Archives for posts with tag: computer
Imaging the Antikythera Mechanism
Google Tech Talk March 5, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Tom Malzbender. The Antikythera Mechanism is an astronomical mechanical computer built by the ancient Greeks in 200 BCE and resides in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. In 2005, Dan Gelb and I travelled to Athens to apply our Reflectance Transformation methods to the device in the hopes of uncovering faint writing on its surface. The trip – part of an international collaboration described in the Dec. 2009 issue of Scientific American – was a success and subsequent epigraphers have been able to decipher enough new writing to allow researchers to understand what the device was and how it operated. I will give an overview of both our imaging method and the Antikythera Mechanism itself. Tom Malzbender is a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Tom works at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision and signal processing and has developed the techniques of Reflectance Transformation, Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) and Fourier Volume Rendering. He also developed the capacitive sensing technology that allowed HP to penetrate the consumer graphics tablet market. His PTM methods are used by the National Gallery in London, the Tate Gallery and in the fields of criminal forensics, paleontology and archeology. Tom is on the program committees for several 3D graphics and vision conferences. More information can be found at www.hpl.hp.com .
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A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable. -Leslie Lamport.


Leslie Lamport
is a computer scientist and mathematician best known for his work with distributed systems. In fact, Dr. Lamport’s research contributions laid the foundations for the theory of distributed systems. He currently works in Microsoft Research where most of his time is spent developing formal semantics (with mathematical logic) for specifying and reasoning about algorithms.

Here, Dr. Erik Meijer, computer scientist and programming language/library designer, sits down with Dr. Lamport to discuss several aspects of Dr. Lamport’s body of work in computer science.

Dr. Lamport’s TLA, the Temporal Logic of Actions, is a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems. TLA+ is the latest incarnation of this formal specification toolset.

Welcome to the latest installment of C9 Conversations. For this episode, we were very fortunate to get a chance to converse openly with one of the world’s preeminent mathematical logicians, the great Yuri Gurevich.

Dr. Gurevich is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is currently a principle research scientist in Wolfram Schulte’s RiSE team (Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research).

Originally, Dr. Gurevich started his career as an algebraist. Later he became a logician. Then he moved to computer science, where his main projects have been Abstract State Machines, Average Case Computational Complexity, and Finite Model Theory. Dr. Gurevich has been honored as a Dr. Honoris Causa of the University of Limburg, Belgium (1998), as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), as well as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995).

Dr. Gurevich’s fundamental work on the theory of Abstract State Machines (ASMs) is of paramount importance for theoretical and applied computer science. The significance of the theoretical concepts developed by Gurevich is confirmed by the substantial impact they have on mathematical modeling of discrete dynamic systems.

*This is probably the only interview in C9’s history where a good case is made for imperative programming versus declarative and functional (this starts right off the bat at around 02:31).

Read Yuri’s Annotated Articles

Tune in. Meet Yuri Gurevich.

Dr. Maria Klawe joined the board of directors of Microsoft in 2009. She is a distinguished computer scientist, scholar and president of Harvey Mudd College. If that’s not enough, she’s also an accomplished artist. We had to catch up with Maria for WM_IN to learn about her path to success and accomplishment in computing and higher education, so when the opportunity presented itself recently Ritzy and I were all over it! What a treat it was to spend some time with Maria. It’s hard to fathom just how motivated, capable and intelligent one person can be. We’re very fortunate to have Maria as one of the people who govern Microsoft’s future.

Tune in and learn about what it’s like to be a member of Microsoft’s board of directors (What does the board do, anyway? What’s it like in the boardroom?) and president of one of the best engineering and mathematics liberal arts colleges in the United States.

Propping Open the Document Trapdoor
Google Tech Talk November 5, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Steven R. Bagley & David F. Brailsford, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, NOTTINGHAM NG8 1BB , UK Computer document processing often starts with an abstract, structural, representation before entering a processing pipeline which creates a desired layout and appearance. But unfortunately the whole system resembles a series of steps in a one-way chemical reaction, or the successive irreversible stages of creating …
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Initiatives in Education
Google Tech Talk October 20, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Maggie Johnson, Google Director of Education and University Relations, at the NSF Computer Science Education Leadership Summit. Google believes that all students should have the opportunity to become active creators of tomorrows technology. Through our diverse set of education efforts, we invest in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers, providing opportunities for all students to engage more directly in technology. To …
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The Church-Turing Thesis: Story and Recent Progress
Google Tech Talk June 8, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Yuri Gurevich. The Church-Turing thesis is one of the foundations of computer science. The thesis heralded the dawn of the computer revolution by enabling the construct of the universal Turing machine which led the way, at least conceptually, to the von Neumann architecture and first electronic computers. One way to state the Church-Turing thesis is as follows: A Turing Machine computes every numerical function that is computable by means …
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