Fall 2005

Faculty Profile
Computing Contributions College of Computing Dean Rich DeMillo reveals his vision. PDF format Interviewed by Jane M. Sanders

RICH DEMILLO is dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, home to one of the highest-ranking computer science programs in the country. He returned to academia in 2002 after a career as an industry and government executive.

photo by Gary Meek Rich DeMillo is dean of the Georgia Tech College of Computing. (300-dpi JPEG version - 995K)

DeMillo was chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he had worldwide responsibility for technology and technology strategy. Before that, DeMillo was in charge of information and computer sciences research at Telcordia Technologies. DeMillo has also directed the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. DeMillo earned his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and served as professor of information and computer science at the Institute from 1976 to 1987.


QUESTIONS:
1.   How can College of Computing research meet one of your goals – to contribute to breakthroughs in the health industry?
2.   What are your key concerns about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology? And what steps are under way to address these problems?
3.   What needs to be done to secure cyberspace from a terrorist attack? How can College of Computing research help?
4.   What is your vision for the College of Computing with regard to the digital technology revolution that is under way?
5.   What new or enhanced capabilities will the Klaus Advanced Computing Building (which is under construction and expected to open in mid-2006) give the College of Computing?
6.   What is the significance of interdisciplinary research for the College of Computing in fulfilling its vision?
7.   Why did you decide to return to academia after a successful career in industry and government?
8.   You are a self-described problem solver. What is it about problem solving that gets you excited?
9.   What computing problems have been the most rewarding to you to solve?
10.   Why did you choose a career in computer science and what makes it a good area of study today?
11.   What do you enjoy doing for fun?



1.   How can College of Computing research meet one of your goals – to contribute to breakthroughs in the health industry?

We don’t know yet what the breakthroughs will be. This is really only a problem that’s appeared on the national radar screen in the last couple of years. It’s been a problem for a long time, but it hasn’t affected the collective consciousness of the country until recently. The thing that strikes us about healthcare, medicine and biological sciences is that every single discussion that takes places at the national level involves computing technology in an essential way. We don’t know what those technologies are going to be able to deliver to the healthcare system, but we know their impact will be crucial.

photo by Gary Meek (300-dpi JPEG version - 841K)

For example, we know we’re going to computerize medical records and we’re going to have privacy so that people can safely put their records online. But we don’t know how the technology is going to do that.

We’ve started in the College of Computing to look at where the pain points are for healthcare costs in this country. It’s very difficult to figure that out, but if you look at the productivity gains made in business data processing, for example, we think almost none of those gains have been transferred over to the healthcare system. We’re going to figure out how to do that.

There are disruptive technologies – like robotics, for example – that should be applied in healthcare systems. But robotics – for most of its history – has been concerned with very heavyweight industrial applications like manufacturing. It hasn’t focused on hives of activity like hospitals or cities or social environments where we think robots will have great potential.

Take the Aware Home (a research initiative to explore the future of computing technologies to support people in their homes). In many senses, that’s the kind of situated laboratory where people can figure out what the breakthrough technologies are going to be. This is a great example of getting people from different disciplines to live together. The Aware Home creates technology that in many ways keeps people out of the healthcare system. It takes basic information, display and communications technology and creates interfaces and applications that are demonstratively useful in helping people to live safe, independent, productive lives at home. The Aware Home is a laboratory that was designed to look at one kind of healthcare problem, but it’s clearly a model that can be replicated for many different kinds of applications. You can imagine, for example, an environment to care for autistic children and how it would benefit from this kind of technology. We’re going to be looking at these things.

2.   What are your key concerns about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology? And what steps are under way to address these problems?

It’s an intriguing technology. I worked on it in the early days of the Internet because it was clear that voice communication was going to be one application of the public Internet. The difficulty is that it is prone to the same kind of security problems that you see on your laptop or desktop computer. Viruses are a significant threat to VoIP. So is the ability of people who are unauthorized to log into your account. Not to mention the spamming that we see in email. All of those things apply to VoIP. These were problem areas that were known early in the specification of voice over IP protocols.

It’s been a bit disheartening that the industry hasn’t taken them seriously until now. So we’re seeing a mad scramble to figure out how we can retrofit this technology to make it safer than familiar information technology like email or Web browsing. That’s significant because we rely on the telephone for things that we don’t rely on a Web browser for – like 911 services. We’re required by law to provide universal telephone service. It has to be available to everyone. So if you make the technological hurdles too high, you won’t be able to do that.

I think the good news is that there’s a consensus around the industry that we’ve waited too long to attack these problems and that these are things that need to be worked on now by a combination of research and industry groups and regulators to get back on track. We’re well on our way to doing that.

Georgia Tech is playing an important role in making that kind of action happen. We think of universities as a safe place for many different stakeholders to get together. We can be a de-militarized zone from a business standpoint so people who don’t normally talk to each other can come to a university environment and discuss the issues in a much more open way. We can offer a chance to put decision makers together with senior technologists and decide courses of action that we can take back to our respective organizations.

