Spelunking CACM, Vol. 13 (1970)

I'm baaack! It's been a while since I did a blog posting on spelunking of the Communications of the ACM. Now I'm up to volume 13, 1970. Dang, there was a lot of action in that year. On my first pass, I picked up ten papers, but I don't want to review that many in depth, so let's pick up a couple:

 Per Brinch Hansen's Nucleus paper is one of the most famous papers in operating systems. It has the notions of program (the set of instructions), internal process (the executing context of a program, without I/O), and external process (the I/O context for the program). Processes communicate with each other via message queues, using Dijkstra semaphores. Processes are in a process tree; a parent can create child processes. Resources are allocated in a hierarchical fashion; if you own a resource, you can subdivide it and share among your children, and you regain control when the child exits. It's an astoundingly modern conception of what an OS kernel should be, with the exception that it has no virtualization whatsoever that I can find and makes no mention of security.

Another that has to be high on the list of great papers from the year is Burton H. Bloom's filters, now known as (surprise) Bloom filters. A little to my surprise, the paper has "only" (ha!) been cited a little over 10,000 times, according to Google Scholar, but if you just search for "Bloom filter" it will return half a million to a million entries, depending on exactly how you phrase it (i.e. with or without quotes).

There were plenty of other important things, such as a pretty detailed technical standard for 1600 CPI (characters per inch) magnetic tape. No such standard would fit into a magazine anymore; it would be hundreds of pages long!

The notion of pricing of resources according to demand and time of day was already understood, if an active area of discussion. Multics was being instrumented. Man, it was a great year for systems work! There was other OS work as well that I found intriguing. A Scholar citation count of 14,000 suggests that a relational model of data for banks has had some impact. A program to teach programming seems important to me, but it wasn't the first such thing, I don't think.

Maybe the year away from this spelunking project is coloring my opinion, but to me this feels like the first truly modern year. The late Sixties and early Seventies were a time of great change and turmoil throughout the world, from the Cultural Revolution to the Beatles to the hippies to the Apollo program to (what Americans call) the Vietnam War...but computing was right there in the mix, changing almost every day.

社会のための情報技術のターニングポイント

１０月１日に私はサイバーインフォマティクス（CI）プログラムのチェアパーソンになりました。ウエッブサイトの紹介として、以下のメッセージを書きました。

 21世紀最初の四半世紀は、目につくあらゆるものが情報化され、インターネットに接続される時代でした。 車、サーモスタット、ベビーモニター、観葉植物や衣類に至るまで、あらゆるものが地球規模の巨大な情報システムの一員となりました。この傾向は、AIの発展とも相まって、ますます強まっています。次の四半世紀は、これに関わる問題が噴出する時代となるでしょう。そこには、技術的問題だけでなく、テクノロジーが社会に与える影響についての重要な対話が隠されています。技術的には、計算のエネルギー・コストや、大規模・小規模を問わずデジタル・コンピューターの限界に対処しなければなりません。 社会的には、個人情報の倫理的な生成・収集・利用、そして個人・企業・政府による情報の管理、さらには人為的な地球温暖化など、社会の重要な問題の解決にテクノロジーをどのように応用していくかに取り組まなければなりません。

SFCのサイバー・インフォマティクスの教員、研究スタッフ、学生は、常に社会的背景の中で活動し、ITの限界に挑戦しています。社会と情報システムの統合に関するもの（農林業や建築におけるIT化、スマートシティ、ビジネスやエンターテインメントにおけるドローン、社会におけるロボット、自動運転車など）や、これらの礎となっているSFのようなIT自体の進歩（モバイル・ネットワーキング、インターネット、モノのインターネット（IoT）、データベースなど）から、将来情報技術に大きな転機を与える研究（例えば量子インターネット）、など、多岐にわたります。サイバー・インフォマティクスの「サイバー」とは、物理的な世界に存在し、人々のために環境と相互作用するITのことです。

CIプログラムの学生は、研究グループの枠を超え、他の政策・メディア研究科の教員や、日本国内および海外に広がる研究機関間のグループと共同研究を行うことが奨励されています。また、慶應義塾大学サイバーセキュリティ・コースなどの資格取得も奨励されています。

