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It is my incredible pleasure to introduce Spaff who's our Keynote speaker. As he said
this morning, "If you don't already know who he is then there's kind of no point in giving
a lengthy explanation. And if you do, there's no point in giving a lengthy explanation."
He is certainly one of our country's foremost experts on information security. And at Purdue,
runs the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. And
so, it--you know, like I said, it's my incredible pleasure to introduce him to speak to you.
>> SPAFFORD: Well, thank you, and good morning. This talk is a kind of a potpourri. When I
was asked to give the talk, I asked, "Well, what should I talk about?" And I was told
to just be myself. And so, with that in mind, I've gathered several things together, and
under the title of Soup to Nuts, to try to give you a few ideas for things that you might
translate into your classrooms and your classes. And part of it is when we talk about computing,
or Computer Science, or Computer Engineering; what is it all about? And I just threw down
three answers here about Computer Science is answering questions about what can be done
and how efficiently. Engineering; what's the best we can do with certain constraints. And
technology is then applying the solutions we have already to new problems. And I'm going
to really illustrate some output of some technology and talk a little bit about some of the underlying
Engineering and Science questions. What I'm hoping is that, as a result of this, you'll
perhaps think a little bit further outside the box or whatever box you have been thinking
in, and to also give you an idea of some fun ways of illustrating deeper concepts, but
I don't know if this will succeed but we'll give it a shot. And I thought I'd throw in
here a few exercises I sometimes use in my classes as a means of waking up the students
or changing their perspective a little bit. So to start with, we're going to take this
simple figure and I'm going to ask you to just think about how you would take the quadrant
A, which is a square and the little gray part is also a square. And if you were to divide
that white area into two equal pieces, how do you do that? And I think that's a fairly
easy problem if you look at it. You just draw that diagonal out. So here's one that's a
little bit harder, and that's dividing quadrant B into three equal pieces. Okay? So I think
several of you saw how that's done. All right. Well, let's try a harder one. And this is
where you divide the white area in C into four equal pieces. Now, this is one that takes
a little bit more effort. You have to think about this some--I've had one or two people
who actually come up with a solution.
You have to look at it really differently. Okay, now, you're loosened up a little bit.
Let's push this to an extreme.
Seven equal pieces. Okay. Well, nobody's going to set the record.
It's amazing how we fall into a pattern of doing the same kinds of solutions to problems
because that's what we've seen before. Part of what we want to do as educators is to help
our students solve the problem rather than repeat the process that they have repeated
for other kinds of--other kinds of problems. And this isn't really a new concept going
back to the Greeks. We're not really concerned with what they are but the way people think
they are. Here's a--here's the--for those of you who are more textually-oriented, here's
one that tests your vocabulary. And the instructions there: "In the following line of letters,
cross out six letters so that the remaining letters, without altering their sequence,
will spell a familiar English word." And I don't want to wait too long on this but I'll
give you a few moments here to look at that. So that's to test the vocabulary. Okay, well,
if you cross out S-I-X-L-E-T-T-E-R-S, six letters, you get the word "Banana." And, again,
it's a matter of how you were looking at the problem and very often the problems that we're
asked to solve have ambiguity in them.
We really need to learn to address ambiguity because it is all around us. And with computing,
we know that if we're not specific, sometimes we get answers we weren't expecting and those
answers may not be the correct ones. Here, another couple just to continue on the same
theme. We all know Roman numerals, I assume. That was all drilled into us probably in second
grade or so, but change XI to represent 12 by adding a single line, and I'm assuming
everyone can do that. That one's kind of simple. There. Okay? We just add the line there at
the end and that gives us 12. And so now, if we change XX to represent 19. I've got the bills sprung on this but--so
there's a single line and that's 19, right? Is this coming back now, the Roman numerals?
Okay, so we'll add another one. Let's see if I can fool you on this one. Change II to
represent 9 by adding a single line. You're waking up here. Oops, there we go. Okay. So
we'll try one more--one more easy one here and then we'll finish up. Change IX to represent
six.
