Why do they call you 'Dragon Lady'? That was a moniker I got a long time ago while teaching undergraduates at . The students dubbed me Dragon Lady because I have high expectations and I can be pretty tough and uncompromising -- but in a friendly-fearful way. Eventually, my karate friends picked up on the name.
Dossier
Name: Jeannette M. Wing
Title: ; professor of computer science,
Favorite technology: "Wireless broadband at home. It's changed my life!"
Ambition: To learn Chinese
Favorite nonwork pastime: Ballet
Ask her to do anything but... "Sing."
Recent good book read: , by Fareed Zakaria
Something people don't know about her: "I've wanted to teach ever since I was 4 years old."
Karate rank: Fourth-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do
What research are you personally doing? I'm interested in trustworthy computing, which includes reliability, security, privacy and usability. A student and I are working on a problem in privacy where we'd like to understand what people mean by the "use" and "purpose" of information. Suppose promises they will not read your e-mail in order to target advertising, but they will read it for spam detection. That seems like a reasonable policy, because you'd like them to filter your e-mail so you don't get spam but not to figure out what ads to serve you. If a company does have such a policy, how can the user ensure it is enforcing it? Is there a formal way to specify those policies? Is there a way to analyze the code to see that it actually satisfies the policy? Using formal methods, how do you analyze the code? We are starting from scratch because we don't even have formal logics for expressing those privacy policies.
Can computational thinking help people who are not computer scientists? One of my visions for the 21st century is that it will be a fundamental skill used by everyone. Scientists and engineers [who are not computer scientists] already know the power of metal tools -- such as supercomputers and networks -- but what I'm arguing is that it's the mental tools that can give them more power. It can truly transform the way they think, even prompting them to ask questions they wouldn't have thought to ask before.
[Take] for instance, the fact that we have many techniques for dealing with large data sets -- machine learning, data mining, data federation and so on. So for us, large data sets offer a different way to solve problems. But scientists and engineers might not even know that they could look for particular patterns or clusters in a data set. It would be unfathomable that they could answer a question [using such techniques].
We are even seeing applications of computational thinking in music, linguistics, economics, medicine and law. My dream is that a course in principles of computing or foundations of computer science would be on a list of courses for a general education. It would go way beyond programming in Java and would be for everyone.
Is there any hope we will see substantial improvements in software quality? There are no silver bullets. However, we have seen progress. In the past five to eight years, we've seen much more use of automated tools in the software development process. Tools do more and more semantic analysis [of code]. That requires annotating the software so the tools have a better understanding of what the code represents. Eventually, we may be able to more automatically generate the annotations. The tools will become smarter, but the research challenges are still there.
What worries you most in computer security? I've been advocating to the research community to think about the threats of the future. The threats of today come from things like coding vulnerabilities -- buffer overruns and so on. We have been pretty fixated on code-level vulnerabilities, but we should be thinking about vulnerabilities at a higher level, at the component level. So you might use one component, like your browser, to interact with another component, like the DNS server, and all of a sudden there is a gap that can be exploited in an attack. We may in the future see more and more of these composition flaws, where even though components may be individually deemed secure, the ensemble may not be.
What kinds of projects do you fund with your [US]$535 million budget? The -- for example, "What is computable?" -- whose impact may be far in the future but which could be truly revolutionary. We also fund fundamental research driven by societal grand challenges, such as climate change, energy, environment and health care.
There are projects in bio-inspired computing, where individual molecules are considered a machine. People have built molecular machines, and the research challenge now is to get them to communicate chemically.
Another hot trend in computer science is in economics. For example, ad placement on Yahoo. And is all about auctioning keywords. There's a whole new field called computational macroeconomics. And there is algorithmic game theory. My mantra in computational thinking is that it will really influence the way people think, whether they are scientists, engineers, economists or musicians.
What's the attraction of ballet and karate? I do them for stress relief, and of course to keep physically fit. Having been in ballet performances and karate tournaments helped me in the classroom as a teacher, because as a teacher, one is really performing. As a teacher standing in front of the classroom, one has to be "on," and through ballet performances and karate tournaments, I gained that stage experience. There is a very similar "buzz" one gets in all those kinds of performances -- teaching, ballet and karate.
What do you expect from the in science? I have great hope. I'm known to be a very optimistic person. in his inaugural address. I was thrilled. I jumped up and down. He certainly has chosen a dynamite slate of top scientists to advise him. How does that translate into federal funding for research? I'm keeping my fingers crossed.