CIプログラムの教員は全員、日本語と英語を併用して研究を行っています。そのため、語学力は優れた研究を行う上での障壁にはなりません。SFCの他の大学院プログラムと同様、性別、性的指向、宗教、国籍、母国語など、あらゆるバックグラウンドを持つ学生の参加を歓迎します。

世界は絶えず変化しており、ITが重要な役割を果たしています。CIプログラムに参加して、世界をより良い場所にするために、その変化を構築し、展開し、研究してみませんか？

A Turning Point: Information Technology in the Service of Society

On October 1, I became Chair of the Cyber Informatics Program (department, more or less, but mostly less) of Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance, at our Shonan Fujisawa Campus. This is the chairperson's message that I wrote for our website. Someday I will step down as chair, so I am recording this here for posterity's sake. (Not that I think this blog is forever, either, but I expect it to outlast my chairmanship.)

Over the first quarter of the twenty-first century, everything – your car, your thermostat, your baby monitor, even your house plant and maybe your clothing – has been connected to the Internet and increasingly is bound to global scale artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems. And yet, within that success lies our challenge for the next quarter century: not only the next technical problem to solve, but also a crucial dialog on the impact of technology on society. Technologically, we must address the energy cost of computation and the limitations of digital computers at both the large and small scale.  Socially, we must address the ethical generation, collection and use of personal information and the personal, corporate and governmental stewardship of that information, and how to apply technology to solving society’s key problems, such as anthropogenic global warming.

The faculty, research staff and students of the Cyber Informatics Program at SFC are pushing the boundaries of IT, but always within that societal context. Our technical work spans the stack from the foundations of information technology (e.g. quantum Internet), through science fiction-like advances in what IT can do (mobile networking, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) and databases), and on up to integrating IT into our daily lives with the goal of improving society for all (IT in agriculture, forestry and building architecture, smart cities, drones in business and entertainment, robots in society, and self-driving cars). The “cyber” in Cyber Informatics can be thought of as referring to IT in situ, in the physical world, interacting with its environment in the service of people.

Students in the CI Program are encouraged to collaborate across research groups, with faculty in other Graduate School of Media and Governance Programs, and in inter-institutional organizations both within Japan and extending abroad. They are also encouraged to acquire certificates such as the Keio Cyber Security Course, taught in part by our faculty.

The CI Program faculty all work in a combination of Japanese and English, and language skills are not a barrier to good research here. As with all of SFC’s graduate programs, students of all genders, sexual orientations, religions, nationalities and native languages are encouraged to join us.

The world is perpetually changing, and IT initiates some of that change; come join the CI Program and build, deploy, and study that change to make the world a better place.

Margo Seltzer on The Power of Allies

 Wow. Great words from Professor Margo Seltzer:

The most important message goes to both senior and junior researchers alike. This has been my mantra for the last decade: it is not the job of the underrepresented to solve underrepresentation [emphasis mine]. It is the job of the majority to make their field open, welcoming and enticing. The first problem we create is we put all of the underrepresented people on the diversity committee. That is not going to fix the problem. The problem needs to be fixed by the majority, who are comfortable in their fields. That is the single most important thing.

 Read the whole article (both Part One and Part Two)!

Release of our Creative Commons-licensed Undergraduate Textbook, Quantum Communications!

 Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your students, tell your enemies!

Focusing on #QuantumCommunications and #QuantumInternet, on Tuesday this week, Michal Hajdušek and I released our undergraduate textbook, Quantum Communications. It is available in PDF from
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02367
https://scirate.com/arxiv/2311.02367

and LaTeX source from
https://github.com/sfc-aqua/Overview-of-Quantum-Communications-E

This is the companion book to our online course, "Overview of Quantum Communications", videos for which are available on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumCommEdu/playlists
in both English and Japanese (so far).

The book and other materials are available under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

(The photo has no direct relationship to the book, it's just my favorite photo I took this week. Lightning in Bangkok!)