The Power of Abstraction

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Start date: 13 May 2011

End date: 14 May 2011

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a talk by Professor Barbara Liskov of MIT

Professor Liskov will be receiving an honorary doctorate from the USI Università della Svizzera italiana at the Dies Academicus on 14.05.2011.

DATE: Friday, May 13th 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room A22, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 16.00

ABSTRACT:
Abstraction is at the center of much work in Computer Science.  It encompasses finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation.  Furthermore, abstraction is the basis for program construction, allowing programs to be built in a modular fashion.  This talk will discuss how the abstraction mechanisms we use today came to be, how they are supported in programming languages, and some possible areas for future research.

BIO:
Barbara Liskov is the first woman to receive a PhD in computer science in the US (Stanford, 1968). She is currently Institute Professor in the department of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. She started at MIT as an assistant professor in 1972 and has been there ever since, rising through the ranks, having served as Associate Department Head and currently as Associate Provost. She lists her areas of research as: Programming methodology, distributed computing, programming languages, operating systems.. She has won many awards that recognize her research contributions, including the ACM Turing Award in 2008 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2004. Her contributions have had impact in programming languages, operating systems, distributed systems and software reliability. She is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

HOST: Prof. Mauro Pezzè