From: Ed Lazowska
To: cs-ugrads
Subject: First three CSE Distinguished Lectures
The first three CSE Distinguished Lectures of the year are a bit off-beat, so I want to take a minute to *strongly* urge your attendance. Topics include space flight, molecular gastronomy (cooking with science), and the invention of wireless telephony. Read on for more info, and mark you calendars!
On Thursday October 1, 3:30 in the Atrium, Charles Simonyi will speak about his second flight to the International Space Station. Charles has a Bachelors in Engineering Mathematics from Berkeley, a Ph.D. in CS from Stanford, built Bravo (the first WSYIWYG editor) at Xerox PARC, built Word and Multiplan (the predecessor of Excel) at Microsoft, and now runs his own software startup, Intentional Software. On the side, he is a jet and helicopter pilot. He flew to the International Space Station in 2007, and again this past March. A couple of years ago he gave a wonderful talk about his first flight. This talk should be equally engaging.
On Tuesday October 6, 3:30 in the Atrium, Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young will speak about … “molecular gastronomy.” Nathan did a startup that was acquired by Microsoft in the late 1980’s. He became Microsoft’s first CTO, and created Microsoft Research. About 5 years ago he left to form Intellectual Ventures. Nathan has eclectic interests and skills — paleontology, photography, cooking. (He is a spectacular cook; did an “internship” at Rover’s.) For the past year or two he has been working with Chris Young on a “molecular gastronomy” cookbook — cooking with liquid nitrogen, various weird chemicals, $250K centrifuges, etc. Last spring I had a dinner that they prepared, and it was off the charts (and plenty weird), so asked them to give a talk. I should note that they are bringing a crew of cooks over to do some demos during the talk and to contribute to the post-talk refreshments.
On Thursday October 15, Irwin Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm, will speak in the Atrium at 10:30 a.m. in a joint EE/CSE talk. (Note the non-standard time.) Irwin was a faculty member at MIT and UCSD before founding Qualcomm (and, before that, Linkabit) with Andy Viterbi. He and Qualcomm hold all the patents on CDMA-based wireless telephony — it’s their invention. “Principles of Communication Engineering” by Wozencraft and Jacobs has been a staple of EE graduate education for 20 years. Irwin is a legend.
“Be there!”
http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/newdlshome.html