Taking the Long View

Back to Gazette, Fall 2014

Deborah CrawfordI am delighted to have this opportunity to pen my first remarks as director, having joined ICSI just a handful of weeks ago.   In a career that has spanned almost three decades, I’ve had the great fortune of working with really smart people on inspiring projects in computing.  With each passing year, I’ve only come to enjoy more the rewards that stem from seeing new ideas come to life enabled by the creative contributions and insights of computing’s best and brightest.  Needless to say, I look forward to continuing this fine tradition at ICSI.

ICSI is a place where great minds from around the world come together to engage with significant opportunities and challenges in computing - a place where open inquiry and creative thinking are the norm, and where new ideas and disruptive innovations have a real opportunity to change the world as we know it.  With research groups working on the most challenging scientific and socio-technical computing problems of our time  - from well-established emphases in networking and security, artificial intelligence, speech and vision, to emerging areas of strength in multimedia, data science and analytics, brain science and health IT – ICSI and its researchers-in-residence host visiting researchers from all corners of the globe, from the junior undergraduate researcher to the most senior faculty fellow.  It is at ICSI that inspiring research visions and ambitious innovation goals crystallize, enabled by the experiences that proximity to Bay area excellence in computing discovery and innovation provides.

ICSI thrives on great partnerships, partnerships that include individuals and institutions in the academic community, both here and abroad, companies large and small, foreign and domestic, public schools, federal, state and local governments, and other nations and international bodies.  These collaborations work best when we and our partners bring complementary capabilities and expertise to the table, so that together we are able to do what we cannot accomplish alone. 

In the coming months, we, the ICSI community, will develop a strategic plan to help guide the future of our institute.  We will share and discuss our hopes and dreams for computing, and in the process synthesize a ten-year vision for ICSI and corresponding strategic directions and actions required to deliver on it.

As we plan for this undertaking, we take time today to highlight some of the great work currently underway here.  This newsletter describes the work of several ICSI researchers and research projects focused on addressing the pressing socio-technical challenges of securing cyberspace.   These challenges are likely to continue to pose a limitless number of research opportunities, for as the 2014 report of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies notes:

Cybersecurity problems result from the inherent nature of information technology, the complexity of information technology, and human fallibility in making judgements about what actions and information are safe or unsafe from a cybersecurity perspective, especially when such actions and information are highly complex.  None of these factors is likely to change in the foreseeable future, and thus there are no silver bullets – or even combinations of silver bullets – that can “solve the problem” permanently.

Cybersecurity problems result from the inherent nature of information technology, the complexity of information technology, and human fallibility in making judgements about what actions and information are safe or unsafe from a cybersecurity perspective, especially when such actions and information are highly complex.  None of these factors is likely to change in the foreseeable future, and thus there are no silver bullets – or even combinations of silver bullets – that can “solve the problem” permanently.

Furthermore, they are only likely to be addressed by the creative contributions of researchers with expertise in computing and in adjacent and complementary fields.  I hope you enjoy learning more about our interdisciplinary work aimed at creating a secure and trustworthy cyberspace.

Please know that as we, the ICSI community, mobilize to chart our path into the future, we will stay true to our past —computing the future in partnership with colleagues the world over is in our DNA.  We remain committed to contributing advances in computing that rock the world, delight our partners, and make our researchers, from the most junior to the quite senior, incredibly proud of what they do.

I hope you will take the opportunity to join us in our strategic planning activities.  I believe that some of our best years lie ahead, and that together we can work to ensure that ICSI remains the vibrant and inspiring place it is today.

Deborah Crawford, Director