Festschrift Honoring Rick Rashid on His 60Th Birthday

estschrift for Rick Rashid F on his 60th birthday Rich Draves Pamela Ash 9 March 2012 Dan Hart illustration for School of Computer Science, © 2009 Carnegie Mellon University, used with permission. INTRODUCTION RICH DRAVES ou’re holding a Festschrift honoring Rick Rashid on his 60th birthday. You may well ask, “What is a Festschrift?” According to Wikipedia, a Festschrift “is a book Y honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime.” The Festschrift idea dates back to August 2011, when a group of friends and colleagues suddenly realized that Rick’s 60th birthday was rapidly approaching. In our defense, I can only point to Rick’s youthful appearance and personality. Peter Lee suggested that we organize a Festschrift. The idea was foreign, but everyone immediately recognized that it was the right way to honor Rick. The only problem was timing. Fortunately, this is a common problem and the belated Festschrift is somewhat traditional. We set a goal of holding a colloquium on March 9, 2012 (in conjunction with Microsoft Research’s annual TechFest) and producing a volume by September 2012, within a year of Rick’s birthday. This volume has content similar to the colloquium, but some authors made a different written contribution. The DVD in the back of the book contains a recording of the colloquium. I want to emphasize that we’re celebrating Rick’s career and accomplishments to date but we are also looking forward to many more great things to come. In other words, we need not fear his retirement. I remember Rick saying once that someone would need to “pry his cold dead hands off the keyboard,” so I assume that Microsoft Research is not in imminent danger of losing Rick. Many people were involved in producing the colloquium as well as this volume. Peter Lee deserves credit for originally suggesting the idea and working with me on the organization— he had some great advice. I want to thank all the contributors and all the people who came INTRODUCTION i from out-of-town for the colloquium. When you are planning something like this, you never know what you are going to get and everyone came through amazingly. Henry Honig and Daniel Betcher worked miracles at the last minute to edit videos of Nathan Myhrvold and Avie Tevanian, who could not attend the colloquium in person. Jamie Rifley, Jenifer Carlson, and Melissa Kelly provided great administrative support for the colloquium. Lynn Powers jumped in to help produce this volume and dedicated many hours to research options and review the design, along with Ann Paradiso and Tony Carbary. Pamela Ash worked full-time for several months on copy editing, layout, and the many other tasks necessary to produce a book. Thank you all! Rich Draves ii FESTSCHRIFT FOR RICK RASHID CONTENTS Rich Draves Introduction �� i Faculty and Staff Raj Reddy Educating a Child Machine �� 9 Mahadev Satyanarayanan On Microkernels and Virtual Machines: The Legacy of Mach �� 21 Alfred Spector A Letter �� 31 Jonathan Chew How I Came to Work for Mach’s Fearless Leader �� 33 Students Avadis Tevanian, Jr. Evolution of the Mach Operating System �� 39 Michael Young A Letter �� 47 David L. Black A Letter �� 49 DH-CHAP: Diffie-Hellman Enhanced CHAP for iSCSI �� 51 Michael B. Jones Matchmaker: An Interface Specification Language for Distributed Processing �� 67 Bill Bolosky The Tiger Project �� 79 iii Rich Draves Twenty-Five Years with Rick Rashid ��83 Galen C. Hunt The Drawbridge Library OS: Windows as an Application ��87 Joe Barrera A Letter ��117 Founding Microsoft Research Bill Gates Letter to Rick Rashid ��123 Nathan Myhrvold Anecdotes from MSR’s Founding ��125 Historical Memo Proposing MSR ��131 Dan Ling and Jack Breese A Short History of Microsoft Research ��153 Linda Stone A Letter ��163 James Larus Software Development and Engineering Research in Microsoft Research, Redmond ��165 Ed Lazowska Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research, and Academia ��171 Xuedong Huang Rick Rashid’s Impact on Microsoft Product R&D ��175 Managing Microsoft Research Roy Levin On Software Principles and Research Management ��181 iv Hsiao-Wuen Hon Rick Rashid & Microsoft Research Asia �� 189 Andrew Blake Moving in Mysterious Ways �� 201 Christian Borgs and Jennifer Chayes From Phase Transitions to Network Algorithms: A Personal Research Journey on Rick’s Long Leash �� 205 Peter Lee The Importance of Dog Food �� 217 Rakesh Agrawal The Future of Textbooks �� 221 Rick Rashid, Renaissance Man Gordon Bell with Jim Gemmell And Now, the Next 20 Years �� 233 Andrew Herbert Rick Rashid—Aeroplane Pilot �� 239 Greg Bear Randomness, Science, and the Library of Babel �� 241 Terri Rashid Seven Habits of the Highly Effective Rick Rashid �� 249 Photographs Early Years �� 260 Recent Times �� 263 v vi F aculty and Staff 8 FESTSCHRIFT FOR RICK RASHID EDUCATING A CHILD MACHINE THE UNFINISHED AGENDA OF HUMAN-LEVEL AI RAJ REddY March 9, 2012 Talk at Rick Rashid’s Festschrift everal eminent scientists from Turing to McCarthy to Kurzweil have made serious proposals for achieving human-level AI (as opposed to creating useful S systems that act intelligently) and yet so far, there has not been a sustained and comprehensive effort towards this goal. In this paper, we present some of the past proposals and their limitations; reasons for optimism given the dramatic results of the last decade in search, speech, language understanding (translation and question answering) and autonomous navigation; and a possible roadmap for making fundamental progress towards the goal by first building a Child Machine that is teachable and can learn to reach the abilities of a 4 year old. I. Introduction When Rick came to CMU in 1979, it seemed that he might spend time doing vision and AI research as a continuation of his thesis. Fortuitously, I had just received a major DARPA grant for research in Distributed Sensor Networks and it was clear that we needed a distributed operating system before we could start the rest of the research. Thus began Rick’s work on Mach and eventual arrival at Microsoft. Nevertheless, given his broad set of interests and contributions to AI, I thought it might be fun to layout a research plan that he could lead when he retires from his current job! It had to be challenging enough to attract his attention and one he might pull off given another 20 years of large scale effort at MSR. Hence the topic for today, namely, “Educating a Child Machine: The Unfinished Agenda of Human-Level AI.” John McCarthy once said, “Human-level AI might require 1.7 Einsteins, 2 Maxwells, 5 Faradays and 0.3 Manhattan Projects, the project coming after the conceptual breakthroughs.” So FACULTY AND STAff 9 far, we neither have all the needed conceptual breakthroughs, nor the long-term infusion of billions of dollars of funding to realize human-level AI. I believe John is mostly right, albeit the needed conceptual breakthroughs may not happen in a vacuum and will need the context of a sustained long-term project. Only MSR, the world’s largest computer science research group, can probably pull it off; perhaps as part of a long-term coordinated national effort and with some help from the academic community. II. Past Proposals for Achieving Human-Level AI (HLAI) So what do we mean by human-level AI? Here we will not concern ourselves with philosophical arguments that “machines cannot have a mind” or the pragmatic view that “the primary mission of artificial intelligence research is to create useful systems thatact intelligently.” Several eminent people starting with Turing have attempted to answer the question of how a machine might think and exhibit human-equivalent

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