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