2006 Visions of Computing Lecture Series

Thursday, November 9, 2006 at 4:30 - 5:45 Lectures in ACES 2.302; 5:45 - 7 p.m. Private reception for invited guests.

The Visions of Computing Lecture Series has been created by the Department of Computer Sciences to highlight the excellence of its faculty and recognize their accomplishments. Its purpose is to provide public education about computer science, and to enhance the public appreciation of the stature of this department and its faculty.

Honors and Awards:

Doug Burger

Professor Burger won the 2006 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award.
Citation: "For contributions to spatially distributed processor and memory systems architecture." Find out more about this award and the TRIPS microprocessor.

Doug Burger's Bio

Doug Burger is a Professor of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his work in computer architecture, including EDGE instruction sets, Non-Uniform Cache Architectures (NUCA caches), and the SimpleScalar simulation tools. He co-leads the TRIPS project at UT-Austin, which has developed a full silicon prototype of an advanced microprocessor architecture. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2002, the President's Associates Teaching Excellence Award in 2003, and the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award in 2006. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from The University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. Doug Burger's home page

Inderjit Dhillon (with his coauthor, Beresford Parlett)

Professor Dhillon and Professor Parlett won the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra (SIAG/LA) Prize for the best paper on linear algebra in the past three years, for their paper, "Orthogonal eigenvectors and relative gaps".

Citation: "This paper contains a beautiful analysis and exposition of how to compute orthogonal eigenvectors and is already starting to have a significant practical impact." Find out more about this award or Read the paper.

Inderjit Dhillon's Bio

Inderjit Dhillon is an Associate Professor of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. His main research interests are in numerical analysis, data mining and machine learning. He is best known for his work on computational algorithms in these areas, in particular on eigenvalue computations, clustering, co-clustering and matrix approximations. Software based on his research on eigenvalue computations is now part of all state-of-the-art numerical software libraries. Inderjit received an NSF Career Award in 2001, a best paper award at the SIAM data mining conference in 2003, a University Research Excellence Award in 2005, and the SIAG/LA Prize in 2006. He received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay, and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Robert Boyer, J Strother Moore and Matt Kaufmann

Professor Boyer, Professor Moore and Senior Research Scientist Matt Kaufmann won the 2005 ACM Software System Award for The Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover.

Citation: "For pioneering and engineering a most effective theorem prover (named the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover) as a formal methods tool for verifying safety-critical hardware and software. Find out more about the award and ACL2.

Robert Boyer's Bio

Robert S. Boyer was born in 1946 and is now 60. He was graduated from King High School in 1964 in Kingsville, Texas, and was graduated from UT Austin in 1967 with a B. A. in mathematics. He is most proud of the fact that all three of his children are now 'doctors', in law, psychology, and medicine respectively. He's been a UT professor on and off since about 1981.

Matt Kaufmann's Bio

Matt Kaufmann was trained as a mathematical logician at The University of Wisconsin, receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics there in 1978, when he joined the mathematics faculty at Purdue. He joined Burroughs Corp. in Austin, Texas in 1984, connecting logic with functional programming. From 1986 until 1995 he worked at The University of Texas and Computational Logic, Inc. on general-purpose automated reasoning, in particular co-developing the ACL2 theorem proving system. Matt worked on tools for formal hardware verification at Motorola, including their model checker, for the next two years. For two years after that he worked on the Year 2000 problem at EDS, developing Prolog-based program analysis tools. From August 1999 through November 2005 he worked on microprocessor verification at AMD, employing a combination of formal and simulation-based techniques. Since December 2006 he has held a Senior Research Scientist position at The University of Texas at Austin, focusing on development of ACL2 with J Moore.

J Moore's Bio

J Strother Moore holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also chair of the department. He is the author of many books and papers on automated theorem proving and mechanical verification of computing systems. Along with Boyer he is a co-author of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover and the Boyer-Moore fast string searching algorithm. With Matt Kaufmann he is the co-author of the ACL2 theorem prover. Moore got his S.B. in mathematics from MIT in 1970 and his Ph.D. in computational logic from The University of Edinburgh in 1973. Moore was a founder of Computational Logic, Inc., and served as its chief scientist for ten years. He and Bob Boyer were awarded the 1991 Current Prize in Automatic Theorem Proving by the American Mathematical Society. In 1999 they were awarded the Herbrand Award for their work in automatic theorem proving. Moore is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.