Michael Lesk -- projects I don't work on that need doing.

1. Given a disk you don't know anything about, describe it and put the
data into a useful format.

2. Whether with open source or legal strategies, keep us from finding that
all online content belongs to some vendor who can put unreasonable limits on
our ability to use it or force us to pay for extraneous services to get it.

Also.....

3. (Joe Hellerstein): mine all the data on the web behind local search engines
so we can find it from outside.

4. Edit-by-example: write a tool that lets me change a few lines of a database
or file and then will do that transformation on the rest of the data.

5. Make database queries as easy to explain as text queries.  We understand
data better than text, don't we?