Sometime back I read the Grant Challanges in Computing Research report by the British Computer Society in collaboration with several other organizations ([pdf]). As the name suggests, the purpose of the report was to identify problems that will define and engage computing research over the coming two decades.
A few entries were quite predictable: quantum computing and ubiquitous computing for instance. I was slightly less impressed by the “dependable systems evolution” challenge—I don’t think its as a grand a challenge, more so because its something that we really need to get right in the short term, and not wait for another 10 years for it to happen.
The one entry that I found most interesting was Memories for life—with the recent digital revolution, penetration of digital cameras and electronic media in the consumer market, and falling storage prices I think the problem of efficiently indexing and managing digital media and designing innovative user interfaces around these technologies is going to be a big challenge, atleast in terms of its relevance and impact in day to day lives of people.
Other challanges, such as In Vivo-In Silico are probably just as important, but more esoteric. The architecture of brain and mind challenge has been around for quite a while now, and I don’t think its going to go away in the next 20 years. Understanding how the brain works has been the holy grail for AI researchers, and though much progress has been made since the 1970s, we’re still a long long way.