In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor, Bushra Anjum, chats with Behnaz Arzani, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, about her pioneering work in automated network management. Arzani discusses the challenges of managing large-scale networks, particularly during incidents, and explores the role of AI and heuristics in addressing these challenges. The conversation then moves to her recently open-sourced project, MetaOpt, which helps network operators analyze and improve the impact of various network algorithms in use.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor, Dr. Bushra Anjum, chats with Ming Yin, an assistant professor at Purdue University, about how intentional human interactions can fully realize the potential of AI in augmenting human intelligence. We also discuss Dr. Yin's research to empirically understand how humans engage with AI, computationally model this engagement, and design interventions to improve humans' engagement with AI by both influencing human behavior and adjusting AI designs.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Ken Holstein, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Co-Augmentation, Learning, & AI (CoALA) Lab. We discuss how, amidst all of the current AI hype, human ability and expertise remain underappreciated. Designing for complementarity in AI-augmented tooling ensures that domain-specific worker-facing AI systems are designed to bring out the best of human ability rather than simply attempting to, many a time incorrectly, automate them away.

The large-language-model-based chatbot ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022. Presented here is a translation of an interview held in February 2023 between Ruth Fulterer, of the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), and Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind. Ubiquity senior editor Martin Walker omitted most comments by the interviewer and details of the interviewer's questions. Although the interview was conducted more than eight months ago, it is full of prescient statements for today's AI. We expect the wisdom expressed by Demis Hassabis in this interview to remain relevant for some time to come.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Francis Enyi, a senior program analyst with the Information and Communication Technology Department at Delta State University Teaching Hospital in Nigeria. They discuss how Enyi and his team of computer software developers, medical personnel, and linguists are working toward bridging the deficit of healthcare personnel in remote and rural areas in Africa. The conversation also details the team's flagship service, interactive voice response (IVR) software, providing access to quality non-surgical medical care information to the populace, made available via the GSM telephone network.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Sunita Chandrasekaran, an associate professor with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. Chandrasekaran discusses her goal, as a researcher as well as an educator, to prepare the next-generation workforce to tackle rich hardware features while exploring suitable software solutions. The discussion also addresses sustainable, maintainable, and portable solutions for legacy code that is traditionally unsuited for modern architectures.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Daniel Russo, an associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, about the future of work for software developers. They discuss the longitudinal studies Dr. Russo and his team have performed to monitor software developers' productivity and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, the conversation focuses on what kind of hybrid work environment is a better fit for software developers based on the different institutional, work, and personal preferences.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Grace IbukunOluwa Ufeoshi, a data science professional and AI entrepreneur, about her passion for preparing the underprivileged African youth for the future of work in the IT ecosystem. They discuss IbukunOluwa's journey as a computer science educator and community leader, and her latest initiatives to equip young people with the requisite skills needed to apply AI in solving real social and business problems---especially in areas of socio-economic development across Africa.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Heena Rathore, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, on how cyber-physical systems (CPS) are inherently similar to humans in their reliance upon sensing their environments and making decisions. They further discuss how this similarity motivates the exploration of novel AI algorithms inspired by the principles of cognition and neuroscience to ensure the security of critical CPS infrastructure, such as IoT networks, medical devices, and connected vehicles.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Shaimaa Lazem, an associate research professor at SRTA-City Egypt. They discuss how computer science curricula should aim at increasing students' sensibilities and appreciation of the differences in the worldviews, skills, and abilities of technology users; as well as teach students how to harness and embrace these differences in technology design.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Tengyu Ma, an assistant professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Stanford University. They discuss Dr. Ma's research that aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice in deep learning by developing novel mathematical tools to understand complex and mysterious deep learning systems.

