Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


Why didn’t we leave a high value target area, you might ask? The Washington Metro was closed, taxis were non-existent, there was a security cordon around the area, and it was too far to walk.

As an enterprising young faculty member, I asked Professor Slotnick if he had any words of wisdom to offer a young parallel computing researcher, based on his experience with ILLIAC IV. He simply said, “Choose your risks carefully.”

The first time I saw the PhDComics strip, I knew the artist must have been a Ph.D. student, because only someone who has experienced graduate school and faculty life, particularly in a technical discipline, could have that much insight regarding the joy and misery of graduate student life and the trials and foibles of faculty…

Today, Microsoft and Intel jointly announced the creation of two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

My friend, Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s chief architect, relates a wonderful story about his undergraduate experience, when he worked as part of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.