August 2020

Your first newsletter interview went over fairly well. Are you ready to do another?

Sure.

You mentioned in 2016 that you are originally from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. How did you end up in Knoxville, TN?

I gave one account of that in my 2016 interview, but the shorter answer is “desperation.” In the mid 1980s I was working on my dissertation, had 2 (sometimes 3) part-time jobs, and a family with two young children. The academic job market in Philosophy was terrible at the time; it looked like, even when I finished my PhD, I might have to take a series of 1-year appointments before I could find a tenure-track position, which would mean a lot of moving. That was bad enough. But the thought of trying to put my children through college by working as a gypsy scholar didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling either. Despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about Information and Communication Technology (ICT), some people I trusted (mostly my wife and my brother) thought I would be good at it. So I decided to change careers, even while trying simultaneously to finish my PhD. UNC Chapel Hill turned out to be a very good place to be if you wanted to self-educate in ICT. After a couple of years of hanging out in the campus computing labs (I couldn’t afford a computer of my own at the time), I had learned enough to talk my way into a job doing ICT support for the School of Nursing at UNC-CH. The Associate Dean there, Dr. Joan Uhl, liked my work and my academic credentials. When she got the job as the Dean of the College of Nursing at UTK, she decided to hire me as her “Director of Computing and Communications” to help her bring the College into the Internet Age. And that’s how my family and I came to Knoxville.

Unlike the other “doctors” at ICL, your background is in the humanities. How has your PhD in philosophy shaped your approach to writing and managing the proposal process (among other things) at ICL?

This is a hard question for me to answer, especially if I want to be mercifully brief. I suppose first and foremost, reading and writing Philosophy shaped the way I think and write in general. This comes out partly in my inclination—frequently criticized by my fellow ICLers—for long sentences. But more importantly, Philosophy taught me that a complete unit of thought is an argument, i.e., a paragraph. Second, I did my PhD work on the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (pronounced “pers”). Peirce spent his working life as a professional scientist, in exactly the same sense of “scientist” (e.g., empirical, quantitative, statistical) that we use today. But his work as a philosopher focused on the Logic of Science in the broadest possible sense of “Logic.” I have always analyzed the “scientific computing” world that ICL inhabits through the lens of Peirce’s Logic of Science. Finally, I did my MS in Political Philosophy. When you’re working on proposals that are going to federal funding agencies, you have to think a bit about the institutional goals and circumstances that are shaping the funders and their funding solicitations. Having some background in Political Philosophy, and a general history of ideas, has been helpful to me in that regard.

Apart from the humanities background, though, the most helpful thing for managing the proposal writing process has been the fact that I played competitive team sports as a kid. Writing proposals at ICL is competitive team writing, and lessons from the former translate to the latter pretty well.

Over the years, you’ve worked on proposals with many members of ICL across all three research groups. Is there one particular research focus that you find more interesting? Speak carefully.

Developing proposals is a somewhat arduous process, but one of its compensatory pleasures is that you get to work with smart people in a very collaborative and creative process. There are people in all three of ICL’s research groups that have a real creative spark, and it’s working with them which has made the process interesting and enjoyable for me. So that spark is something special that is independent of the research focus, but it’s a characteristic of many of the people I have worked with at ICL during my two decades here.

You told me once—during my job interview actually—that we should never stop learning, and that if you stop learning and get comfortable, you should move on. Something about an ascidian eating its own brain. This is not a question, but more so something I thought others should know about your interviewing style.

Moving on. You’ve been with ICL for a couple of decades, and I think you have a pretty good idea of the operation at this point, if I may be so bold. That said, this pandemic has flipped the script on many of us. What has been your biggest challenge working apart from your fellow ICLers?

I’m sure it’s pretty similar to what everyone is experiencing. Our understanding of what’s going on with others is always a guess based on the experiences we have with them. In the last few months, we’ve gone from daily, n-dimensional experiences with real people in the flesh to occasional encounters with flat, 2-dimensional talking heads. It’s like everyone has turned into their own little versions of Max Headroom. So our ability to make our guesses about what our colleagues are thinking and feeling comes from only a very tiny fraction of the experience we used to have with them. As I said above, doing proposals is a kind of competitive team sport. To be effective, you have to have a sense of what your team is thinking and feeling. It’s hard to maintain that sense in Zoomworld.

And even though we’re mostly relegated to Zoom meetings these days, we are fortunate that much of the work and research at ICL can be accomplished remotely. Tell us a little bit about some of the proposals and/or projects you’re involved in at present.

ECP provides us with a solid funding foundation these days, so we’re able to be more selective about the proposals we do. I helped with some AI-related proposals for the DOE that we did in May because AI is rapidly revolutionizing scientific computing, and it’s very important for the long term that we begin to expand our research portfolio in that direction. For similar or related reasons, I worked on a preproposal for NSF Computing Expeditions with Michela Taufer and Micah Beck that was submitted in June. If that effort is given the green light for a full proposal, that will be a big deal, because it is for 15 million dollars over five years and involves four other universities. If we’re selected to submit a full proposal, it would be due in mid-February of 2021. So I guess I’m trying to work on strategic things that might help open up a post-ECP path forward for ICL.

Over the past few years, a lot of the effort within the HPC community to think strategically about cyberinfrastructure for science has been going on in the Big Data and Extreme-scale Computing (BDEC) project. BDEC is a long-running series of international workshops that Jack and Pete Beckman have been leading. At the moment I’m focused on helping to put together a summary report, or a kind of “technology roadmap” document, for that project. Because of the emergence of Deep Learning and the incredible tsunami of data that scientific instruments of all kinds are generating today, this is truly a watershed moment for cyberinfrastructure and for scientific computing generally. So working on the BDEC strategy document is both very challenging and, for someone interested in the history and philosophy of science, like me, extremely interesting. That document will need to be finished this fall, the Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding.

Finally, tell us what you miss most about working on campus. Do you think we’ll ever get back to (a new) “normal?”

What I’ve said already about the challenges of making ICL work in Zoomworld covers this question to some degree. Briefly put, it’s all about the people. I very much miss what I think of as the social and intellectual metabolism of life at ICL. It’s a special place. I’ve thought that and heard that from people inside and outside of ICL throughout my entire career there. But the pandemic has put us into something like a state of suspended animation. Although we’re keeping the metabolism going, living in Zoomworld has slowed it way down. So as tiring as it could sometimes be, I very much miss the spark and pace of life at ICL, pre-Covid.

As for the “new normal,” I hope and expect to get back to a state of societal homeostasis sometime in the not too distant future, especially if we get an effective vaccine or treatment regimen for Covid reasonably soon. Yet the pandemic, and the poor quality of our society’s response to it, has been a huge shock to our system and its institutions; if and when we do stabilize, it seems obvious that we’re going to have to reestablish our lives in a very different world. And that’s not even to mention all the other forces that are sweeping us along and making the future uncertain. But aside from such lame generalities, I’m sure I don’t know any more than anyone else about where we’re headed.