TITLE: Notes on the Rebooting Computing Summit
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 17, 2009 3:09 PM
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[This is the first of several pieces on my thoughts at the
Rebooting Computing summit,
held January 12-14 in San Jose, California. Later articles
talk about
image of CS,
thoughts on approach,
thoughts on personal stories
and, as always, a little of
this and that.]
This was unusual: a workshop with no laptops out.
Some participants broke the rule almost immediately,
including some big names, but I decided to follow my
leaders. That meant no live note-taking, except on
paper, nor any interleaved blogging. I decided to
expand this opportunity and take advantage of an
Internet-free trip, even back in the hotel!
The workshop brought together 225 people or so from
all parts of computer science: industry, universities,
K-12 education, and government. We had a higher
percentage of women than the discipline as a whole,
which made sense given our goals, and a large
international contingent. Three Turing Award winners
joined in:
Alan Kay,
Vinton Cerf, and
Fran Allen,
who was an intellectual connection to the compiler
course I put on hold for a few days in order to
participate myself. There were also a number of other
major contributors to computing, people such as
Grady Booch,
Richard Gabriel,
Dan Ingalls, and the most famous of three Eugenes in
the room, Gene Spafford.
Most came without knowing what in particular we would
do for these three days, or how. The draw was the
vision: a desire to reinvigorate computing everywhere.
The location was a perfect backdrop, the
Computer History Museum.
The large printout of a chess program on old green
and white computer paper hanging from the rafters
near our upper-floor meeting room served as a
constant reminder of a day when everything about
computers and programming seemed new and exciting,
when everything was a challenge to tackle. The
working replica of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
on the main floor reminded us that big dreams are
good -- and may go unfulfilled in one's lifetime.
The Introduction
Peter Denning opened with a few remarks on what led
him to organize the workshop. He expressed his
long-standing dissatisfaction with the idea that
computer science == programming. Dijkstra famously
proclaimed that he was a programmer, and proud of
it, but Denning always knew there was something
bigger. What is missing if we think only of
programming? Using his personal experience as an
example, he claimed that the outliers in the general
population who make enter CS have invested many
hours in several kinds of activity: math, science,
and engineering.
Throughout much of the history of computer science,
people made magic because they didn't know what they
were doing was impossible. This gave rise to the
metaphor driving the workshop and his
current effort
-- to reboot computing, to clean out the cruft. We
have non-volatile memory, though, so we can start
fresh with wisdom accumulated over the first 60-70
years of the discipline. (Later the next day, Alan
Kay pointed out that rebooting leaves same operating
system and architecture in place, and that what we
need to do is redesign them from the bottom up, too!)
A spark ignited inside each of us once that turned us
onto computing. What was it? Why did it catch? How?
One of the goals of the summit was to find out how we
can create the same conditions for others.
The Approach
The goal of the workshop was to change the world --
to change how people think about computing. The
planning process destroyed the stereotypes that the
non-CS facilitators held about CS people.
The workshop was organized around Appreciative Inquiry
(AI, but not the CS one -- or the one from the ag
school!), a process I first heard about in a
paper by Kent Beck.
It uses a an exploration of positive experiences to
help understand a situation and choose action. For
the summit, this meant developing a shared positive
context about computing before moving on to the
choosing of specific goals and plans.
Our facilitators used an implementation they
characterized as Discovery-Dream-Design-Destiny. The
idea was to start by examining the past, then envision
the future, and finally to return to the present and
make plans. Understanding the past helps us put our
dreams into context, and building a shared vision of
the future helps us to convert knowledge into actions.
One of our facilitators, Frank Barrett, is a former
prof jazz musician, said an old saying from his past
career is "Great performances create great listeners."
He believes, though, that the converse is true: "Great
listeners create great performances." He encouraged
us to listen to one another's stories carefully and
look for common understanding that we could convert
into action.
Frank also said that the goal of the workshop is
really to change how people talk, not just think,
about computing. Whenever you propose that kind of
change, people will see you as a revolutionary -- or
as a lunatic.
An unusual complement to this humanistic approach to
the workshop was a graphic artist who was recording
the workshop live before our eyes, in image and word.
Even when the record was mostly catchphrases that
could have become part of a slide presentation, the
colors and shapes added a nice touch to the experience.
The Spark
What excited most of us about computing was solving a
problem -- having some something that that was important
to us, sometimes bigger than we could do easily by
hand, and doing it with a computer. Sometimes we
enjoyed the making of things that could serve our needs.
Sometimes we were enlivened by making something we
found beautiful.
Still, a lot of people in the room "stumbled" or
"drifted" into CS from other places. Those words carry
quite different images of peoples' experiences. However
subtle the move, they all seemed to have been working on
real problems.
One of the beauties of computer science is that it is
in and about everything. For many, computing is a lens
through which to study problems and create solutions.
Like mathematics, but more.
One particular comment made the first morning stood out
in my mind. The gap between what people want to make
with a computer and what they can reasonably make has
widened considerably in the last thirty years. What
they want to make is influenced by what they see and use
every day. Back in 1980 I wanted to write a
program to compute chess ratings,
and a bit of BASIC was all I needed. Kids these days
walk around with computational monsters in their pockets,
sometimes a couple, and their desires have grown to
match. Show them Java or Python, let alone BASIC, and
they may well feel deflated before considering just
what they could do.
