Roland Piquepaille points to vnunet.com article: “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. The UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), a joint expert panel of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and the British Computer Society is working with the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing to start seven new projects. The hope is that some, or at least one, of the initiatives will be taken forward to become a Grand Challenge – a major, long term project that will create great advances in computer science.”
The 7 projects short-listed are:
In Vivo In Silico (IVIS): This project is focused on modeling real-life events in silicon to experiment with virtual organisms.
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.
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
