Stanford 4:15PM * Wednesday, January 26, 2005 * Fifty Years of Hacks*

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: <allison () stanford edu>
Reply-To: <ee380 () shasta stanford edu>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:05:52 -0800
To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: [CSL Colloq] 4:15PM * Wednesday, January 26, 2005 * Fifty Years of
Hacks*


              COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
               4:15PM, Wednesday, January 26, 2005
       NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
                   http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]
                   
Topic:    Fifty Years of Hacks*
          A Computer Geek's Confession

Speaker:  Ed Fredkin
          Carnegie Mellon University

About the talk:

This lecture is basically about some disconnected but interesting
computer-personal history that is mostly unknown. It all starts
in LA then takes place in a Jet Fighter, at Lincoln Laboratory,
BBN, III, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, BU, Carnegie Mellon, the CIA,
the Kremlin, the White House and the IBM Board-Room. Other things
happened at the USSR Academy of Sciences: the Presidium and
various centers and institutes. Then there is the International
Laboratory for Research in Artificial Intelligence! The players
include Stanford‚s own John McCarthy along with other luminaries
and political leaders. The action covers having fun inventing
parts of the future, using computers in new ways, making great
things happen, killing off gigantic losers, do goodery and an
occasional screw-up.

* By „Hack‰ we mean a modest effort that yields a surprisingly
big result, the „hacker‰ is known to very few and the result is
hopefully amusing. In this case the hacker always meant well,
but∑

About the speaker:

Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and,
at age 19, joined the USAF and became a jet fighter pilot.
Fredkin‚s computer career started in 1956 when the Air Force
assigned him to work at MIT‚s Lincoln Laboratories. In 1968
Fredkin returned to academia, starting at MIT as a full
professor. From 1971 to 1974 he was the Director of CSAIL
(formerly „LCS‰ or „Project MAC‰). He spent a year at Caltech as
a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Richard Feynman,
and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for 6 years.
More recently he has been a Distinguished Career Professor at
Carnegie Mellon University and also a Visiting Professor at MIT.

Fredkin has been broadly interested in computation: hardware and
software. He is the inventor of many things including the Trie
data structue, the Fredkin Gate and the Billiard Ball Model.
Fredkin and his students did pioneering work on cellular automata
and reversible computing. He has also been involved in computer
vision, chess and other areas of AI research. Fredkin also works
at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of
computation and computational models of physics. He recently
developed Salt, a model of computation based on fundamental
conservation laws from physics.

Contact information:

Edward Fredkin
Carnegie Mellon University
Building 23 MS 23-11
Moffett Field, CA 93035
650-796-2802
ef () cmu edu[2]


Embedded Links:
[ 1 ]    http://ee380.stanford.edu
[ 2 ]    "mailto:ef () cmu edu


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