The UK Computing Research Committee is working on a series of seven proposals that they hope will turn into at least one project similar to the Human Genome Project.
All the draft proposals are available in PDF format. And vnunet.com has additional comments.
Before going further,what are the rules to comply with to become a Grand Challenge?
A Grand Challenge must be a 15-year project with international participation. There should be a clear evaluation of success or failure, and it should offer fundamental and radical advances in basic science or engineering.
Here is the list of the seven projects.
- In Vivo <-> In Silico (IVIS)
This project is focused on modeling real-life events in silicon to experiment with virtual organisms. Sir Tony Hoare, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, said: "We are working in an area that we believe is of important social and economic importance."
- Science for Global Ubiquitous Computing
In 20 years, computers will be everywhere and globally interconnected. Researchers think that this worldwide network will be seen as a single Global Universal Computer (GUC). The goal is to define the theories behind this future GUC.
- Memories for Life
The amount of data that we collect, pictures, films, e-mails, is growing at a growing rate every day. This project wants to find ways to securely store and search all of these data.
- Scalable Ubiquitous Computing Systems
This is an approach to solve future problems coming from growing computing complexity created by increasingly networked computers and Internet's proliferation, leading to the integration of organic models.
"People are moving far too quickly and building systems with no design rules," said Professor Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge. "If you have the same vulnerabilities in the internet and you times that by 1,000, the world around us would go wrong in mysterious ways."
- Architecture of Brain and Mind
This project wants to know how our brains are working. But even the proponents of this plan are not sure it can be done in 15 years.
- Dependable Systems Evolution
With computer viruses and worms causing increasingly severe threats to everybody, this project wants to build "dependable, secure and trustworthy computer systems."
- Journeys in Non-Classical Computing
This is an attempt to build complex computer systems by using nature and biology as sources of inspiration.
Which of these projects will achieve the status of Grand Challenge? You can join the discussions on the Grand Challenges for Computing Research web page.
Source: Emma Nash, vnunet.com, September 24, 2003
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