The Power of Abstraction
Barbara Liskov
10 November 2011
3.30pm-Reception outside Auditorium
4.00pm-Lecture, Rashid Auditorium - Gates & Hillman 4401
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 an Institute Professor at MIT and also Associate
Provost for Faculty Equity. She is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and a fellow of the ACM. She received the ACM Turing Award in 2009,
the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award in 2008, the
IEEE Von Neumann medal in 2004, a lifetime achievement award from the
Society of Women Engineers in 1996, and in 2003 was named one of the
50 most important women in science by Discover Magazine. Her research
interests include distributed systems, replication algorithms to
provide fault-tolerance, programming methodology, and programming
languages. Her current research projects include
Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems and online storage systems
that provide confidentiality and integrity for the stored information.