[cap-talk] Butler Lampson's upcoming talk

[Winnie Cheng]

Hi,

For those in the area, this upcoming talk may be of interest.

Winnie
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Speaker: Butler Lampson
Affiliation: Microsoft Research & CSAIL
Host: Peter Mager
Host Affiliation: gbc/acm and IEEE/CS

Date: 4-17-2008
Time: 7-9 pm
Location: MIT Room 54-100

Joint meeting of Boston/Central New England Chapter of IEEE Computer 
Society and GBC/ACM
Thursday, 4/17/2008, 7-9 pm
MIT Room 54-100

Gold and Fool's Gold: Successes, Failures, and Futures in Computer 
Systems Research
Butler Lampson, Microsoft Research & CSAIL

Abstract:

People have been inventing new ideas in computer systems for nearly four
decades, usually driven by Moore's Law. Many of them have been spectacularly
successful: virtual memory, packet networks, objects, relational databases,
and graphical user interfaces are a few examples. Other promising ideas have
not worked out: capabilities, distributed computing, RISC, and persistent
objects. And the fate of some is still in doubt: parallel computing, formal
methods, and software reuse. The Web was not invented by computer systems
researchers. In the light of all this experience, what will be exciting to
work on in the next few years?

Bio:

Butler Lampson is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an
Adjunct Professor at MIT. He has worked on computer architecture, local
area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating
systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their
semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing,
transaction processing, computer security, WYSIWYG editors, and tablet
computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing
system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700
laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, the SPKI
system for network security, the Microsoft Tablet PC software, the
Microsoft Palladium high-assurance stack, and several programming
languages. He received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1984 for his
work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996 and von
Neumann Medal in 2001, the Turing Award in 1992, and the NAE's Draper
Prize in 2004.

MIT building 54 is the tall building with a radome on top near the
center of the MIT campus. You can see it on a map at
<http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level3&centerx=710894&centery=495913&ol
dzoom=level4&map.x=298&map.y=191>.

Room 100 is up a flight of stairs or take the elevator.

Information about additional upcoming meetings is now online at 
<http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/>.
In particular, Ray Kurzweil will be talking on "Grand Challenges for 
Engineering in the 21st Century" 7:00 PM, Thursday, May 15, 2008 in the 
Broad Institute Auditorium and Ken Baclawski will be talking on 
"Semantic Web Ontologies" Thursday, June 19 in E51-345.


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