Talks

The opening of "Computing the Future," a celebration of fifty years of computer science and artificial intelligence at MIT.

Scott Aaronson is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Before that, he did a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley, as well as postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and more generally on the connections between computational complexity and physics. Aaronson is known for his blog as well as for founding the Complexity Zoo (an online encyclopedia of complexity classes); he’s also written about quantum computing for Scientific American and the New York Times. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published this year by Cambridge University Press. He’s received the Alan T. Waterman Award, the PECASE Award, and MIT’s Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Bill is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation and a Professor (Research) and former chair of Computer Science at Stanford University. Bill and his group have developed system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization technology that can be found in most large parallel computers today. While at Bell Labs Bill contributed to the BELLMAC32 microprocessor and designed the MARS hardware accelerator. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing Chip which pioneered wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology his group built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanisms from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. At Stanford University his group has developed the Imagine processor, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and partitioned register organizations, the Merrimac supercomputer, which led to GPU computing, and the ELM low-power processor. Bill is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Seymour Cray Award, and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He currently leads projects on computer architecture, network architecture, circuit design, and programming systems. He has published over 200 papers in these areas, holds over 90 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks, Digital Design: A Systems Approach, Digital Systems Engineering, and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.

Dan Huttenlocher is Dean and Vice Provost for Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s new graduate applied science campus in NYC. In this capacity, Dean Huttenlocher oversees the academic quality and direction of the campus’ research, degree programs and faculty recruitment as well as its entrepreneurial initiatives and early stage investor network. Huttenlocher has a mix of academic and industry background, having worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), as CTO of Intelligent Markets, as well as being a faculty member at Cornell for two decades. Huttenlocher holds over two dozen U.S. patents and has published numerous technical papers. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and both his Master’s and Doctorate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently serves as Trustee of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Jon Kleinberg received his AB from Cornell University in 1993 and his PhD from MIT in 1996. He is currently the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell, where his research focuses on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is the recipient of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

Bob Metcalfe '68 is an MIT engineer-entrepreneur who made it into the Internet Society's Pioneer Hall of Fame based on work started on the 9th floor of Technology Square at MIT Project MAC in 1970. His Harvard PhD dissertation, Packet Communication, was for work done at Project Mac and was first published as MAC TR #114 -- still available at Amazon.com.  Bob went on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research where he led the team that invented Ethernet, of which today over a billion new ports ship annually, if you count WiFi, which Bob does.  He next went on to found Silicon Valley billion-dollar networking giant, 3Com Corporation, which after 30 years merged in 2010 into the Hewlett Packard Company. After 3Com, Bob spent the 1990s as a publisher-pundit with IDG InfoWorld and the 2000s as a venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners.  Bob is a Life Trustee of MIT, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and received the National Medal of Technology for "leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet."  Bob has started his fifth 10-year career as Professor of Innovation in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.  His mission is to help Austin be a better Silicon Valley.

Jeannette M. Wing is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research. She is on leave from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is President's Professor of Computer Science and twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM. She is currently Vice Chair of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board, Chair of the ACM Infosys Award Committee, and member of the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Selection Committee. She has been a member of many other advisory boards, including: Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), National Academies of Sciences' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ACM Council, Computing Research Association Board, DARPA ISAT, NSF's CISE Advisory Committee, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, General Electric Academic Software Advisory Panel, and the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. She served as co-chair of NITRD from 2007-2010. She was on the faculty at the University of Southern California, and has worked at Bell Laboratories, USC/Information Sciences Institute, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories. She spent sabbaticals at MIT in 1992 and at Microsoft Research 2002-2003. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011. She is a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).