An interesting article on Wired.com today, featuring Google computer scientists Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: Time and again, we hear the story of Xerox PARC, the Silicon Valley research lab that developed just about every major technology behind the PC revolution, from the graphical user interface and the laser printer to Ethernet networking and object-oriented programming. But because Google is so concerned with keeping its latest data center work hidden from competitors — and because engineers like Jeff Dean aren’t exactly self-promoters — the general public is largely unaware of Google’s impact on the very foundations of modern computing. Google is the Xerox PARC of the cloud computing age (more following the link…).  

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is holding its A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco, CA, today and Saturday — marking the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by bringing together 33 living Turing Award winners for the first time, and raising awareness of Turing, reflecting on his contributions, and discussing the fundamental importance of computing and computer science. The event, which kicks off at 12pm EDT this afternoon, will be streamed live via the web. Over 1,000 in-person attendees are expected. As Vint Cerf, the General Chair for the celebration and himself the 2004 ACM Turing Award winner, writes (following the link):

Beginning at 1pm EDT this afternoon, the World Science Festival — an annual celebration and exploration of science, culture, and art that’s taking place all across New York City this week  — will stream live from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a 90-minute session titled “Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”: Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the Internet. Pioneers of the digital revolution examine the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other. From social upheaval […]

At the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, Stanford President John Hennessy stepped through the history of computer architecture, with an eye toward the future — including multicore and multithreading (fine-grained vs. simultaneous). I’m going to try to both take a look backward and then a look forward and talk about what the implications are. “The March of Technology” is indeed a good “uber-title” for this type of talk, because it really is about the dramatic changes and about the inflection point that we passed through, and what some of those inflections are.   Let’s face it: most of the world is not going to […]

There are many reasons for research funding agencies (DARPA, NSF, etc.) to invest in the education of students. Producing the next generation of innovators is the most obvious one. In addition, though, there are an impressive number of instances in our field in which undergraduate and graduate students have made truly game-changing contributions in the course of their studies. The inspiring list in the attached PDF was compiled by the following individuals and their colleagues: Bill Bonvillian (MIT), Susan Graham (Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), Pat Lincoln (SRI), Fred Schneider (Cornell), and Victor Zue (MIT). We solicit your suggestions for additional student contributions of […]

On March 25th, the Computing Community Consortium organized a spectacular daylong symposium at the Library of Congress:  “Computing Research that Changed the World:  Reflections and Perspectives.” Videos of the presentations (as well as slides) are now available on the symposium website.  See http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php for the complete agenda with individual links, or see our YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/computingresearch. Talks at the Symposium included: Introductory Session Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Changing the World” Session 1: The Internet and the World Wide Web Alfred Spector (Google), “Why We’re Able to Google” Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley), “The Magic of the ‘Cloud’: Supercomputers for Everybody, Everywhere” Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University), “Human Computation” Session […]