The most potent weapon against COVID-19 is a vaccine based on messenger RNA (mRNA). The first of these vaccines authorized for use was developed by the German company BioNTech in cooperation with Pfizer, closely followed by the (U.S.-produced) Moderna vaccine. These vaccines send a piece of mRNA into cells of a host. The mRNA instructs the cells to produce masses of the same spike protein that also occurs on the shell of the real coronavirus. The immune system responds by learning to destroy anything showing that protein: if the real virus arrives, the immune system will attack it immediately. This much has been reported widely by the media. But important questions remain. How is mRNA actually synthesized as a transcription of the spike-producing segment of the virus' RNA? How is the selection and replication done? How does mRNA enter a host cell, and how long will it stay there? Will it produce the spike protein forever? Is it perhaps dangerous? And the biggest question of all: How does the immune system record the structure of the foreign protein, how does it recognize the invader, and how is the immune response cranked up? To answer these questions, we bring you a conversation between Ubiquity editor Walter Tichy and his daughter Dr. Evelyn Tichy, an infectious disease expert.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Kashyap Tumkur, a software engineer at Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare and life sciences arm of Alphabet. They discuss how the notion of "precision medicine" has gained popularity in recent times. Next, the focus turns to Tumkur's work, where he, along with his team, is working on collecting and integrating continuous time-series data to create a map of human health.

In this interview, Bushra Anjum, senior editor Ubiquity, sits down with Xiaokui Shu, a Research Staff Member at IBM, and they chat about the latest emerging issues in cybersecurity. Is it possible to discover modern cyber threats before attackers accomplish their goals? The discussion then turns to the new era of dynamic cyber defense, which consists of detection strategies and procedures developed on the fly by security analysts based on live observations.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Felix Kerger, an experienced developer advocate working for King.com (Spain). They focus on the increasing challenges of information overload for computing professionals and students. The discussion then moves to some of the strategies that can be employed to make information easier to find and ensure the right audience receives the right information directly.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Ella Peltonen, a research scientist with the Center for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu, Finland, about the traditional divide between theoretical machine learning and the more applied fields of distributed systems. They then discuss the need for environments and opportunities where researchers from both theory and application areas can discuss, share their latest findings, and understand each other.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Gürkan Solmaz, a senior researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, Germany, about his work focused on building new situation classification frameworks for smart cities (IoT). They then discuss the three major design aspects for such systems, namely, certainty, efficiency, and privacy.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Tempestt Neal to discuss her work to improve access control on mobile devices, specifically developing continuous authentication methods.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum sits with Akhil Mathur, a principal research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge (United Kingdom). Both discuss improving the robustness of AI models deployed on mobile and wearable devices to minimize the accuracy degradation as these devices are used in new domains.

Student mobility is a shared goal of the member states of the European Union. One ingredient that makes student mobility possible is a universal student ID card that is accepted everywhere and can be coded with services at the institutions visited. The European Student Card (ESC) is such a universal ID card, standardized in Europe. A team of students from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed the software for it. It works as follows: A student with an ESC simply walks up to a self-service kiosk, presents the card to a reader, and then selects the desired services, such as cafeteria, library, lab access, etc. In this interview, the development team will explain how they made this work smoothly, including the security considerations. This project is another example of how undergraduate students can build impressive software if given a challenge, the right tools, and some supervision.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Dr. Jesmin Jahan Tithi, a research scientist in the Parallel Computing Labs at Intel, to discuss overcoming the scaling wall that is thwarting application efficiency, specifically within high-performance computing.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Dr. Richard Skarbez, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at La Trobe University, to discuss augmented, mixed, or virtual realities and how users interact with such technologies.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Jeronimo Castrillon, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the TU Dresden, to discuss the need for novel programming abstractions and methodologies for efficient computing on future systems.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Sarah Clinch, computer science researcher and lecturer at the University of Manchester, to discuss the cognitive burden technology innovations create.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Lauren Wilcox, Director of the HX Lab at Georgia Tech, to discuss how intelligent technologies can be designed and developed to facilitate the management of personal health data and support patient decision-making.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Danish Contractor, a senior artificial intelligence researcher at IBM Research India. Contractor discusses his work advancing question-answering systems and chatbots for complex human interaction.

