Computer Science: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract – The National Science Foundation created the Computing Community Consortium to stimulate the computing research community to envision and pursue longer-range, more audacious research challenges.

I’d like to take this opportunity to engage you in this process. If we get it right, the next ten years of advances in computer science should be far more significant, and far more interesting, than the past ten. I’ll review the progress that our field has made, and I’ll present a number of “grand challenge” problems that we should be prepared to tackle in the coming decade.

Biography – Professor Lazowska serves as the Founding Director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, and as the Chair of the Computing Community Consortium. Lazowska received his A.B. from Brown University in 1972 and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1977, when he joined the University of Washington faculty. Lazowska’s research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems, and, more recently, the techniques and technologies of data-intensive science.