Learning for life challenges, plus an update on six already-established research programmes were discussed at the Grand Challenges 2006 conference sponsored by the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) with the backing of the BCS, the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), IET, and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC).


The purpose of the Grand Challenges is to pursue goals recognized one or two decades in advance of their application. A third new challenge - finding how to engage and excite youngsters about IT - was also proposed and won approval as a meta-grand challenge bridging both research and education fields.


For the proposers, the need to engage young people in the IT discipline is key for the future of the profession. The researchers want to discover what will excite the 12-14 year age range, an age that generally is information hungry but appears to see the progress already made in IT, such as radio technology, laptops and mobile technology, and believes that everything has already been achieved.


"At this age, youngsters are looking to make choices that will affect their future careers, so we need to challenge their perception of IT and hope to do it by articulating research-based grand challenges in simple terms to capture their imagination and excite them about future possibilities in IT."


The proposers of the challenge of bringing the past to life have a vision to explore how man can interact and understand the past through technology. The idea is based upon enabling people to link a reconstruction of an event from the past to the modern-day evidence and receive explanations of the differing socio-political perspectives that are relevant to the events.

The proposers explain: "The vision is that the citizen should be able to witness events interactively but as more than just a re-creation, allowing the viewer to explore and discover more about the circumstances and motivations of the participants."


The learning-for-life-challenge researchers want to find out how learning environments and opportunities will manifest in the future, how people will engage with learning events, and what learning for life will be like.


They explain: "With the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing, the semantic web, and the development of an e-Research infrastructure, new possibilities are opening up for eLearning and learning for life that take us beyond what has been conceived in this area before. These new possibilities need to be understood in the context of our developing comprehension of the co-evolutionary nature of learning and computing systems, so we ensure that the full potential of learning for life is realized."