Add one line.
Sometimes, when we approach problems, we assume the context or we assume what the answer should
look like and that doesn't allow us to actually explore the full wealth of possibilities.
I have to have a quote by John von Neumann if we're going to be talking about computing.
So, one--I think this is the last one of the ones I pulled out here. With nine dots, the
idea is to draw five straight lines without lifting your pencil, or pen, or crayon from
the paper, so it has to go through each of the dots exactly once, and it is okay to cross
previous lines. And there are a lot of ways to solve this and I'm not going to spend too
much time on this. This is an example of one of those kinds of problems you can do. So
there's one, two, three, four, five. So that's one of the possible solutions. It gets a little
harder when you say draw four lines. And this maybe a bit familiar problem to many of you.
It's harder than it looks. And without spending a lot of time here for you to do this, I'll
show you the solution.
The solution to this problem requires that you don't assume there are boundaries. When
you assume there are boundaries, again, it often prevents you from finding the right
solution and, really, what we want to do is a matter of discovery is to erase those boundaries.
There's an old saying that fences are made for those who don't know how to fly. And many
of the problems that we encounter are couched in terms of particular problem sets or particular
context and it's important to understand what five-year olds understand about not coloring
between the lines. We need to continue to keep that as a skill as adults. So as something
we're--maybe you're a little warmed up now. Let me talk a little bit about computing.
It's a young field. It's effectively about 60 years old. It could--we could really say
it goes back longer if we talk about computing in the mathematical sense. It certainly goes
back much, much longer. But if we talk about digital computing, using computers in some
forms similar to what we know, it's a pretty young field. The first PhD-granting program
is only 48 years old. It happens to be Purdue University. And there was a wonderful quote
that Harlan Mills--I was having a conversation with him some years before he died. He was
saying, "Computing is at the stage in its history where Civil Engineering was before
the invention of the right triangle." It's very interesting to think about computing
in those terms. We are at the very earliest stages of the field. And so, when we look
at the accomplishments we have, we shouldn't look at them with the sense of they are polished,
implements and technologies, and science that we have created, but we should look at these
as first steps as really perhaps crude prototypes. And to illustrate that a little bit, here
are some areas that are still being developed that we can think of now. I hesitate to say
what 10 years from now we'll be working on but the idea of nanocomputers, quantum computers,
always on connectivity, things that think; wearable computers, virtual reality. All of
these ideas that people are talking about are certainly accessible within the next decade
or so. If we think about where we came from, I took a 50 year slice. I chose 1958 because
that was the first year that IBM marketed in all transistor computer. Everything before
that had tubes. And this was a big gamble for the company. In 1958, transistors were
running about $60 apiece in current dollars. And if you were to buy a computing system,
relatively bare bones computing system from IBM, it would cost you $22 Million. Not in
count--not--does not include reinforcing the floor, adding the air conditioning, the power,
the people that changed the boards, or programming using plug boards, for those of you who have
ever seen those. I will admit to being old enough to having programmed with plug boards,
by the way. But if we--if we go just 50 years forward in time, transistors about $1/800,000
a piece. That's a drop of 7 orders of magnitude in 50 years. That's an amazing change. Here's
another illustration with big numbers; 10 quintillion. It's a big number. How do you
illustrate it, 10 to the 18th? Well, in 2004--I'll tell you the significance of that in a moment.
In 2004, all the grains of rice grown everywhere in the world, combined, came out to 10 quintillion
grains of rice. How do we know that? Grad students. But that's a lot of rice. Everywhere in China,
Japan, Korea, South America, the United States, Africa, everywhere. The reason 2004 and 10
quintillion are significant is because in 2004, it was the first year that we had as
many transistors manufactured as grains of rice grown and harvested in the world. And
every year since then, we've produced more transistors than grains of rice, and that
is an amazing change that is continuing to accelerate. For look at secondary storage,
same kind of numbers. In 1958, the density was about 2,000 bits per cubic inch, and in
current dollars, about 10 cents per byte. In 2008, about 425 gigabits per cubic inch
and about 20 cents per gigabyte. That's a price drop of seven orders of magnitude and
a density increase of 10 to the eighth; Major, major changes on how we compute. Here's an
illustration from Ed Lazowska that if you go back and look at those computers in 1958
that occupied several rooms and people, and generated huge amounts of heat and power.
