CONVERSATION WITH …Avi Silberschatz
Yale professor talks about his work in computer science
By Howard Blas

NEW HAVEN n When Israeli Avi Silberschatz moved to the United States in the 1970s to begin his studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he intended to major in industrial engineering. But after taking a course in the relatively new field of computer science, Silberschatz was hooked.
Today, Silberschatz is a professor and chair of the computer science department of Yale University. 
Born in Haifa, Israel, Silberschatz moved to the U.S. after graduating from high school and serving in the Israel Defense Forces, completing his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science in just seven years. 
In 1976, Silberschatz accepted a position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as an assistant professor. In 1993, Silberschatz took what was intended to be a one-year sabbatical to Bell Labs in Murray Hills, N.J., but ended up staying there for 10 years, serving initially as the head of the Computing Systems Research Department, and then as the vice president of the newly formed Information Sciences Research Center. Silberschatz returned to academia in 2003, when he accepted the position at Yale where he conducts research, lectures and trains PhD students. He is currently working on a new book entitled “Computer Science,” aimed to cover the basic principles of the field. 
Silberschatz recently spoke to the Ledger about his work in the field of computer science.

Q: How would you describe your current areas of interest? 

A: I spend a lot of my time on three research areas: 
a) Bioinformatics (or biosciences databases) - We are trying to come up with new methods for storing bioscience information. Data in the biological world is different than what we store in the business world. I am working closely with faculty members in the medical school, and I have two PhD students working on this project. We hope that our research will lead to new ways for storing biological scientific information. 
b) Internet privacy issues - Two Yale colleagues and I have received a large five-year National Science Foundation grant in support of this work. We are working collaboratively with colleagues at Stanford, NYU, the Stevens Institute of Technology, and the University of New Mexico. 
c) Networking - I have a lot of experience and knowledge about networking from my work at Bell Labs and am working closely with one of my colleagues in the department on various issues concerning data networks. 

Q: You recently returned to academia following a long stint at Bell Labs. How have you found the transition from academia, to Bell Labs, and back to academia? 

A: In academia, you can’t build large systems that have an impact. At most, you can generate proof of concepts systems. This is different at an industrial research lab, like Bell Labs.
Being at Bell Labs was like being in academia. There were 1,200 PhDs from all walks of life. I was surrounded by people from the fields of chemistry, physics, materials science, mathematics, statistics, etc. It was a place where you get the best people together and just let them think. It is an academic setting without teaching and without the requirement to write grant proposals. 
Since the parent company is in the business of making money, we were exposed to real world problems and real life situations. For example, when I was working with Bell Labs (with the parent company being AT&T and then Lucent), we faced the real-world problem of building a reliable network… It was gratifying to see that some of my academic research on main-memory database systems, turned into a large scale commercial product, which was deployed as part of the AT&T network. 

Q: What is the most important lesson you have learned from all of your work?

A: Here is one major lesson: When I do research on a particular subject, I always ask myself, “When I am finished with the work, what is the killer application?” meaning “how will this research going to be used?” Even though it may only have a remote application, I always ask myself, what application can the research be used for? It may only be a stepping stone to something larger, but if you can’t even dream of one application of how it will be used, the research is only theoretical. It is different in a field like mathematics - where you can build theories for the sake of theory. This is the biggest influence industry had on me. 

Q: How are we as a country doing in the area of research and development? 

A: Our country is not doing well in this area because funding for basic research is dwindling. The U.S. government is allocating less and less money for basic research. As an example, a lot of research in the past 20-30 years was funded by the Department of Defense - it is from this money that new technologies, like the Internet, was created. But the Department of Defense, NIH and National Science Foundation are all cutting down on funding. It will be more difficult for people in academia to get funding for basic research.
In the U.S. government today, I would guess that 90 percent of all congressmen are lawyers, who have little appreciation of basic science. In contrast, most government officials in China are engineers or scientists. This difference in leadership plays an important role in how much money is invested by the respective countries in support of research in basic science and technology.
If we don’t do something about this funding problem, we will lose our technological edge. The rule of thumb is that it takes about 15 to 20 years from the time a new idea is conceived until it becomes a viable commercial product. Remember - the Internet was created in the 1960s, and it only became commercially viable in the mid ‘90s - 30 years later. The point is that if we stop funding basic research, we will do OK in the short term, but in 15 years from now, the “innovation” pipeline will be empty, with severe consequences on our ability to compete globally.
 
Q: You and Mark Shiffrin, former Connecticut State Consumer Protection Commissioner, have recently written several articles about the Internet. What is happening in the world of Internet “ownership and regulation?” 

A: Mark and I had recent pieces in the New York Times and in the International Herald Tribune. We have written about the movement afoot in the United States and the European Union to get the U.S. to give up control of the Internet, which is a medium the U.S. created and on which it critically relies. 
The Internet has become an integral part of the global economy, in large part because the United States has also provided the genius of its technology to other societies that use it to benefit themselves, including in doing business and competing with the U.S. So it was only a matter of time before foreign powers began asking who should control the electronic superhighway on which they now rely for their national well-being, something that America has built, paid for and maintained. 
Internationalizing control of a medium now regulated with a loose hand by a nation committed to maximizing freedom would inevitably create more of an opening for countries like China (a strong proponent of imposing some international supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the California-based nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Commerce Department in 1998) to exert more pressure on Internet service providers. More broadly, international regulation could enable like-minded governments to work in concert to deem certain thoughts impermissible online. 
The Internet is an attractive commercial infrastructure for all societies, even oppressive ones. But the string attached to its creation by America is that it must be used within a context of freedom, both economic and political. This is a democratic value that America should not be shy about exporting. Accepting that commitment to online freedom should be the price that foreign governments must pay for the blessing of the Internet in their national economic lives.