3.   What needs to be done to secure cyberspace from a terrorist attack? How can College of Computing research help?

It’s been a slow process. There’s been so much focus at the federal level on other aspects of homeland security that it’s sucked all the oxygen away from areas of concern like how to secure cyberspace.

photo by Gary Meek (300-dpi JPEG version - 990K)

The fact of the matter is that there are vast organizations with state sponsorship that are capable of disrupting the power, transportation, communications and utility systems of this country. They’re going to do it by attacking the way we interact with our basic infrastructure, which is increasingly through the Internet.

Federal government investments in this problem haven’t kept pace. The amount of money that’s available to mount a significant counterattack on state-sponsored cyberterrorism is miniscule compared to what’s being poured into planning attacks. The spam that you get that attempts to get you to log onto bogus Web sites that ask for your bank account number or Social Security number are often the result of organized criminal activity, either state-sponsored or not.

Until there’s an initiative that says, “We’re going to put as much effort into what protects our basic infrastructure as the attackers are putting into damaging that infrastructure,” we’re going to lose. Those of us who think about this problem a lot marvel that the system works at all. The idea that somehow the 250 million users of Windows are going to simultaneously upgrade to the right version of Windows or apply the same security patch defies imagination. Yet somehow it continues to work.

It’s like all disasters. You dread what’s going to happen during the combination of rare events that people haven’t thought of. There are many in the security community who think there are things out there we don’t know how to contend with. There’s a feeling at the National Science Foundation and in the defense research community that these are issues we need to work on. Georgia Tech has done well in bringing teams together to address these problems. But if you look at the national and international scale and ask what it’s going to take to really make progress, it’s going to take a level of investment and activity that’s way above what we have today.

4.   What is your vision for the College of Computing with regard to the digital technology revolution that is under way?

It’s interesting that this college is called the College of Computing and not the College of Computer Science. That’s a great platform for thinking about what the vision of this place is. The technology has been around for a while, and it’s been used in a lot of interesting places. We don’t think the real value of information technology has been defined yet. That’s what the College is all about – figuring out what the future of computing is, how it affects people’s lives, how it affects the way they work and play. We believe computing technology is key to solving some of society’s most critical problems.

5.   What new or enhanced capabilities will the Klaus Advanced Computing Building (which is under construction and expected to open in mid-2006) give the College of Computing?

It’s a building that makes a statement about information technology. Driving from the Ferst Street entrance to the campus west, the building dominates the horizon. Placing the College centrally on the campus says a lot about the way we’re going to interact with the rest of the campus. The Klaus Building will bring us together in a collaborative environment that hasn’t existed before. The College has been scattered among six buildings on campus. Our new building also will give us a modern collaboration space. We’ll have the ability to instrument this environment. We’ll have state-of-the-art displays. We’ll have the ability to network the building in ways we couldn’t do when our present building was built 15 years ago. We intend to use these capabilities in defining our program.

For example, we have a collaborative project going with the Steelcase Company. They think of themselves as a company that defines workspaces. They’re not an information technology company, so they came to Georgia Tech to look at things like the Aware Home and some other things we’ve done in our research labs. They asked us to help them find out how information technology informs the workspace of the future. So the atrium of the Klaus Building – in addition to being a beautiful piece of architecture – is a great laboratory.

6.   What is the significance of interdisciplinary research for the College of Computing in fulfilling its vision?

Interdisciplinary is a word that we’re not really happy with anymore. The way to look at computing and the way we interact with other disciplines is to look at the agendas for other disciplines. Information technology is a critical part of what they do. That’s why at the College level we’re creating partnerships with disciplines like literature, music and architecture.

If you look at all the disciplines that are important to Georgia Tech, information technology turns out to be a lens that you look through and see the world in a very different way. Architects work with modern, high-resolution displays and visualization technology. So it’s not surprising to see there’s a tight interaction between us and this very distinguished and traditional College of Architecture on campus.

From biology to mechanical engineering to electrical engineering to architecture to management, you find that computing technology forms a critical path to everything they want to do. We want to be partners in that process.

The keyword here is partnership. You can’t take a technology that’s on your critical path and say, “OK, we’re going to define how this technology is used,” because you don’t know. By the same token you can’t have a computer scientist sitting in a cubicle trying to imagine what it’s like to be a senior citizen living at home and what kind of technology you would need living in that environment. You need to put those two pieces together in a collaborative environment.

So the reason I don’t like the term “interdisciplinary” is that I’d rather talk about the new disciplines that are being created. You almost get the feeling when you talk about interdisciplinary work that there’s an office over here in this building and another office over here in this building, and two people exchange emails once in a while. What we really want is for people to live together. The Technology Square Research Building is a great example of that. You have people there from humanities, electrical engineering, computing and communications technology all in the same building working together in ways that would be difficult if you tried to keep them apart.