And now if you go out to a local, I guess, pharmacy or card store, you can buy a greeting
card that has a little computer chip and battery in it that you can record a birthday greeting
or something similar and send it to someone, so when they open it, it plays music in your
karaoke rendition of your message, and you can buy that for about 8 or $9. That has more
processing power and memory than that computer in 1958 that cost $22 million. Now, when you're
talking to your students and you're talking about computing, you may talk about computing
as it is. But if you put yourself in the mindset of "That was 50 years ago, what will they
see during their lifetime at the same rate of change, at the same rate of cost and development?"
It may not achieve the same pace, but still, we cannot imagine some of the things that
are coming. Computers are already ubiquitous. We're finding them in nearly every kind of
appliance, vehicles--my automobile, I am told has 73 computing systems in it which is a
little bit daunting in some respects but they don't diagnose it anymore by me coming in
and saying, "Well, it makes this funny noise when I start it." Instead, they plug in this
wiring harness and do a lot of automatic detection. Part of it, they just take the ignition key,
put it in a field proximity reader, and it downloads all of the diagnostic information
that it has been collecting while I was driving the car. What will they have 10 years from
now? I don't know, but it is really interesting to see the progression. I used to work as
a mechanic. If I open up the hood now, I don't recognize anything that's under there. So,
what I want to say is that some of the things that we're doing with computing have already
changed the reality in many ways that we don't observe. We are seeing some applications that
are really quite astonishing and there are more yet to come. Some of those changed the
way that we look at the world, the way we represent the world, the way that we are able
to envision the world. Sometimes we would consider that as capturing images or sounds,
and other times, we can do it through artistic expression. I kind of like this picture. It's
kind of dark. If you can't see that very well, that's a picture of–-from Science fiction,
one of the aliens from Alien, and one of the predators from that series of movies, playing
a game of chess in a library. It is an exceptionally detailed picture that if you have the high
resolution version, you can zoom in and find incredible detail. There are many, many sites
out there that have these pictures. They represent not only a means of expression of vision,
of what is in someone's mind, or what someone's imagination can present. We can do that in
a video, something like Avatar, which has sprung largely from computers, or the Lord
of the Rings series, and that adds tremendous depth to our ability to tell stories. It also
has some interesting drawbacks because it used to be that a picture was accepted as
evidence. But with this kind of technology in Photoshop, what is reality anymore? It
is difficult for us to say that something that is a real representation of what was
when we have things like Photoshop and some of the rendering capabilities possible through
large disk firms. A point like this, another great philosopher, Douglas Adams; "In cases
of major discrepancy, it's always reality that's got it wrong. Reality is frequently
inaccurate." Especially on Mondays. What computing allows us to do is to change some of the physical
parameters of the world. For a very long time, what we tried to do to augment our minds was
through the development of writing and printing, and that was to augment our memories to keep
records. And then we started adding machines to help augment our calculations. Now, we're
using computing and technology that is enabled by computing to augment our ability to be
in places at different times and interact with others that we may never have met. And
I'm going to try a few videos here to illustrate some of this. Some of you may have seen, some
not. At the end, I'll give you a URL where I'll have all the links at the end of the
week. And it allows us, perhaps, to create new variations on art and this is one. This
is not quite what I wanted. Yeah. That isn't going to work there. Yeah, for some reason,
the resolution dropped back. Here we go. I'm going to play a little of this. Have any you
seen this before or heard this? I'll have the full--I'll have the URL available for
you on the website, but that is a choral piece that was composed and sung by a conductor
and a vocalist who had never met each other, still have not met each other. They auditioned
online and then they each recorded their part of the choral online with a video camera and
a microphone, over the Internet, and it was then composed and brought together as a group
piece by people who'd never met each other. And several of the people who were involved
in this won scholarships for their vocal performance as a result. A fascinating news of the technology
that for many people would never have occurred to them until somebody thought of it. It's
not the computing, it's what the computing enables. Let's see here. If I can get to the
next one. It's also possible to create visions of--and expressions of what is going on. This
one, I just picked out as an example of something interesting that may give you ideas for something
to do with some of your students.
