“Making Dreams Come True”: A story about reverse time machines

One often-heard comment about academic research is that it is too incremental and only marginally improving on the state-of-the-art. And indeed, we as researchers often tend to follow the wave of the day, and even worse trail it. To get away from this incrementalism, consider an alternative approach. Imaging or dream of how the future may look like - A prediction sustained by educated guesses informed by science, roadmaps and technology insights. From there we can work backwards to identify the big hurdles that need to be overcome to realize that future and let this guide our research. It is exciting and visionary. We call itreverse time machines.