Vehicle emissions tests used to be done entirely in the laboratory. However, certain car manufacturers cheated on those tests. In response, the European Union introduced emissions tests in real traffic. To make such tests meaningful, they must be performed on routes that meet certain criteria, such as the difference in elevation between start and end points and the proportion of urban and country roads. Finding suitable routes is a complex search problem. Undergraduate students from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, developed the first fully automatic solution for finding such routes. In this interview, they share how they did it.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Marianna Obrist, who is exploring augmented and virtual reality within the context of HCI. Obrist discusses multi-sensory interactions that go beyond sight and sound, as well as her work that explores the role of human senses in the design of future technologies.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Dr. Santiago Montesdeoca to discuss the evolution of the animation industry as well as the aesthetic constraints creatives face when reconciling their personal artistry with commerce and trends.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Prof. Lana Yarosh of the University of Minnesota to discuss geophysical and emotional distances as they relate to social disconnection and our evergrowing dependence on technology.

The purpose of the Mars rover is in its name---to rove, explore, study Martian geology, look for signs of water, look for signs of life (past or present), etc. However, achieving these and other objectives requires putting the rover down on a suitable landing site, i.e. a site suitable for searching for the desired information and safe to land and function without hindrance or breaking down.

The data for making these decisions comes from prior Mars missions. Selecting a suitable landing site is a complex process typically taking several years. Researchers at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research prototyped a new software that can help NASA mission planners to more rapidly and reliably find landing sites, potentially reducing the total time required to weeks. In this interview, Victor Pankratius, leader of the research team, shares some insight into the project.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Jason Ernst, CTO of RightMesh, to discuss how his company is using mobile mesh networks to decentralize existing network infrastructure in areas where it doesn't exist or is too expensive to maintain--effectively putting the control of data in the hands of the people.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Katie Schuman to discuss computers inspired by biological neural systems as an alternate promising architecture.

Indrajit Roy is a staff engineer at Google. He is currently working on peta-scale distributed databases. Previously, he was a principal researcher at HP Labs where he led the development of Distributed R, an open source HP product that brings the benefits of parallelism to data scientists. Roy received his Ph.D. in computer science from UT Austin. He is also an inaugural member of the ACM Future of Computing Academy.

Lauren Maffeo is a research analyst who joined the global technology sector in 2012. She started her career as a freelance journalist covering tech news for The Next Web and The Guardian. She has also worked with CEOs of pre-seed to profitable SaaS startups on media strategy. Lauren joined GetApp, a Gartner company, as a content editor in 2016. She covers the impact of emerging tech like AI on small and midsize business owners.

Lauren has been cited by sources including Forbes, Fox Business, DevOps Digest, The Atlantic, and Inc.com. In 2017, Lauren was named to The Drum's 50 Under 30 list of women worth watching in digital. She holds an M.Sc. from The London School of Economics and a certificate in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy from MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida's Department of Computer Science and an inaugural member of the ACM Future Computing Academy. As a human-computer interaction researcher, she studies privacy as a means to protect people, but more importantly, as a social mechanism to enrich online interactions that people share with others. She is particularly interested in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents. Being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she is committed to protecting at-risk youth from online sexual predation risks, as well as empowering vulnerable youth online, so that they can garner the resources and support they need to overcome adversity and succeed in life.

Dr. Bushra Anjum is a senior editor for ACM's web-based magazine Ubiquity. Her research background is in performance evaluation and queuing theory. She is also a trained data scientist, having worked extensively with predictive analytics. Anjum, a Fulbright Scholar, has previously held academic positions in the U.S. and Pakistan, and is a keen enthusiast of promoting diversity in the STEM fields. She is a mentor at Rewriting the Code, GlobalTechWomen, ReigningIt, Empowering Leadership Alliance, LeanIn.org, Computing Beyond the Double Bind's mentoring network, and others. Dr. Anjum can be contacted via Twitter @DrBushraAnjum.

Natural language processing, an area of artificial intelligence (AI), has attained remarkable successes. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa respond to spoken commands, and understand several languages. Google has demonstrated a machine can call up a restaurant and make a reservation in a manner that is indistinguishable from a human. Automated translation services are used around the world in over a hundred languages. This interview discusses a new and surprising application of language processing in politics. Though the AI software analyzes texts in German, it could be adapted to any language. The underlying technology has wider applications in text analysis, including legal tech, contracting, and others. Here is a summary.

