Priscilla P. Nelson

Photographer: Robert Severi

Senior Advisor, Directorate for Engineering, National Science Foundation

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Computational capability—both greater power and its distributed nature.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Distributed sensing, which goes hand in hand with computational capability.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Bottled water.

"Forty years ago, I never would have thought that we would be lugging bottled water around. We are a risk-averse society right now, so people will get rid of any risk they think they can, if they have the money. It's a new factor in trying to understand how people make sustainable decisions in their lives.

"The pace of technological change and the complexity of natural environmental change overwhelm our human and social systems' ability to deal with them. We need fundamental research that relates the sources of change to how humans and social systems react in order to manage, to live with, to perturb—whatever it is that we do with—these changes.

"Distributed sensing is about being able to observe freshly and innovatively the world around us, both the constructed and the natural environments, and indeed our own organizational and social environments. These systems are too complex to model explicitly, and we can now make more complex models than we can validate. So it's very important to build the observational capability through networked sensors, whether they're on satellite platforms, airborne devices, or ground-based. For example, the planet's water resource capacity will be newly observed, so we'll understand more about what's going on with our water balance and what role the oceans play in their vastness. Then we can change the models and make better decisions that are sustainable. We're right on the edge of what I think of as the Sensing Revolution, and it's very exciting."