A sustainable global society will require new, ever-more efficient, technologies to enhance all aspects of human participation in life. Critical to this future synergistic relationship is computing, the focus of a potential interdisciplinary USC Institute on the Future of Computing (IFComputing). The institute will aim to explore, guide, and develop revolutionary computing technologies and solutions that will be significantly more functional, secure, and sustainable compared to today’s computing platforms and paradigms. These technologies will in turn empower new applications in high-performance data processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, security and privacy, biology and medicine with huge positive impacts for the environment, people, and economy.
Computing is not simply about algorithms, data structures, operating systems, networks, robotics, computing system architectures, programming languages, artificial intelligence, databases, graphics, and software engineering. It also encompasses many new and growing areas including sustainability, mobile and edge computing, cybersecurity, dynamical systems, information visualization, user interface design, neuromorphic computing, and the internet of things. The ensuing commercial applications have spawned new research challenges in social networking, distributed multiparty transactions, data analytics, and mobile platforms, evolving and fusing together computation, vision, natural language understanding, decision making and control, sensing and actuation, and much more. As a result, there is now a strong argument that computing should be treated as a fourth great domain of science alongside the physical, life, and social sciences. In addition to creation of important new technologies, the institute will work to understand the impact of these emerging capabilities on society.
Conventional computing based on silicon electronics and von Neumann architectures are about to enter a new epoch forced by the looming end of Moore’s Law, the advent of the big data era, emergence of challenging new applications, and important societal considerations ranging from ecological sustainability to economic prowess to distributed security and privacy. Along with this imminent generational change to the technology environment, new computing paradigms, computing architectures, circuit solutions, and device technologies are needed to address a fundamentally different future socio-technical landscape and to guide the future of computing. Examples of the emerging computing paradigms include all-optical computing, secure distributed computing, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing. Examples of the exciting new computing architectures are evolving machine learning architectures, processing in memory architectures, and low-power embedded system-on-chip architectures. Some examples of the interesting new circuit solutions include coherent Ising machines, optothermal logic, and superconducting logic. Finally, some of the exciting new devices are compound semiconductors, metamaterials, 2D materials, nanophotonic devices, Josephson junction devices, magnetic nanowires, and and memristive devices.