In this second interview with Marianne Winslett, our conversation mines the temporal and spatial aspects of the culture of CS research and development within academia, labs, and startups, delving into recent trends that are fundamentally changing our profession.

Clock speeds of computing chips have leveled off dramatically since 2005, and putting more cores in systems on a chip (SoC) has produced more heat, adding a new ceiling to further advances. Leading-edge researchers, like Mike Frank, and dedicated technologists with a wealth of experience, like Art Scott, represent a new vanguard of the leap-forward beyond Dennard scaling and Landauer's limit. Art looks for ways to reduce energy consumption and Mike looks for ways to "architect" future chips according to principles of reversibility. Is the future in reversible, adiabatic computing and simpler architectures using posit arithmetic? My guests think so.

In this interview, computer scientist Catherine McGeoch demystifies quantum computing and introduces us to a new world of computational thinking.

In this interview, we learn about five fascinating subjects: security in manufacturing, negotiating trust in the web, updating logical databases, differential privacy, and scientific computing (including its security issues). This is a confluence that has, at its roots, the thorny problems that arise when you mix computation with people. Some beautiful technical results, many originated by Marianne Winslett, now address those challenges, but some surprises crop up along the way.

There is new hope for those who despair securing computer systems from external hackers. The recent DARPA HACMS project demonstrated conclusively that "certain pathways for attackers have all been shut down in a way that's mathematically proven to be unhackable for those pathways." Continuing research at DARPA and IARPA will eventually shut down all the pathways, and the external hackers will be out of business permanently.

In an earlier interview (April 2016), Ubiquity spoke with John Gustafson about the unum, a new format for floating point numbers. The unique property of unums is that they always know how many digits of accuracy they have. Now Gustafson has come up with yet another format that, like the unum 1.0, always knows how accurate it is. But it also allows an almost arbitrary mapping of bit patterns to the reals. In doing so, it paves the way for custom number systems that squeeze the maximum accuracy out of a given number of bits. This new format could have prime applications in deep learning, big data, and exascale computing.

In Part 1, Jeff Buzen discussed the basic principles of his new approach to randomness, which is the topic of his book Rethinking Randomness. He continues here with a more detailed discussion of models that have been used successfully to predict the performance of systems ranging from early time sharing computers to modern web servers.

Peter J. Denning
Editor in Chief

For more than 40 years, Jeffrey Buzen has been a leader in performance prediction of computer systems and networks. His first major contribution was an algorithm, known now as Buzen's Algorithm, that calculated the throughput and response time of any practical network of servers in a few seconds. Prior algorithms were useless because they would have taken months or years for the same calculations. Buzen's breakthrough opened a new industry of companies providing performance evaluation services, and laid scientific foundations for designing systems that meet performance objectives. Along the way, he became troubled by the fact that the real systems he was evaluating seriously violated his model's assumptions, and yet the faulty models predicted throughput to within 5 percent of the true value and response time to within 25 percent. He began puzzling over this anomaly and invented a new framework for building computer performance models, which he called operational analysis. Operational analysis produced the same formulas, but with assumptions that hold in most systems. As he continued to understand this puzzle, he formulated a more complete theory of randomness, which he calls observational stochastics, and he wrote a book Rethinking Randomness laying out his new theory. We talked with Jeff Buzen about his work.

Peter J. Denning
Editor in Chief

Dave Schrader, known to his friends as Dr. Dave, worked for 24 years in advanced development and marketing at Teradata, a major data warehouse vendor. He actively gives talks on business analytics, and since retiring has spent time exploring the field of sports analytics. In this interview, Schrader discusses how analytics is playing a significant role in professional sports--from Major League Soccer to the NBA.

The following interview with Dr. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar is on the prospects of how will technology change the face of employment in the future? What will the jobs of the future look like? What skills are needed to prepare students and researchers for employment in the digital age? As our world is getting digitized day-by-day, technology influences how students communicate, learn, work and interact with society as a whole more than any generation before. Ultimately, students nowadays have to compete with a more globalized, mobile work force, and rapid technological advancement.

