IST Caltech

I've been fortunate over the past couple of years, to be a "guest" member of IST at Caltech, an umbrella group for Information Science and Technology in the Engineering and Applied Science (EAS).  EAS comprises some seven departments (Aerospace, Applied Physics and Materials Science, Bioengineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Electrical Engineering, Environmental Science and Engineering, and Mechanical and Civil Engineering)  if I have them right.  IST is an umbrella for multi-disciplinary programs composed of EE and CMS.  Ares Rosakis is EAS chair; their mission is: "Working at the edges of fundamental science to invent the technologies of the future."

Gordon Moore, a major Caltech benefactor, has a great quote that explains his enthusiasm for IST at Tech:  "So many important things come out by taking experts in disparate fields and bringing them together.  I watch other universities try artificially to stimulate this interdisciplinary work, and it is very hard to do, while it just happens naturally at Caltech.  The big research universities can't do the science that falls between these boundaries anywhere near as well as Caltech."  Moore's foundation funded six initiatives over the past decade; in some sense, we were sitting in review of those accomplishments.

IST is 'advised' by a Council of sixteen eminent folk, many of them Caltech trustees.  In addition, it has a rotating "Guest" group of another fourteen, some of them also Trustees.  Each group is a star-studded collection -- to be included is quite a privilege (and I am imagining that they are seriously seeking advice rather than just donations).  One nagging question for IST is "what is the 'offical' standing of this umbrella group?  The answer seemed to me to be a bit fuzzy during the day, but ....

Why should you care about IST?  Well, maybe the Mission Statement will be inspiring:  "The IST initiative seeks to expand the power and cross-disciplinary impact of information science and technology.  Targeting transformative contributions to science, medicine, and society, IST endeavors to lay out the theoretic, algorithmic, and physical underpinnings of information and computations."

Actually, that is a bit wordy, and in many respect, perhaps just platitude.  But as I listened to the outline of several historic initiatives, and the proposed set of current goals, I found myself getting more engaged, more enthused, and even caught up in the excitement of it all.  I will outline a few of the initiatives in subsequent posts, but for now I'll just note that they seem to coalesce some of the issues that I find persuasive in terms of where our society needs help.

1.  Privacy and Incentives in Networked Systems, where they rightly note that our society increasingly depends upon the power grid, cloud services, and stable financial markets, each element of which feels increasingly brittle and prone to catastrophic factors -- and at the same time, most of these advances are at odds with societal norms and beliefs in individual privacy (especially in a democratic society) .

2.  Something as prosaic as Logic Model Checking, something that I worked on for years at HP, Veritas, CenterLine, Spectron, and Applied Microsystems.  Static source code analyzers were invaluable for much high-quality software development in the 1980s and 1990s; missions like the JPL Curiosity rover for Mars, though, or the Boeing Dreamliner, cannot afford the low specificity of these historic tools for code as complex as we now use for safety critical embedded systems.

3. This appealed to me, thinking about the COPD initiative for ISI.  "The Mathematics of Big Data" according to a proposed IST initiative would tackle the question of 'data driven analysis of complex systems' with the goal of Optimal Uncertainty Quantification (gawd, did they really say that?)
The point was that non-stationary, non-linear data isn't easily usable for provable correct inferences, due to sparsity, conventional options, and that classic bugaboo, hidden variables.  Moreover, 'big data' is not taught, it is barely understood, and it seems increasingly the best way to deal with large-scale situations.

In many ways, these kinds of issues are a great foil for InnovaScapes Institute.  ISI seeks also to have transformative impact (who doesn't?), using small crackerjack teams of cross-disciplinary folk, on questions of science, medicine, and society.  ISI includes a more focused inquiry and belief in the role and value of business enterprises than is evident in the IST Mission -- these folk are "pure" researchers, untainted (as was carefully explained to me in a sidebar) by 'taking sides' or 'seeking application method'.  They explain their role as "discovering, documenting, and establishing the science" while leaving the transmission and transformative impact of their work to others.

Encouraging -- worth the day.