Computing needs a Grand Challenge

Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a "grand challenge" to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. Speaking last Tuesday at an open day at Microsoft Research's lab in Cambridge, Hoare told the audience of around 60 journalists and analysts that there are seven such challenges facing researchers today. Significantly, these are not purely computational challenges, but involve a mix of disciplines from biology and psychology, right through to quantum physics. This reflects how much other areas rely on and use IT to support their research, but also the changing nature of computer science itself.