September 30 Webcast with 2013 ACM Fellow Dennis Shasha: "The Changing Nature of Invention in Computer Science"

Register TODAY for the next free ACM Webcast, "The Changing Nature of Invention in Computer Science," presented on Tuesday, September 30, 2014 at noon ET (11am CT/10 am MT/9 am PT/4 pm GMT) by Dennis Shasha, Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University and a 2013 ACM Fellow. The talk will be followed by a live question and answer session moderated by Eric Simon, Chief Architect at SAP in the area of Information Management. (If you'd like to attend but can't make it to the virtual event, you still need to register to receive a recording of the webinar when it becomes available.) Note: You can stream this and all ACM Learning Webinars on your mobile device, including smartphones and tablets.

What drives inventions in computing? Necessity seems to play only a minor role. Anger at the way things are is much more powerful, because it leads to easier ways to work (the invention of new computer languages). A general dissatisfaction with the practical or theoretical structure of the world can open up whole new approaches to problems (complexity theory and cryptography). Finally, a genuine collaboration between people and machines can lead to an entirely new kind of engineering for devices that will travel to far-off planets or to hostile environments. The talk will discuss the work of several inventors in computing and engineering, their inventions, and how they came up with them and how they plan to come up with more in the future. The ensuing discussion will address the fundamental nature of invention in a world partly populated by intelligent machines. Duration: 60 minutes
Presenter: Dennis Shasha, Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University; 2013 ACM Fellow
Dennis Shasha is a professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University where he works with biologists on pattern discovery for network inference; with computational chemists on algorithms for protein design; with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series; on clocked computation for DNA computing; and on computational reproducibility. Other areas of interest include database tuning as well as tree and graph matching. Because he likes to type, he has written six books of puzzles about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco, a biography about great computer scientists, and a book about the future of computing. He has also written five technical books about database tuning, biological pattern recognition, time series, DNA computing, resampling statistics, and causal inference in molecular networks. He has co-authored over seventy journal papers, seventy conference papers, and twenty patents. He has written the puzzle column for various publications including Scientific American.
Moderator: Eric Simon, Chief Architect at SAP
Eric Simon is currently Chief Architect at SAP in the area of Information Management. Before that he was the engineering lead for data access and data federation products at SAP Business Objects. In 2001, he co-founded and became CEO of Medience, a French start-up developing data federation technology, later acquired by Business Objects in 2005. Previously, Eric was a tenure research scientist at INRIA (France), one of the largest European research center in Computer Science. His research interest covered different areas of databases including database system design, database languages, query optimization, and data integration methods and algorithms. Eric received a PhD in computer science from University of Paris VI in 1986.
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