Crunching numbers was the prime task of early computers. The common element of these early computers is they all used integer arithmetic. John Gustafson, one of the foremost experts in scientific computing, has proposed a new number format that provides more accurate answers than standard floats, yet saves space and energy. The new format might well revolutionize the way we do numerical calculations.

In this wide-ranging interview, we will hear from a pioneer in computational biology on where the field stands and on where it is going. The topics stretch from gene sequencing and protein structure prediction, all the way to personalized medicine and cell regulation. We'll find out how bioinformatics uses a data-driven approach and why personal drugs may become affordable. We'll even discuss whether we will be able to download our brains into computers and live forever.

Fixing bugs manually is expensive, time-consuming, and unpleasant. How about getting the computer to fix the bugs, automatically? Automatically repairing them might save us from misunderstandings, lack of time, carelessness, or plain old laziness. But this brings into question some fundamental limitations. Yet in the past 10 years, a number of young scientists have taken on automatic bug fixing. This interview discusses the approximations currently in use and how far they can take us.

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). His research focuses on the intersection of computing and education, from the role of computing in facilitating education to how we educate about computing. In this interview with him, he discusses how we teach computing and to whom, especially his contention that a contextualized approach is a powerful tool to teach everyone about computing.

There has been an explosion of interest in mathematical models of large networks, leading to numerous research papers and books. The National Research Council carried out a study evaluating the emergence of a new area called "network science," which could provide the mathematics and experimental methods for characterizing, predicting, and designing networks. David Alderson has become a leading advocate for formulating the foundations of network science so that its predictions can be applied to real networks.

In 1965 Leonard Ornstein wrote a long and thoughtful essay on information and meaning. Shannon's idea that communication systems could transmit and process information without regard to its meaning just did not seem right to him. He was particularly interested in how scientists use and interpret information as part of science. Forty-eight years later, he is sharing how he sees science, discovery, information, and meaning with Ubiquity Magazine.

Protecting computing systems and networks from attackers and data theft is an enormously complicated problem. The individual operating systems are complex (typically more than 40 million lines of code), they are connected to an enormous Internet (on order of 1 billion hosts), and the whole network is heavily populated (more than 2.3 billion users). Hunting down and patching vulnerabilities is a losing game.

Over the past 10 or 20 years, the subject of machine organization and system architecture has been deemphasized in favor of the powerful abstractions that support computational thinking. We have grown accustomed to slogans like "computing is bits, not atoms"---suggesting that bits are not physical and the properties of the physical world are less and less important for understanding computation.

As computing technologists, we tend to think of innovations in terms of new products or services supported by, or made of, computing technologies. But there are other types of innovation besides products. There are process innovations, such as McDonald's method of making hamburgers fast; social innovations, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving; and business model innovations, such as Starbucks replacing a coffee shop with an Internet cafe. In all these categories, we tend to think of innovations as new ways of doing things that positively impact many people.

Far too many R&D programs in industry as well as government result in reports or prototypes that represent fundamentally good ideas but end up gathering dust on a shelf. Ellison "Dick" Urban, formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and now the Director of Washington Operations at Draper Laboratory, has had considerable experience with technology transition. We talked to him about his guidelines for success.

2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the first educational program on computer law, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Continuing Professional Education of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association (ALI-ABA). In 1971 at an ACM conference, Roy Freed and six colleagues founded the Computer Law Association (CLA), an international bar association (renamed later as the International Technology Law Association).

Computer science is often divided into two camps, systems and theory, but of course the reality is more complicated and more interesting than that. One example is the area of "experimental algorithmics," also termed "empirical algorithmics." This fascinating discipline marries algorithm analysis, which is often done with mathematical proofs, with experimentation with real programs running on real machines.

Untrustworthy information is an increasing threat to decision making in information environments. Rick Hayes-Roth has been studying how to detect and filter away untrustworthy information and base decisions on well-grounded claims that can improve outcomes. In last week's installment of this two-part interview, we focused on the problem and the principles that help ameliorate it. In this installment, we focus on the means to implement the principles in our information environments.

