2007-2008 Distinguished Lecture Series

hosted by the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

David Patterson, October 2007
Manuela Veloso, January 2008
David D. Clark , April 2008
Christos Papadimitriou, April 2008
Next year: 2008-2009 Lecture Series

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 2007, 4:30 p.m., Room RCH 101
Speaker: David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley
Title: The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley
Abstract: The sequential processor era is now officially over, as the IT industry has bet its future on multiple processors per chip. This shift toward increasing parallelism is not a triumphant stride forward based on breakthroughs in novel software and architectures for parallelism; instead, this plunge into parallelism is actually a retreat from even greater challenges that thwart efficient silicon implementation of traditional uniprocessor architectures. The IT industry is urgently facing perhaps its greatest challenge in 50 years, giving researchers the once-in-a-lifetime chance to reset the foundations of computing, provided we can deliver on the overarching goal to make it easy to write programs that execute efficiently on highly parallel computing systems. A diverse group of University of California at Berkeley researchers from many backgrounds ----circuit design, computer architecture, massively parallel computing, computer-aided design, embedded hardware and software, programming languages, compilers, scientific programming, and numerical analysis --- met for two years to discuss this topic from these many angles. This talk and a technical report are the result. (See view.eecs.berkeley.edu) We concluded that sneaking up on the problem of parallelism the way industry is planning is likely to fail, and we desperately need a new solution for parallel hardware and software. Here are some of our recommendations:
- The target should be 1000s of cores per chip, as these chips are built from processing elements that are the most efficient in MIPS (Million Instructions per Second) per watt, MIPS per area of silicon, and MIPS per development dollar.
- Instead of traditional benchmarks, use 13 Dwarfs to design and evaluate parallel programming models and architectures. (A dwarf is an algorithmic method that captures a pattern of computation and communication.)
- Autotuners should play a larger role than conventional compilers in translating parallel programs.
- To maximize programmer productivity, future programming models must be more human-centric than the conventional focus on hardware or applications or formalisms.
- Traditional operating systems will be deconstructed and operating system functionality will be orchestrated using libraries and virtual machines.
- To explore the design space rapidly, use system emulators based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays that are highly scalable and low cost. (see ramp.eecs.Berkeley.edu)
Biography: David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, which he joined after graduating from UCLA in 1977. Daves research style is to identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. The answer is typically embodied in demonstration systems, and these demonstration systems are later mirrored in commercial products. The best known projects were on Reduced Instruction Set Computers, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and Networks of Workstations. One measure of the success of projects is the list of awards won by Dave and his teammates: the C & C Prize, the IEEE von Neumann Medal, the IEEE Johnson Storage Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time award, and the Katayanagi Prize. He was also named fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, the Computer Museum, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In his spare time, he co-authored five books, including two with John Hennessy in computer architecture that are in their fourth editions. Dave also served as President of ACM, as chair of the Computing Research Association, and as chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley.
Date: Thursday, January 17, 2008, 4:30 p.m. Davis Centre Room DC1302
Speaker: Manuela Veloso, Herbert A. Simon Professor, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Title : Multi-Robot Intelligence
Abstract: Robots are physical artifacts with a seamless integration of perception, cognition, and action. My presentation will be focused on teams of intelligent autonomous robots performing tasks in highly uncertain domains. Robots need to jointly assess the state of their environment, communicate with each other, make decisions, execute actions towards the achievement of team objectives, and learn from observation and demonstration.

Biography: Manuela M. Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, researching artificial intelligence and robotics. She focuses on planning, control learning, and execution algorithms for single and multirobot systems, in particular in uncertain, dynamic, and adversarial environments. With her students, Veloso has developed teams of robot soccer agents, which have successfully participated in international RoboCup competitions since 1997.
Veloso holds a BS in electrical engineering and an MSc in electrical and computer engineering from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon. She earned her PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and vice president of the RoboCup International Federation. She was awarded a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research and is the program chair of the 2007 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Veloso is the author of Planning and Learning by Analogical Reasoning (Springer-Verlag, 1994), has edited several books, and has published more than 150 journal articles and conference papers.
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2008, DC1350, 4:30 p.m.
Speaker: David D. Clark, Senior Research Scientist, CS and AI Lab, MIT
Title: A brief history of predicting the future of the Internet: Looking back and looking forward
Abstract: For three years now, the U.S. National Science Foundation has supported a research program called Future Internet Design, or FIND. The research challenge is to envision what an Internet of 15 years from now should be. Current network research is sometimes a bit incremental--it seeks to make the current Internet a bit better. but it does not set a long-range goal, a preferred outcome for what our future network should be. The FIND program demands that the research community think long-term, not incrementally. Programs similar to FIND are underway in a number of other countries, and the challenge to think longer-term has caught the attention of both technologists and policy-makers.
It is perhaps difficult to envision a network that is "not the Internet"--the network is so successful that it requires a stretch of the imagination to think how it might be different, or how it might have come out differently today if we had taken some different forks in the road over the last 30 years.
This talk will be in two parts: a look back and a look forward. It is both fun and sometimes surprising to look back at what visionaries said about the future of networking, before the Internet existed. After a brief historical review, I will try to look forward and speculate on how a future Internet might not be the network of today, but something rather different.

Biography: Since the mid 70s, Dr. Clark has been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet ActivitiesBoard. Recent activities include extensions to the Internet to support real-time traffic, explicit allocation of service, pricing and related economic issues, and policy issues surrounding local loop employment. New activities focus on the architecture of the Internet in the post-PC era. He is chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.
Date: Friday, April 25, 2008, DC1350, 2:00 p.m. (note change in time)
Speaker: Christos Papadimitriou, C. Lester Hogan Professor of EECE, UCBerkeley
Title: The Algorithmic Lens: How the Computational Perspective is Transforming the Sciences
Abstract: Computational research transforms the sciences (physical, mathematical, life or social) not just by empowering them analytically, but mainly by providing a novel and powerful perspective which often leads to unforeseen insights. Examples abound: quantum computation provides the right forum for questioning and testing some of the most basic tenets of quantum physics, while statistical mechanics has found in the efficiency of randomized algorithms a powerful metaphor for phase transitions. In mathematics, the P vs. NP problem has joined the list of the most profound and consequential problems, and in economics considerations of computational complexity revise predictions of economic behavior and affect the design of economic mechanisms such as auctions. Finally, in biology some of the most fundamental problems, such as understanding the brain and evolution, can be productively recast in computational terms. My talk is structured around eight vignettes exemplifying this pattern.
Biography: Christos H. Papadimitriou is C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley in 1996 he taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written five textbooks and many research articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, economics, and the Internet. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from ETH (Zurich), the University of Macedonia, and the University of Athens. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the ACM. His novel ."Turing". was published by MIT Press in 2003, and his graphic novel "Logicomix" (with Apostolos Doxiadis) will be published by Bloomsbury in 2008.

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