7.   Why did you decide to return to academia after a successful career in industry and government?

I think the thing that attracted me back to Georgia Tech was a chance to continue to innovate. Industrial innovation has become focused on operational efficiency and, frankly speaking, I was more attracted to the ability to innovate technologically. The amount of money that is available in the computer industry to do basic research is not what it was 10 years ago. Basic research is going to be done on university campuses. The thing that has driven me through my whole career is being where the action is and anticipating where innovation is going to be.

Georgia Tech is a really intriguing place to work these days. Everybody who comes here looks around and says: “This is a campus that is on the move. People know how to get things done.”

On a more personal level my family considers Atlanta home. And this was a good chance to come back.

8.   You are a self-described problem solver. What is it about problem solving that gets you excited?

It’s actually a physical rush. There’s something about focusing – almost to the exclusion of everything else – on a difficult problem. It’s the same kind of high that runners get. You concentrate your energy on one particular channel. When you’re successful, it really does result in a physical reward.

This is something that kids can learn early on. I have a 15-year-old daughter who spends a lot of her time on the computer. What’s going on? She’s downloading programs and toolkits to build games and things that allow her to communicate with others. These are problem-solving activities. She is able to focus on one or two things that she wants to get done for four or five hours.

This question of what does it take to be a problem solver has a lot to do with being wired this way. I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to get paid for something I love to do.

9.   What computing problems have been the most rewarding to you to solve?

It’s hard to talk about that because the most rewarding ones to me are probably the least accessible to people outside the field. The ones that I take the most pride in are the problems that I’ve worked on that have been deep technological problems, mainly mathematical in nature.

However, the ones that have had the most impact have not been the most technologically difficult problems. They’ve been the ones that have tried to move a field or organization in some direction. For example, when I joined Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) in the 1990s, it was just at the start of the Internet boom. I was attracted because Bellcore was a company that was known for its great engineering, but it focused on traditional telephone technology. The CEO wanted me to come to Bellcore because they needed to move into this new market of the Internet. My problem for five years was how to take my research organization and refocus it on the new technology.

If you approach things like that as a problem, you get the same kind of satisfaction that you get from solving a technology problem. I like solving business and strategy problems, so my most impactful work has not necessarily been technical.

10.   Why did you choose a career in computer science and what makes it a good area of study today?

I actually didn’t choose a career in computer science. I’m revealing something about my age when I explain that when I decided to make this career choice, computer science didn’t really exist. I’ve had the opportunity during my career to see the field defined and evolve into what it’s become today.

What drew me to this discipline was the chance to solve a problem that no one else has been able to solve before. In my early experience with computers, I used them to solve very large physics problems and to visualize things that were happening at the very smallest atomic scale. No one had been able to do that before. When you get that kind of feedback as a young grad student, it’s easy to be attracted to the discipline.

I think what attracts people today to computing is the ability to combine the technology with something that interests them. Last year, we started an undergraduate degree program in computational media. Sue Rosser, the dean of the Ivan Allen College, and I did a careful business plan for this program and thought by the end of this year we might have 10 students enrolled in the program and maybe over time we’d be able to get 100 students. This is the second semester of the program, and we already have 100 students. The reason that people are attracted to the program is that it gives them the ability to focus on something that’s intrinsically interesting to them and combine it with computing technology.

For example, people with creative talents and aspirations in the written word can see how those aspirations change when you add technology. In journalism, you can add technology and make it not just a one-way conversation between a reporter and a mass audience, but a dialogue. Those kind of transformations are extremely exciting to people. When you’re a freshman at Georgia Tech and you know you’re really not destined to be a mechanical engineer, that you’re a person who wants to put different pieces together and do something new, this is the kind of program that attracts you. People are flocking to programs to do things in their area of interest in ways that couldn’t be done without computing technology.

We’ve created seven degree programs in the College of Computing in the past three years, and they’re all degree programs that adds computing to a discipline so people can do something that is fundamentally new – from bioinformatics to human-centered computing to computational media. These programs will continue to attract people.

Bill Gates has been bemoaning the fact that students are not going into computer science like they were in the 1990s. Georgia Tech is bucking that trend. Every other major computer science department has experienced a decline at the undergraduate level. Our enrollment has continued to climb, and I think it’s because we’re allowing people to combine these areas and customize their educational experience so they can get out of the program something that’s intrinsically interesting to them. It’s another way of innovating.

11.   What do you enjoy doing for fun?

I travel extensively and I have hobbies like photography. But the truth is that I don’t live a very balanced life. So I tend to concentrate a lot of my fun on areas that I work in. I play with the technology a lot. I write programs. I fiddle around with electronic things, and that gives me great pleasure. But again those are problem-solving types of things to do.

We like to have fun here. One of the things I look for in my own career choices and in the careers of people I work with is people who really enjoy what they’re doing. It shows up in the kinds of things we’ve been able to do in the College of Computing and at Georgia Tech. This is a place where it’s a lot of fun to come to work everyday.

CONTACTS:

Rich DeMillo at 404-894-4222 or richard.demillo@cc.gatech.edu

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