Update and note: Be sure to check out the comments. It turns out that while the MacArthur site does not list Paul Rothemund as a computer scientist, he actually is. So there is indeed at least one CS genius for 2007.
Well the 2007 MacArthur fellows were announced and it looks like no computer scientists made it onto the roles this year. The last time there were no computer scientists on the list was 2001. This is probably just a blip, but if the trend continues, it might be a warning sign that computer science is producing fewer visionaries. In a time when the intertubes are booming with social networking activity, this seems odd. Perhaps the problem is that there are too many players and no one stands out, even though as a whole the products are changing the world. At least two of the geniuses are doing some work that appears to draw a lot on computer science but deals more with computational applications of DNA. That is, the DNA is the computer. Maybe this isn’t such a bad sign for CS, but a sign that CS by itself is diminishing and interdisciplinary applications of CS are on the rise. I know I’m not the first person to say that, so if you have a quote or a reference, please leave a comment.
My picks for top geniuses are:
- Paul Rothemund – Caltech – DNA computation and nanotechnology. Awesome stuff. He has used
algorithmic self assembly methods with DNAscaffolded DNA origami to construct images like a map of the western hemisphere (see picture). - Saul Griffith - Squid Labs - One of his inventions could bring cheap eyeglasses to poor communities throughout the world. Another was a handheld human powered generator. He’s also into nanotech, so we could see some cool stuff there.
- Michael Elowitz – Caltech – More algorithmic coolness with DNA and DNA circuits.
In time, husband, you shall be a recipient.
Dear Jason,
I just got a reference to your blog in a google alert—I share with you a worry for the demise of computer science.
While the press release calls me a “research technologist” (and I have no idea where that came from) I _am_ a computer scientist. And a wannabe naturalist/biologist.
The map of the Americas was not created by algorithmic assembly but rather “scaffolded DNA origami”. It has all the computer science of printf(“hello, world\n”); DNA origami can display arbitrary (kolmogorov random) information at the price of, well, using an amount of DNA equal to the amount of information (in terms of the length of the DNA strands required).
Algorithmic self-assembly is the discipline of growing crystals with actual computation embedded within them. The subunits of the crystals can be made from DNA, we call them “tiles” since the link to computation comes via Hao Wang’s work on tiling. But really they are most easily thought of as physical instantiations of the space time-histories of cellular automata. So they can compute anything and they have algorithms, and decidability questions, and complexity questions, and all that good computer science stuff.
We can use DNA origami to initiate algorithmic self-assembly, providing say 16 or probably 32 bits of input to a computation. Maybe as high as 200 bits now that I think about it. It is a neat way to combine the two.
And algorithmic self-assembly is by no means the only way of connecting computation to molecules. In some number of decades you may not see such things as merely “interdisciplinary applications of CS”, they may be CS because we will do lots of programming of molecules and the physical world.
BTW, this is the first time I have posted to a blog, I feel like a dinosaur.
Paul Rothemund
I have this feeling that computer science is lacking a visionary. We need an Einstien (some e=mc square ) thing here. I see reason are to believe that we are not progressing in terms of capturing information effectively and smarty with less efforts.
If you see, everyone in the world in busy in making applications, but fewer are after some big idea that could change the thinking scenario of the softwares.