Talks

Planned Talks (Winter 2009)

• March 12th
  • IQC - Intro to QC and Programming the QC
• March 10th or 11th
  • Prabhakar - Functional Lexing and Parsing
• March 30th or April 1st
  • Craig Kaplan - Computer Aided Manufacturing/Creative uses of rapid prototyping
• TBA
  • Geoff Norton - Mono development

Possible Speakers/Talks (not yet requested)

Local Open Forums

• CSCF/MFCF/IST Open Forum
  • Dave Gawley [CSCF]
  • Dawn Keenan [IST]
  • Jim Pell [MFCF]
  • Stephen Mann [SCS]
  • Bruce Campbell [IST]
• SCS Undergraduate Open Forum
  • Director or Associate Director of the School
  • Director or Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies
  • Undergraduate Operations Coordinator
  • Members of Undergrad Committees

UNIX/Linux/Operating Systems

• Bill Joy
  • Location:
  • Known for his work on BSD Unix, vi and csh
  • Contact:
• Andrew Tanenbaum
  • Location: Vrije Universiteit
  • Author of MINIX and well known for his work in the area of operating systems
  • Craig Kaplan suggests we not invite AST. Apparenlty he gave a distinguished lecture a few years ago and it wasn't very good or interesting.
  • Contact: ast@cs.vu.nl
• Keith Packard
  • Location: http://keithp.com/
  • X Windows
  • Holden has contacted him in F2007 to ask him to come in that October
  • Contact: http://keithp.com/
• Hans Peter Anvin
  • Location:
  • Linux kernel hacker
  • Contact

Languages: Formal and Otherwise

• Noam Chomsky
  • Location: MIT
  • Its Noam Fucking Chomsky. Need I say more?
  • Contact: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html
  • Sent a letter in April 2009 by Edgar Bering, no reply yet
• Walter Bright
  • Location: ???
  • D Programming Language
  • Contact: http://www.walterbright.com/
• Jeffrey Shallit
  • Location: Here
  • Its Jeff Fucking Shallit. Need I say more?
  • Contact: Go to his office or something.

AI/LISP

• Marvin Minsky
  • Location: MIT
  • Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.
  • Contact: minsky at media.mit.edu
  • Sent a letter in April 2009 by Edgar Bering, no reply yet
• John McCarthy
  • Location: Stanford
  • John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language.
  • Sent a letter in April 2009 by Edgar Bering, no reply yet
  • Contact: jmc@cs.stanford.edu
• Gerald Jay Sussman
  • Location: MIT
  • He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education.
  • Contact:
• Geoffrey E. Hinton
  • Location: UofT
  • Hinton graduated from Cambridge in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in Experimental Psychology, and from Edinburgh in 1978, with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence. He has worked at Sussex, UCSD, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University and University College London. He was the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and is currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning. He is the director of the program on "Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception" which is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
  • Currently working on Restricted Boltzman Machines which are just FUCKING AWESOME!!!

Graphics

• Scott McCloud
  • Location: ??
  • Cartoonist, Artist, and Digital Media expert. Has vast insight in the influence technology has on design, storytelling, etc. Can probably asked to make things for a more technical audience. Reccommended by Craig Kaplan.
  • Contact: http://www.scottmccloud.com/6-presentations/index.html

General Badassery

• Niklaus Wirth
  • Location: ETH Zurich
  • Pioneer in the field, also developed Modula and Oberon, early terminals and workstations from circuits to userland
  • Sent a letter in April 2009 by Edgar Bering, no reply yet

Misc

• Douglas Hofstadter
  • Location: Indiana University
  • Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. [1]
  • We have asked Hofstadter in Fall 2008, but he was busy
  • Sent a letter in April 2009 by Edgar Bering, no reply yet
  • Contact:
• Wayne Beaton
  • Location:
  • Technical Evangelist for The Eclipse Foundation
  • Contact: dzappolo knows him
• Cory Doctorow
  • Location:
  • Co-editor of Boing Boing
  • Contact:
• Ron Rivest
  • Location:
  • Helped create the RSA scheme, also helped write the CLRS book
  • Contact:
• Phillipe Khan
  • Location:
  • Founded Borland in the 1980s, helped develop several successful languages and products (also inveted camera phone)
  • Contact:

Encoding

We use dvgrab to rip the talks from the camera and ffmpeg to encode.