Bryant: A recent big growth area in computing has been in using statistical methods to process vast quantities of data. Google is a prime example of that: They can return a query to you in a few seconds based on the contents of the entire [Web]. How do they do it? By maintaining massive data repositories that allow thousands of processors to operate on terabytes of data. This data-centric style of computing will drive many future efforts in natural-language translation and understanding, astronomy and even epidemiology. For example, we have a project that provides early detection of public health concerns by monitoring the sales of cough and cold remedies at regional pharmacies -- giving a heads-up before doctors start seeing disease trends among their patients.

Birman: I'm convinced that we're reaching a point where trustworthy computing will finally overcome its historical market-failure problems and become a commonplace requirement. And I see massive databases as a huge area and opportunity, particularly when the data is intrinsically distributed.

Web services will be the next interoperability standard, engulfing CORBA but going further. The world is going to become interoperable, and this leads to large-scale, distributed, service-oriented architectures. There's a lot of research to do, but this is going to be a phenomenally large thing, much larger than the original Web revolution.

Carbonell: Artificial intelligence. Although those words may be somewhat out of fashion these days, much of the deep excitement and universally useful apps descend therefrom. For example: speech understanding and synthesis in handheld devices, in cars, in laptops; machine translation of text and spoken language; new search engines that find what you want, not just Web pages that contain query words; self-healing software, including adaptive networks that reconfigure for reliability; robotics for mine safety, planetary exploration; prosthetics for medical/nursing care and manufacturing; game theory for electronic commerce, auctions and their design to ensure fairness and market liquidity and maximize aggregate social wealth.

Is the looming end of Moore's Law a key driver for CS today?