Again.
I'm not sure--I'm not quite sure what the author was trying to tell us with that but
it certainly is amusing. And
from the standpoint of new forms of expression in art and amusement, we have increasing capabilities,
not only for art, but for sometimes simply the day to day. The--rather, mundane. So,
for example, imagine at home, some of the things you have to do on a regular basis;
Laundry. At least--I'm hoping that you have laundry done on a regular basis. And food
preparation in the kitchen. It is already possible to buy appliances that have become
Internet-enabled. I've got pictures of two here. One is a washing machine that will download
the best program for stains and the fabric that you tell it. Isn't quite to the point
yet it has sensors but you can put in it--you have ketchup stains on a cotton and a linen
blend, and it will program itself and display directions for the best time to add detergent,
or a whitener, or what ever is necessary, and set the cycles accordingly. And when the
load is done, it will send you a tweet so that you know that you have to go and empty
the washer. If you're living in an apartment building or otherwise with a shirt washer,
that's a real advantage. The refrigerator has a built-in Internet connection to a small
Linux portable that actually--Samsung makes this that you can take the portable out. It
controls other appliances in the kitchen. And the goal is to include on that some quick
references so that you can do an online shopping list when you look in the refrigerator. And
you say, "Oh, gee, I forgot I have to go get lettuce," and you can put it online. Or you
can look in and go, "Hmm, I've got two eggs, some radishes, and some left over butter milk,
what can I make with that?" And there you go on the computer to be able to pull up the
recipes. These are also being designed as appliances to talk with each other and to
configure themselves for some optimal energy usage to help you cut down on your energy
usage at home. All of these are really great possibilities as we move the technology forward
as it becomes more embeddable and better cost. Of course, there is a dark side to this that
I should mention as somebody who works in security and privacy, do you want people to
know that all you have in your fridge is a 12 pack of Bud? Or that you're doing your
laundry along with someone else's? There are privacy and security issues here that I don't
think the vendors are thinking about and aren't thinking about some of the longer term consequences,
but the dynamic of using more information and connectivity pushing it out to our everyday
lives is--I already mentioned the automobile as one example, is a really empowering capability
that if you present that to your students, the reason that computing is interesting is,
for a few of us, because of what we can compute. But in reality, it is where they're going
to be able to change the world and express themselves with computing. For those who want
to go on to Science, here's a picture of the computer system at CERN in Switzerland that
is used with the SuperCollider that will eventually come online fully and it will--it's used for
gathering data, but there's more than just gathering data and processing data that computers
are good for. They also help us actually understand and--this is a wonderful animation. Have any
of you seen this before? This is a great thing that can be integrated into other course work
and what's--what they've done is they've taken all the data that's been collected about the
world, the solar system, the universe, and look how they present it. Can we have the
room's light down just a little bit? Some of the [INDISTINCT] isn't showing up on the
screen. They reversed the full--the full view there, but how can you look at that and not
be interested in cosmology and astronomy? It's very different from reading it in a book
but to be able to see that kind of progression in space and in time, if you wish to present
it as such, are really amazing. Let's see, back to my presentation. There are a number
of these that are out there for Chemistry, for Biology, for other sciences that if you
can get those in front of the students, it helps them to understand the Science, and
perhaps even to get excited about it because it's not numbers, it's not text on the page,
it's visualized in a way that they can actually see the world around them. And by seeing the
world and understanding it, one of the next things is perhaps how to manipulate it; Robots.
And this is an area that, again, we can find a lot of interesting material. We envisioned
robots like this in the 50's and 60's. How many of you recognize both of these? Excellent.
