Richard C.Alkire, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: In addition to the chemical engineering department, I have an appointment at the computing group at Illinois, and I play the piano. I have been thinking of your work and about the way the eyes see data visually when playing the piano. The fingers touch the keys and the muscles drive them. There is integration to a considerable extent, but it is all connected to the brain.

We have a very large and still growing computational infrastructure in the United States, and we have fingers and eyes and data coming together to solve problems or create solutions. Could you comment in a forward-looking way on how all of these pieces will actually be integrated, how the data will be structured, so the most people can access the data in a proper way on computers for which they weren’t originally intended and compiled, and how it can be accessible in a way that allows us to solve problems over and over and learn from them, just as you have envisioned? What is needed between all those fingers and the nerve endings that you have described and the brain that coordinates all the pieces that keeps them straight?

Venkat Venkatasubramanian: Certainly we are nowhere near such a level of complexity. That would involve database management and security issues, which we are not looking at right now. Eventually, when these kinds of systems are sitting in companies and institutions, both issues will be somewhat important. We have a long way to go to reach that point.