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MIT is celebrating her 150th birthday this year. Many festival events are scheduled throughout the year. On April 11-12, there was a two day symposium entitled “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” on campus. I attended it as an interested scientific public. This is an information packed meeting with talks delivered by the who's who of computer science. Here are my observations and comments on what took place (my notes are in RED below) :

Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything
Monday, April 11, 2011 Location: Kresge Auditorium

8:00 AM Continental breakfast / registration
9:00 AM Welcome and opening remarks

• David Mindell, Chair, MIT150 Steering Committee and Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing and of Aeronautics and Astronautics

• Susan Hockfield, President and Professor of Neuroscience, MIT

• Victor Zue, Director, CSAIL, Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

9:15 AM History
Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Akamai Technologies, Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT  (There are more computing device manufactured per year than there are people on the earth.  5 billion connections to the WWW . Major fields of Computation: massively parallel computation, Complexity, Bio-Informatics, Cryptography, and Quantum computing

Major Accomplishments of the past: the RSA Protocol, the Viterbi algorith, Linear Programming, Google’s Page Rank alg. The Akamai Content Delivery Alg.)
Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington (Top three inventions of the past 30 years: Internet,  PC, and e-mail

CS accomplishments of the past 10 years: Scalability, Efficiency (only 12 staff to overlook 35,000 quad-core server) , and all digital media

Future systems will be smart, invisible, ubiquitous and be able to deal with uncertainty)
Patrick Winston, Ford Professor of Engineering, MIT

Review of history of AI

10:30 AM BREAK

11:00 AM Physical Sciences and Engineering
Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus, MIT and President, the National Academy of Engineering

He talked about from  “Brain Drain” to “Reverse Brain Drain” to “Brain Circulation and Integration” where bright minds and scientists of the world can work together across national boundaries.

Maria Zuber, E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, MIT She reviewed how computation revised our view of the earth and ocean. Weather predictions are accurate now to three days. The five day accurate prediction is the next goal
Kaigham J. Gabriel, Deputy Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

DRAPA is of course the funding agency for many of the CS breakthrough for the past half century including the INTERNET.

12:15 PM Current Research I
Russ Tedrake, X-Consortium Associate Professor, EECS, MIT The intricacies of wind turbine control for electricity generation = feedback control of fluid dynamics
Anant Agarwal, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT  The 1000-core chip by 2015
Shafrira Goldwasser, RSA Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT

Challenges of cryptography and security – secure mobil device, secure cloud computing, privacy with functionality

12:45 PM LUNCH

2:00 PM Travel and Entertainment
Jeremy Wertheimer, President & CEO, Co-founder, ITA Software
Tony DeRose, Senior Scientist, Pixar Animation Studios

2:50 PM Current Research II
Leslie Kaelbling, Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Fredo Durand, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Regina Barzilay, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Samuel Madden, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

3:30 PM BREAK

4:00 PM Business and Economics
Andrew Lo, Harris & Harris Group Professor, Sloan School of Management, MIT
John Thain, Chairman and CEO, CIT

4:50 PM Closing Remarks
Eric Grimson, Chancellor, MIT

4:55 PM Adjourn

6:00 pm Banquet - Cambridge Marriott Hotel

Speaker presentation

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Location: Kresge Auditorium

8:00 AM Continental Breakfast / Registration

9:00 AM Welcome
John Guttag, Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT

9:05 AM Life Sciences This is the HOT area of computer science and biology
Eric S. Lander, Professor of Biology, MIT; Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School; Founding Director, The Broad Institute of MIT BIOLOGY IS INFORMATION which is enabled by study of Genetics and advances in computation. Gene sequencing had a 100,000 fold increase in speed during the past decade. Goals of Genetic research: cure disease, change inheritance, discover human history.
Collin Stultz, M. Keck Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, MIT Computation in cardivascular medicine
David E. Shaw, Chief Scientist, D.E.Shaw Research

Dynamic visualization of protein folding and attachment to cells

10:20 AM BREAK

10:50 AM A.M. Turing Award Winners Panel Discussion
Fernando Corbato (1990), Professor Emeritus, MIT
Butler Lampson (1992), Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; Technical Fellow, Microsoft
Barbara Liskov (2008), MIT Institute Professor and Associate Provost for Faculty Equity
Ron Rivest (2002), Andrew & Erna Viterbi Prof of Computer Sci & Engr, MIT
Andrew Yao (2000), Professor and Director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

The first two awardees are for their contributions to time sharing computers and for development of the desktopPC systems. The next three awards are for software, cryptography and theoretical computer science study of complexity.

Yao made the interesting remark that we should let technology drive the theoretical mathematical questions we should study. This is how he decided to study CS (This is similar to my own recommendation to do “problem driven basic research”). Other panelists suggest that

1.     Be passionate about what you do

2.    Try to reach just a little beyond your ability

3.    Be opportunistic

11:50 AM Current Research III
Polina Golland, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Dina Katabi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT How to do mobile video well.
Robert C. Miller, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT How to do secure cloud computing

12:20 PM LUNCH

1:35 PM Computing for Everyone
Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman, One Laptop per Child
Tim Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering, MIT, Professor, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, Director, World Wide Web Consortium
Suzanne Berger, Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, MIT

2:50 PM The March of Technology
Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer, Heartland Robotics
John Hennessy, President, Stanford University

3:40 PM BREAK

4:10 PM Current Research IV
Erik Demaine, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Daniela Rus, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Scott Aaronson, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

4:40 PM Closing Remarks
Victor Zue, Director, CSAIL, Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

I did not attend most of the afternoon sessions which I am sure are equally interesting on account of the fact that

1.     I have read enough or know something already on these topics

2.    Intense concentration for more than 4-5 hours at a time is beyond my physical endurance at my age.

3.    The entire two day program are videotaped and will be available on the Internet.