You don't have Geek Cred unless you have seen both of these movies. So, the first is the
original, "The Day the Earth Stood Still". What's the robot's name? Gort. Gort. And the
directions were "barada nikto." But Gort was the name of the large robot on the left. And
on the right, what's that robot's name? >> Robot Robbie.
>> SPAFFORD: That's Robbie. And the movie? >> Forbidden Planet?
>> SPAFFORD: Forbidden Planet. Forbidden Planet, the tempest in space, with a very young Leslie
Nielsen. A very interesting movie. A serious role for him. We envisioned robots like that
and their great staples in movies but what we really wanted was a robot that would do
something like this for us. >> Have you ever really wanted a beer but
you don't want to stop working? At [INDISTINCT] garage, we've solved this problem.
>> We built a web interface that has a menu of a number of different beers that you can
select from. Once you select the beer of your choice, you can place it in the beer bucket,
and then select the location of your choice for the robot to drive to. Once, those two
things are completed, you simply click the big "beer me" button, and the robot comes
to you to deliver your beer. In this process, the robot goes to the fridge, detects the
handle of the fridge and opens it, looks inside of the fridge and uses its cameras to detect
what kinds of beers are available. If the beers you've selected are not available, the
robot will inform you that your choice is not available at this time. Otherwise, the
robot picks the beers that you've selected from the fridge and puts them in the cup holders
mounted on its base, and delivers them to the location that you selected. Once the robot
gets to this location, the robot waits for a face to appear in front of it. If your face
appears, the robot looks directly at you and you know it's okay to take the beer. The robot
won't release the beer unless it sees a face in front of it. We also got the robot to use
a bottle opener to open beers. So, even if you don't have a bottle opener on you, the
robot can crack it open for you when it delivers it.
>> All right. >> Cheers.
>> SPAFFORD: Now, if only we could teach it to make nachos. But that's maybe not quite
what you want to show your students depending--it's--I know many of you use some of the Lego robots
and others as a teaching tool. There are other versions of this that can be interesting to
see but it's not simply a matter of going and doing things for us, and dealing with
the mundane. I have two other examples; one from a good friend of mine who I think is
doing some of the most amazing work, and that's Robin Murphy at Texas A&M. She started a whole
field--she's probably the world's current authority in rescue robots. When disasters
occur, her robots are on the scene and she made this video for me of some highlights
of where her robots have been used, and this is something I think that could actually be
very inspirational and motivational for some of your students.
>> That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an airplane, and Lenny Bruce
is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself turn works of its own needs, dummy
serve your own needs. Feed it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, the ladder start to clatter
with fear of height, down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games, and a government
for hire at a combat site. Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furies breathing
down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped. Look at that low
playing. Fine, then. Uh oh, overflow, population, common food, but it'll do. Save yourself,
serve yourself. The world serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed dummy with the
rapture and the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of
the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. Six o'clock,
TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning, blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive
incinerate. Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down. Watch your heel crush,
crushed, uh oh, this means no fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear. A tournament, tournament,
a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline. It's
the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end
of the world as we know it and I feel fine. >> There's more detail in the video than is
showing up in a projector, but she has built autonomous robots that have night vision cameras,
infrared, have ultrasound, and other imaging capabilities that are designed to find a way
through a wreckage of buildings. You saw some that are on the water and even airborne to
go with higher altitude cameras to be able to look at damaged or look for people who
are in distressed, and this is just the beginning. She's only been doing this for a little over
about 12, 15 years now. And some incredible progress that has actually helped find victims
after earthquakes, and collapses, and building explosions. Instead of having that Saint Bernard
with a keg of brandy, we're going to have robots come to the rescue possibly with bottles
of beer. But if you are able to take it a step beyond, simply being able to navigate
to where a wall is or find a way around a table or a chair in the middle of the room
and talk about, "Well, where could this be used? How could this make a difference in
somebody's life?" You can reach into the headlines almost any day and pull out examples and show
how people are actually trying to address some of those issues now. Here's another video.
