KAUST IT Summit
If it’s Friday, this must be Victorville. I’m writing to you today from the site of the DARPA Urban Challenge, the premier race for autonomous robots. A report on that tomorrow.
It’s been a whirlwind of travel lately. Before arriving in Victorville, I was in Washington DC for a meeting of the CCC Council. More on that later. And then before that, I was in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, co-chairing a meeting of 17 academic and industry leaders, on the question of the IT infrastructure for KAUST, the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The other co-chairs for the Summit were Jack Breese, formerly of Microsoft Research and now at the Washington Advisory Group, and Ed Lazowska, of the University of Washington. (Ed became quite ill during the pre-planning for the Summit and couldn’t make the trip.)
As I stated in my charge to the participants, the purpose of the Summit was to dream — given a clean sheet of paper, what new research university would you design? The particular focus of the Summit would be on the IT infrastructure, but of course the overall university design is such an interesting concept that comments on all aspects were invited. The Summit participants were simply fantastic. From industry we had Larry Roberts (early Internet pioneer and CEO of Anagran), Lutz Heuser (Chief Architect, SAP), Merv Andrade (CTO, Aruba Networks), Tony Hey (VP, Microsoft), Usama Fayyad (Chief Data Officer, Yahoo!), and Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon). From academia, the participants were Dan Reed (UNC), Garth Gibson (CMU), Omar Ghattas (UT-Austin), Ramesh Rao (UCSD), Rob Pennington (NCSA/Illinois), and Ron Johnson (Washington). Charlie Catlett (Argonne) provided a government lab perspective, and finally two IT and economic leaders from Saudi Arabia were present. They were His Excellency Dr. Mohammed Al-Suwaiyel (President of King Abdulaziz for Science and Technology) and Dr. Ibrahim Al Mishari (former CIO, Saudi Aramco).
The Summit was a major, possibly historic, event for Saudi Arabia. I expected this to be small, private summit meeting intended to give frank advice to the KAUST team on how to develop the IT infrastructure for their new campus. But it became clear pretty quickly that this event was much more important than that. Over 250 people attended live, and then as many as 16,000 people were able to watch the telecast. The press coverage in the region was extensive, with a full page in Al Hayat and several other articles, such as this, that, and the other.
The day before and the day after the Summit, we were given tours of several interesting places, including the Saudi Aramco operations and drill-steering centers, as well as King Fah’d University. The level of technology and need for basic science shown to us by Aramco was pretty stunning. The Aramco steering center (where they remotely direct drilling operations) was particularly impressive.
I think it is fair to say that all of us were swept up in the excitement of the event and what it obviously meant to the people connected with higher education in Saudi Arabia. In reflecting on our involvement in the Summit, I think the experiences we’ve had thus far in Qatar, and the productive partnership with the Qatar Foundation, have put us in a unique position to work both effectively and nimbly in the gulf region.
Peter Lee @ November 2, 2007