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Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works’ impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science. Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who remembers MIT’s 100th birthday celebration. Corbato pioneered the idea of timesharing, and notes “how frozen the attitude of industrialists and computer manufacturers were.” They resisted the idea of timesharing, not understanding “why they needed to change anything.” The ultimate goal of his work, says Corbato, was “man-machine interaction.” His achievements led to Unix and C programming language and “are being rediscovered today in cloud computing.” 1992 award winner Butler Lampson describes the nearly free rein Xerox gave him and colleagues at PARC starting in 1970, which led to the first personal computer, a series of LISP machines, and other revolutionary technologies that developed into “pretty much all the things you’re now accustomed to in the world of personal computing,” he says. The only vision Lampson was unable to explore was the web, and that was “because we didn’t have a big enough sandbox to play in.” Andrew Chi-Chih Yao earned his 2000 Turing for the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography and communication complexity. Yao attributes his successes in part to the times (late ‘70s), when it became apparent that public key cryptography would herald big networks, electronic commerce and the need for cryptography. He also notes that a group of researchers were “trying to break away from Claude Shannon” and “embraced computational complexity as our savior.” It should come as no surprise, given these trends, says Yao, “those of us lucky enough in those days to be thinking about these issues would come up with concepts that would become very important.” Inspired by a paper in public key cryptography, Ronald Rivest and MIT colleagu...
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Video Length: 0
Date Found: June 29, 2011
Date Produced: June 22, 2011
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MIT World |
July 07, 2011
In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns. Nicholas Negroponte tells a few “dirty secrets” about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including ...
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MIT World |
June 29, 2011
Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works’ impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science. Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who ...
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MIT World |
June 13, 2011
Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox “nothing less than astounding,” and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation. In her lab’s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are “Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?” That’s a bold agenda for a panel of children’s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame ...
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