I'm not going to show a lot of this one, but this also struck me as kind of interesting.
>> This is a special forces training facility in Western Australia. Marathon Robotics uses
state of the art robotics technology to give users of facilities such as these the opportunity
to train with unprecedented levels of realism and unpredictability. These robots allow training
with complex motion for long durations. >> BROOKS: This is an armored mobile target
training robot. The advantage of this thing is that it has the smarts to be able to drive
itself. So, the idea here is that one operator can control a fleet of these things by designing
a game scenario on a computer and then hitting the go button, and these things will run around
the environment, moving in and out of buildings, into and out of line of sight, in a way that's
realistic and unpredictable from the soldier's point of view. The way it works is it has
a laser scanner down here that looks like a slot in the armor and it has a set of navigation
algorithms that match what it sees against what it knows about the environment from a
map that it built earlier. And since it knows where it is, it can transmit this information
in real time using these wireless Internet antennas back to a control station so the
operator can see where all the robots are in real time and can interact with them. You
can give them new paths so they can go react to what the soldiers are doing.
>> The robots are able to move along any path the user chooses. They can turn on the spot,
move in tight circles, and execute quick changes in direction. Rather than remaining bolts
upright, the robots lean to accelerate just like a person. This makes them challenging
targets. Their size and physical capabilities are similar to a person's. They can accelerate
quickly and stop at any time. The robots can navigate in tight spaces, into and out of
buildings. When a robot moves out of line of sight, it's difficult to predict when or
where it will reappear. >> SPAFFORD: There's more there and perhaps
a military application isn't the first one that would come to mind to some of you with
this. Some of you may actually be able to define access to a segue and build something
like this yourself. There are all kinds of things that can be done with these. One of
the first thoughts that occurred to me is if I had enough of these, it could add a whole
new sense to the idea of a flash mob. And this was put together with not a lot of resources.
It wasn't that they had to build a whole new platform. They took a segue, a commercial
item, that uses computers to manage whether it's upright, and its speed, and otherwise,
and simply build some sort of those on top of it with the site mechanism and some of
the navigation algorithms. As we build more items into our tool kits, the possibilities
of what we can craft and where we can go is really quite astonishing. But with all of these things, let me note,
"The future is not uniformly rosy". There are a lot of issues involved in the way we're
using computing. And part of it is because we see all these great possibilities, we think
of all the things that it would be nifty to do, to build, to try, and deploy. And then
for many of those, what we try to do is commercialize it and get it out of the market, get people
to use it, but we also have to think about the responsible use of this technology. It's
no longer simply a hobby. The field is not so new that we can simply do things to see
if they can be done because we know many of these things can be done. As we design things,
we need to think about issues of privacy for example. If you go back at some of the examples
that I gave, that washer and dryer and automobile, the ability to track what is being used, where
you're going, when you're home, and when you're not, how often you have to do your laundry
for instance or what kind of stains around them, all that information could be a value
to someone who wishes to monitor or otherwise influence you. There are a wide range of possibilities
for how we can process and store information but we need to be worried about who else has
access to that information. Security, in its many forms, is certainly an issue. It is not
simply a matter of protecting the information against leakage but against damage. When we
deploy our information to remote systems or portable systems, what happens if it's stolen
or someone vandalizes it? What happens to that information? We have hundreds of years
of case law built up around using pictures as irrefutable evidence of some behavior.
What happens now when that's all digital and can be manipulated with computer systems?
Ownership for many of these ideas, many of the things that are expressed who owns them,
whose laws take precedence in a global society, and what are some of the crimes? We're just
beginning to see. This is an area of research all its own. Again, not one I'd necessarily
suggest your students to pursue but we have new criminal behavior that is coming up that
we haven't really seen before like cyber stalking is something that is new in many respects
and very difficult to understand and to prosecute. For a long time, those of us who work with
computers said, "Well, probably the best thing about this is that it's just information.
