A Grand Challenge in Science

Jim Thomas of PNNL has just started delivering a keynote. I believe they're an IBM shop, the first user/co-developer of the SGE, or Scalable Graphics Engine. That's the 4 GigE input framebuffer thingy with inputs from Mesa renderers on an IBM multiprocessor.

Subtitle of the keynote is "Turning information overload into the opportunity of the decade". I would think that the kind of high-cost "opportunities" he would likely talk about is "of the century"; but balancing that with the possibility of non-opportunities, "decade" seems a reasonable compromise. But I promise this was the last manifestation of my morning cynicism.

Stuard Card "Information Visualization: Wings of the Mind" - very inspiring, according to the speaker. Somehow this reminds me of "Ender's Game", but that must be a different Card.

Book: "Rembrandts in the Attic", "Illuminating the Path".

What's Changed? Scale; Time to decision: secs, minutes, hours, as compared to days and months before. Nice. Bombs get dropped much more quickly these days. Sorry for breaking my promise (already). Next gen distinguished by Data-to-Decision in complex systems (color duplicated from the slide).

Visualization of Ports of Entry - the slide is terrifying. You've gotta see it to believe it - they're everywhere. (I'm sorry for the total relapse. What was the quote in Office Space about Monday?)

Discourse and discovery. Relationship visualization: tree, mesh, star structures for determination of intent (related to the Washington DC sniper).

Information synthesis - high dimensional discovery.

Walk-up usable; information into my context space; old info from new perspectives with new experimental data (sniper again - another guy shot, and the Petri-Net changes);

Systems biology: data sources... (I had a senior moment and the speaker flipped to next slide)

Share Lessons Learned: Most researchers don't "experience" the need - I think this is illustrated by the term of the "perfect storm"; for the guy who really experienced it, there's nothing perfect about it.

A movie clip was shown in which a guy successfully performs the stunt of avoiding a collision by running on top of the car that was the threat. He was promptly collected by another car traveling in the opposite direction, just as he began to be complacent. The morale of the story is that if you don't get killed by some data, you will be by others.

Don't understand how the human mind performs abstractions so effectively on so many levels. Reminds me of the scene in "Oh Brother": "Who elected you the leader of this outfit?" - "I'm the one capable of abstract thought".

Critical thinking: concepts and tools; Psychology of Intelligence Analysis; Mega-creativity; more books recommended, along with mentioning of many disciplines of study.

Emerging fields of study: visual analytics, something the speaker's very much into.

I thought he was done, but I was wrong. Apparently, stuff being talked about here has much to do with the DHS - the Department of Homeland Security; a movie clip by the departmental head of DHS was played. The guy's nice, and the message predictable. There's collaboration between PNNL and Stanford - Pat H. is involved. More people thanked.

Top 10 challenges with Vsual Analytics (from a book the speaker's written, which he referrs to profusely): human info discourse and discovery based on cognitive aspects of critical thinking; new visual paradigms; blend computational, sensor, and visual analytics for hypothesis; blah.

The speech ended with: The best is yet to come. (Again I duplicated the actual color on the slide.) I agree with the spirit, however it's an odd mix with the DHS.

Now Q&A: a director of some agency with a long name ("subject to change at any minutes") stood up and kissed ass (i.e. there was no Q and the redundant A was "thank you"); guy's asking why not many universities are involved; how to redirect compiler people and parallel processing people in this direction. Redirect? These people are not to be directed, much less redirected, and much less redirected by the government. Now comes an interesting one: how does such research work on an international basis? - Q by a guy who is "not a U.S. citizen". Darn it, such people do exist. A: working through it, takes energy and time, etc.

Now it's officially over.