalog number 2013.0026.11, https:// americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1437998, accessed July 1, 2020.
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