We can't really hurt anyone or anything with a computer system that's gone awry," and that's
not true any longer. See the smoke. That's a multimillion dollar electricity generator
that's just been totally destroyed through software. Fairly straightforward as the demonstrations
to people at the Idaho--or at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Idaho were
given generic information that this test generator had been setup at a company typical of how
these generators are set up and they proceeded to find a way in through the network to connect
to the generator, and send it a series of commands to cause it to basically self-destruct.
That's not a normal instruction set that you would build in to a generator, but by causing
it to start up, shutdown quickly, and then start up again out of phase, and do this repeatedly,
it caused the generator to catch fire and fail. Much of what we have done with computing
to date has been to put it in places where we have better control and we can eliminate
people from control loops. So, most of our utilities no longer have someone sitting in
a room looking at dials and pulling switches as we have seen in movies. Instead, there's
a small computer system that's connected to those and that has been--and added to the
Internet so that someone in a control room, possibly in another state, is controlling
the settings for generators, for water pumping and sanitations, for communications, and for
other kinds of major utilities. It is cheaper, some sense, faster, and because it gives a
global view, it may be more efficient for someone to have that kind of view. But by
putting all those systems online, they now become susceptible to the various kinds of
software failures and attacks. That's an area that I think is interesting and has a great
deal for the future that we can bring to bear and inspire our students. When we talk about
what can be done in computing, there are a number of areas, and these are just a few,
where we can present problems, we can give inspiration, and we can show examples of needs,
and why we want them to study the things they study; the languages, the architecture, the
algorithms, software engineering. All of what I showed and talked about as malicious activity
can occur because of faulty activity; systems fail. They have problems the way they're currently
built and delivered. We need to find better ways of doing that. Security, privacy, the
interface to many of these is rather crude. What can we do to change the way people can
react to computer systems including those who may be differently abled who don't have
the same capabilities that some of us do for a movement or a vision, or particularly when
we look around the world who may not be as literate as our intended audience. Robotics
grow in area. What are the things that we could use there if we knew how to program
it and we added things like vision and mobility; what could change? Graphics is an easy one.
All we have to do is look at something that's done on TV or the movies, but there are a
lot of other examples as I showed where what we're doing is envisioning information in
a different way, envisioning history in a different way. That allows us to gain a better
understanding of the world around us, but also with some danger, that the visions may
be competing and how do we know what really is the authoritative version. That's one of
the very interesting questions that we don't really understand yet. You look at tools such
as Wikipedia or YouTube because you can see it, because it looks published. Does that
mean that it's definitive? It may even have links and references to something that looks
definitive. I was trying to find one of the sites that I used to use as an example and
it was down when I was trying to do a screen shot. There is a wonderful sight; all kinds
of documentation, diagrams, pictures, mathematics, beautiful flash graphics, CSS design web page
from this person who believes that alien beings have infiltrated world governance and implanted
electrodes in his head. Maps, timelines, pointers to books that you can actually find at Amazon,
and it is more convincing than some of the sites I've seen that talk about carbon-based
chemistry; much more accessible. So, this is another issue that is incumbent on all
of us is to get across that--because it's on the computer, because it's on the network,
because it looks polished, it doesn't necessarily mean it is truth, unless of course you do
believe that the government has been taken over by aliens, and that would explain some
things but... So, the title of my talk was "Soup to Nuts" and I really have about three
hours' worth of material, and I've trimmed it down to a few. And after I'd used the title,
I remember this old Kliban cartoon, Soup to Nuts. Many view what we do is computing as
being a bunch of nerds working with very esoteric and, "Oh, you work in computing," still, or
people who think it's boring because it's the same old, and yet, the future is very
bright. We've only begun to look at a few of the possibilities. I commend you for what
you're trying to do; to educate the next generation. I find this to be a continually fascinating
field. I wish I were able to see, and who knows maybe I will, what will come along in
50 years. But for now, I want to say thank you and acknowledge the people who sent me
some material. I will have a page with the links to the videos and possibly one or two
other, up at that URL probably by Friday. So, thank you very much for your attention.