Computing creates a new world. It builds new structures
on top of old, day by day. Computing is different today
than it was thirty years ago -- and so is the world.
What excited us may well not excite today's youth.
What about what excited us might?
(Like any good computer scientist, I have gone meta.)
Educators cannot create learning. Students do that.
What can educators provide? A sense of quality.
What is good? What is worth doing? Why?
History
A lot of great history was made and known by the people
in this room. The rest of us have lived through some
of it. Just hearing some of these lessons reignited the
old spark inside of me.
Consider Alan Turing's seminal 1935 paper on the Halting
Problem. Part of the paper is Turing "thumbing his nose"
at his skeptical mathematician colleagues, saying
"The very question is computation. You can't escape
it."
One time, Charles Babbage was working with his friend,
the astronomer Herschel. They were using a set of
astronomy tables to solve a problem, and Babbage became
frustrated by errors in the tables. He threw the book
at a wall and said, "I wish these calculations had
been executed by steam!" Steam.
Ada Lovelace referred to Babbage's Difference Engine
as a machine that "weaves patterns of ideas".
Alan Kay reminded us of the ultimate importance of what
Turing taught us: If you don't like the machine you
have, you can make the machine you want.
AI -- the computing kind, which was the source of many
of my own initial sparks -- has had two positive effects
on the wider discipline. First, it has always offered a
big vision of what computing can be. Second, even when
it struggles to reach that vision, it spins off new
technologies it creates along the way.
At some point in the two days, Alan Kay chastised us.
Know your history! Google has puts all seventy-five or
so of Douglas Engelbart's papers at your fingertips. Do
you even type the keywords into the search box, let alone
read them?
About Computing
A common thread throughout the workshop was, what are
the key ideas and features of computing that we should
not lose as we move forward? There were some common
answers. People want to solve real problems for real
people. They want to find ideas in experience and
applications. Another was the virtue of persistence,
which one person characterized as "embracing failure"
-- a twisted but valuable perspective. Yet another
was the idea of "no more black boxes", whether hardware
or software. Look inside, and figure out what makes
it tick. None of these are unique to CS, but they
are in some essential to it.
Problem solving came up a lot, too. I think that
people in most disciplines "solve problems" and so
would claim problem solving as an essential feature of
the discipline. Is computer science different? I
think so. CS is about the process of solving
problems. We seek to understand the nature of algorithms
and how they manipulate information. Whichever real
problem we have just solved, we ask, "How?" and "Why?"
We try to generalize and understand the data and the
algorithm.
Another common feature that many thought essential to
computing is that it is interdisciplinary. CS reaches
into everything. This has certainly been one of the
things that has attracted me to computing all these
years. I am interested in many things, and I love to
learn about ideas that transcend disciplines -- or
that seem to but don't. What is similar and
dissimilar between two problems or solutions? Much
of AI comes down to knowing what is similar and what
is not, and that idea held my close attention for
more than a decade.
While talking with one of my table mates at the summit,
I realized that this was one of the biggest influences
my Ph.D. advisor,
Jon Sticklen,
had on me. He approached AI from all directions, from
the perspectives of people solving problems in all
disciplines. He created an environment that sought
and respected ideas from everywhere, and he encouraged
that mindset in all who studied in his lab.
Programming
While I respect Denning's dissatisfaction with the idea
that computer science == programming, I don't think we
should lose the idea of programming whatever we do to
reinvigorate computing. Whatever else computing is,
in the end, it all comes down to a program running
somewhere.
When it was my turn to describe part of my vision for
the future of computing, I said something like this:
When they have questions, children will routinely walk
to the computer and write a program to find the answers,
just as they now use Google, Wikipedia, or IMDB to look
up answers.
I expected to have my table mates look at me funny, but
my vision went over remarkably well. People embraced
the idea -- as long as we put it in the context of
"solving a problem". When I ventured further to using
a program "to communicate an idea", I met resistance.
Something unusual happened, though. As the discussion
continued, every once in a while someone would say,
"I'm still thinking about communicating an idea with a
program...". It didn't quite fit, but they were intrigued.
I consider that progress.
Closing
At the end of the second day, we formed action groups
around a dozen or so ideas that had a lot of traction
across the whole group. I joined a group interested
in using problem-based learning to change how we
introduce computing to students.
That seemed like a moment when we would really get
down to business, but unfortunately I had to miss the
last day of the summit. This was the first week of
winter semester classes at my university, and I could
not afford to miss both sessions of my course. I'm
waiting to hear from other members of my group, to
see what they discussed on Wednesday and what we are
going to do next.
As I was traveling back home the next day, I thought
about whether the workshop had been worth missing most
of the first week of my semester. I'll talk more
about the process and our use of time in a later
entry. But whatever else, the summit put a lot of
different people from different parts of the
discipline into one room and got us talking about why
computing matters and how we can help to change how
the world thinks -- and talks -- about it. That was
good.
Before I left for California, I told a colleague that
this summit held the promise of being something special,
and that it also bore the the risk of being the same
old thing, with visionaries, practitioners, and career
educators chasing their tails in a vain effort to tame
this discipline of ours. In the end, I think it was --
as so many things turn out to be -- a little of both.
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