Gold and Fool's Gold: Successes, Failures: MEETING CANCELLED

When: 
Thursday, November 30, 2006 - 7:00pm
Venue: 
MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)
Room: 
E51-345
Lecturer(s): 
Butler Lampson, Microsoft Research and MIT CSAIL

Due to an unforseen scheduling conflict, the speaker needs to reschedule this presentation. We hope to reschedule it for sometime next spring.
<\p> 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?

Lecturer Biography: 

Butler Lampson is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was on the faculty at Berkeley and then at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and at Digital's Systems Research Center. 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, WHSIWYG 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 SDSI/SPKI system for network security, the Microsoft Palladium security system, the Microsoft Tablet PC software, and several programming languages. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Turing Award in 1992, the IEEE von Neumann Medal in 2001, and the National Academy of Engineering's Draper Prize in 2004.

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