Larry Smarr | University of Missouri honorary degree | May 17, 2008 Machine-generated transcript, reviewed for names and selected passages. Minor speech disfluencies may be omitted. The recording is authoritative. [00:00] Chancellor The special time that we take today to praise and honor our graduating seniors also affords us a special opportunity to recognize an individual whose body of scientific work and life of achievement we honor today. [00:18] Chancellor We want to show the pride of this institution, our faculty, students, staff, and alumni who recognize the accomplishments of this special individual in his role as citizen and leader. And we will be presenting him today with an honorary degree. [00:34] Chancellor And our recipient today is Dr. Larry Smarr. I would ask that Dr. Smarr join me at the podium. [00:48] Chancellor Dr. Smarr is a renowned scientist, a devoted researcher, innovator, a venerated pioneer, and notable educator. Larry Smarr is a native Columbian and a graduate of the University of Missouri College of Arts and Science. [01:04] Chancellor We salute you today for your many accomplishments. And we're so pleased to be able to award you the degree of Dr. of Science, honoris causa. Let me share some of the background with this audience today that has commended you for this recognition. [01:21] Chancellor Larry Smarr is the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and the Harry E. Gruber Professor in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. [01:37] Chancellor Dr. Smarr is principal investigator on the National Science Foundation OptIPuter Lambda Grid Project, and is co PI on the National Science Foundation LOOKING Ocean Observatory prototype. As founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, established in 1985, and the National Computational Science Alliance, beginning in 1997, Dr. Smarr has driven contributions [02:06] Chancellor to the development of the national information infrastructure, the Internet, the web, the emerging grid, collaboratories with the private sector, and scientific visualization. [02:20] Chancellor His views have been quoted extensively in science, nature, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and Businessweek. And he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. [02:39] Chancellor Dr. Smarr received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based astrophysical sciences research for fifteen years before becoming director of the NCSA. [02:55] Chancellor He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Science. In 1990, he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. [03:09] Chancellor Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. [03:25] Chancellor He served as chair of NASA's Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was the first chair of the newly formed NASA Science Advisory Council. Dr. Smarr, we're honored that you're with us today, and we thank you not only for the glorious achievements you have made in your professional career, but for being with us and accepting our honors. [03:49] Chancellor For all now... For all your accomplishments, your public service, and your generosity, the University of Missouri is proud to confer upon you the degree of Dr. of science, honoris causa. [04:37] Chancellor Now by the virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, I hereby confer upon you the degree of Dr. of science, honoris causa, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities pertaining thereto. [04:53] Chancellor Congratulations. [04:54] Larry Smarr Thank you. [05:00] Chancellor I'll extend the podium to Dr. Smarr. [05:05] Larry Smarr Thank you very much, chancellor, and welcome to all of the honors students. You know, in 1929, my grandparents came to Columbia to have a... Set up their home because my grandfather had an eighth grade education and he wanted to be close enough that his kids could walk to the University of Missouri and get the first college degree. [05:30] Larry Smarr Since then, this is the thirteenth MU degree in our immediate family. My niece, Stephanie, among the honors students, will be the fourteenth, and my niece, Melissa this afternoon when she gets her MD will be the fifteenth. [05:48] Larry Smarr This university has been totally responsible for setting the foundation on which my career was based. As a student here, I was able to not only get the deep research training in mathematics and physics that my immediate career was based on, but also the breadth. [06:12] Larry Smarr I was the first Bachelor of Arts degree in physics because I insisted on having that breadth that has stayed with me and made so much of my career possible. My first course in programming a computer, which my father insisted I take in 1966 because he believed that these computers were going to amount to something, was maybe one hundred million to one billion [06:40] Larry Smarr times slower than the fastest computer today. Now, we're handing off to you the next thirty or forty years during which you're going to see not only that kind of increase, but you're going to see the Internet which didn't exist, the Web which didn't exist, the social networks which didn't exist for decades after I got your... [07:07] Larry Smarr My BA degree. Those... The Internet is now moving throughout the physical world. You notice with your cell phones, can be on the net anywhere, but all the inanimate objects are going to have microprocessors inside of them hooked to the net. [07:22] Larry Smarr The Internet will be everywhere, anytime. The world essentially will develop a whole new virtual character in addition to the physical character built of atoms that it already has. [07:36] Larry Smarr Now most of the folks up here on the platform are a little too old to appreciate the profound impact this is going to make on every aspect of your world. [07:51] Larry Smarr But you are young enough that you grew up assuming bits were everywhere and all they had to do was be manipulated to make whatever you wanted to happen in the next second happen. So you're the bridge to the world of the future. [08:07] Larry Smarr You're the people who know that this is going to change everything and you're going to be able to take the values that you've learned at Mizzou and apply them. And what's important is that each of you realize that what you decide to do in your particular area, your particular discipline, is going to be critical to how the world as a whole transforms because you're the [08:35] Larry Smarr leaders, you're the honor students that have made the extra effort to get that education. So I wish I could see what you're going to see when you're my age. [08:51] Larry Smarr It's going to be a world that looks nothing at all like the world we have today and hopefully it will have the power to deal with the challenges that you're going to have to deal with that no other generation has ever dealt with that will be induced by things like global warming. [09:10] Larry Smarr So good luck to you. We're counting on you. Don't let us down. Bye bye. [09:29] Chancellor Dr. Smarr, thank you for those inspiring and very challenging remarks, not only to the great future that our honored graduates have, but those challenging remarks of survival for those of us that have passed 30. So we're all going to be in here fighting together, and we're really depending on you, the graduates, to look for those policies that help us all. [09:49] Chancellor That's wonderful. Thank you so much, and what an honor.