Untrustworthy information is an increasing threat to decision making in information environments. Rick Hayes-Roth has been studying how to detect and filter away untrustworthy information and base decisions on well-grounded claims that can improve outcomes. We interviewed him to find out more about this problem and get advice for our readers. Although there are many subtleties in the shades of truth and the intentions of speakers and listeners, Hayes-Roth finds the essential core of what you can do to ward off untrustworthy information.

Richard John is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and a historian of communications networks in the United States. His most recent book, Network Nation, won the inaugural Ralph Gomory prize from the Business History Conference and the AEJMC prize for the best book in the history of journalism and mass communications.

Punched cards were already obsolete when I began my studies at the Technical University of Munich in 1971. Instead, we had the luxury of an interactive, line-oriented editor for typing our programs. Doug Engelbart had already invented the mouse, but the device was not yet available. With line editors, users had to identify lines by numbers and type in awkward substitution commands just to add missing semicolons. Though cumbersome by today's standards, it was obvious that line-oriented editors were far better than punched cards. Not long after, screen oriented editors such as Vi and Emacs appeared. Again, these editors were obvious improvements and everybody quickly made the switch. No detailed usability studies were needed. "Try it and you'll like it" was enough. (Brian Reid at CMU likened screen editors to handing out free cocaine in the schoolyard.) Switching from Assembler to Fortran, Algol, or Pascal also was a no-brainer. But in the late '70s, the acceptance of new technologies for building software seemed to slow down, even though more people were building software tools. Debates raged over whether Pascal was superior to C, without a clear winner. Object-oriented programming, invented back in the '60s with Simula, took decades to be widely adopted. Functional programming is languishing to this day. The debate about whether agile methods are better than plan-driven methods has not led to a consensus. Literally hundreds of software development technologies and programming languages have been invented, written about, and demoed over the years, only to be forgotten. What went wrong?

Bob Metcalfe thinks we are in a bubble, an innovation bubble, seeing that the word "innovation" is on everybody's lips. To help ensure that this bubble does not burst, he has embarked on a new career path as Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin. This is his fifth career, building on his work as an engineer-scientist leading the invention of Ethernet in the 1970s, entrepreneur-executive and founder of 3Com in the 1980s, publisher-pundit and CEO of InfoWorld in the 1990s, and venture capitalist in the 2000s. As General Partner with Polaris Venture Partners, he has invested primarily in cleantech and currently serves on the boards of five companies: Ember, Sun Catalyx, 1366 Technologies, Infinite Power, and SiOnyx.

Ubiquity is dedicated to the future of computing and the people who are creating it. What exactly does this mean for readers, for contributors, and for editors soliciting and reviewing contributions? We decided to ask the editor in chief, Peter Denning, how he approaches the future, and how his philosophy is reflected in the design and execution of the Ubiquity mission. He had a surprisingly rich set of answers to our questions. We believe his answers may be helpful for all our readers with their own approaches to their own futures.

Melanie Mitchell, a Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, has written a compelling and engaging book entitled Complexity: A Guided Tour, published just last year by Oxford University Press. This book was named by Amazon.com as one of the 10 best science books of 2009. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, biologically inspired computing, cognitive science, and complex systems.

Joseph F. Traub is the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses his early research, organizations and other entities he has created, and offers his view on several open-ended topics on the future of computing.
--Editor

This interview is the second of two parts of an interview of Professor Erol Gelenbe by Professor Cristian Calude. It appeared in print in the October 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the European Association for Computer Science and is printed here with permission.
--Editor

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). His research focuses on the intersection of computing and education, from the role of computing in facilitating education to how we educate about computing. In this interview with him, he discusses how we teach computing and to whom, especially his contention that a contextualized approach is a powerful tool to teach everyone about computing.
--Editor

This is Part I of an interview with Professor Erol Gelenbe, conducted by Professor Cristian Calude. Gelenbe holds the Dennis Gabor Chair Professorship in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College London and is an associate editor for this publication. This interview also appeared in the October 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the European Association for Computer Science and is printed here with permission.
--Editor

By exploring the intersections between different disciplines and cultures, one may discover the next groundbreaking ideas.

The vast amount of information on the internet is growing every day -- it's enough to gag a google search. Researcher Ramesh Jain offers up new strategies for information retrival.