The Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group (UCLUG) is bringing Red Hat community relations manager Greg DeKoenigsberg to its February 13th meeting at the downtown Greenville Public Library beginning at 6:30pm. Greg DeKoenigsberg will be discussing and showing off one of the units from the One Laptop Per Child Program. (OLPC) The program is free and open to the public, and the community is invited to come ask about this education initiative. More about the event can be found at the UCLUG website: http://uclug.org
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Archive for February 4th, 2007
Using examples of cathedrals, nuclear submarines, software, and business, Dr. Fred Brooks explores the role of individuals and groups in the design of creative and complex systems. Dr. Brooks is an energetic speaker and will speak at Clemson University on February 19.
Dr. Brooks founded the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1960s. In 1999, he received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A. M. Turing Award, considered the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” He was awarded the prize for significant contributions to computer architecture, operating systems and software engineering. In 1985 he was the recipient of the National Medal of Technology. Dr. Brooks coined the term “computer architecture” and was project manager for the development of the IBM Corporation’s System/360 family of computers and Operating System/360 software. He is well known for his classic 1975 work The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, which is still used in classrooms today.
Dr. Edward Lazowska, chair of the Turing award committee, said, “Fred Brooks has changed the face of computing: the way we think about computer architecture, the way we engineer software and the way we use 3D interactive computer graphics to advance other fields. Beyond these extraordinary technical contributions, Fred is a true gentleman with enormous personal integrity, whose leadership has shaped our discipline in countless ways. I’m delighted that this long overdue recognition occurred on my watch.” Lazowska chairs the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and chairs the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
Brooks’ early concern for word processing led to his selection of the 8-bit byte, the decision to make the byte the addressable unit and the inclusion of a full upper- and lower-case character set. All of these concepts are now universal practice.
In 1997, Brooks wrote, with Gerrit A. Blaauw, Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution. The book documents and exemplifies the power of their 1960’s innovation of thinking about computer design as separable domains: architecture, implementation and realization. Similarly, many of the technical innovations found in OS/360–such as the approach to I/O handling, and the method of transition between supervisor and user modes–are foundations of today’s operating systems.
Even more influential, though, according to ACM, is the distillation of the successes and failures in the development of OS/360 that Brooks captured in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Today, 25 years, two editions, and 300,000 copies later, this book remains a defining work in the field of software engineering.
Brooks left IBM in 1965 to found the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, now considered a world leader in interactive computer graphics. At UNC-Chapel Hill, his research on real-time, 3D computer graphics has propelled that field forward, driven by the goal of creating tools that enable scientists and engineers to tackle problems formerly beyond their reach. Brooks’s students built the first molecular graphics system on which a new protein structure was solved. They also first proved that haptic displays augmenting visual displays can significantly improve a scientist’s understanding of data.
Brooks received his undergraduate degree in physics from Duke University in 1953. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science, under Howard Aiken, at Harvard University.
The A. M. Turing Award is the latest award for Brooks. In 1994, he was the first recipient of ACM’s Allen Newell Award. He won ACM’s Distinguished Service Award in 1987 and the IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal in 1993. In 1995, he received the Franklin Institute’s Bower Award and Prize in Science, which carried a $250,000 prize. A decade earlier, he was in the first group of engineers to receive the National Medal of Technology, presented by President Ronald Reagan. In 1986, he received UNC-Chapel Hill’s Thomas Jefferson Award, which goes to a person who best exemplifies the ideals and objectives of Jefferson.
Event Details:
Who:
Dr. Fred Brooks, Kenan Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
When and Where:
6:00, Monday, February 19th, Tillman Hall Auditorium (clock tower) at Clemson University . Refreshments in the Tillman Hall lobby, 5:30.
Charge:
Free, open to the public
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