[usyd-happenings] USYD Basser seminar, Thursday, 23.11., 4pm: Willy Zwaenepoel on "P2P, DSM, and Other Products of the Complexity Factory"

[seminar at it.usyd.edu.au]

Basser Seminar series, School of Information Technologies, USYD:
(please note the unusual day)


    P2P, DSM, and Other Products of the Complexity Factory


Speaker:  Willy Zwaenepoel
           EPFL, Switzerland

Time:     Thursday 23 November 2006, 4-5 pm
Location: Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, room 123


ABSTRACT:
In order to get your paper accepted at a major conference, the idea you
develop in the paper must be complex, preferably even incomprehensible
to all but the few experts. In order to have your idea have any impact
in a real system, it must be simple and comprehensible to the
above-average programmer in industry. The obvious net result of this
contradiction is that very few papers at major conferences have any
impact in real systems. This talk will explore some examples of this
dilemma, some counterexamples of ideas that were successfully
transferred to practice, and some ideas on how we can perhaps improve
the situation.


SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Willy Zwaenepoel received his B.S. from the University of Gent,  
Belgium in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in  
1980 and 1984, respectively.
Since 1984, he has been on the faculty at Rice University, where he  
is presently the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and  
Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Computer  
Systems Laboratory, a joint effort between the Computer Science and  
the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments. He is also an  
Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed  
Systems. His interests are in all aspects of distributed computing.  
His most recent projects, ScalaServer and Puppeteer, focus on system  
support for scalable network servers and adaptation of component- 
based applications for mobile computing.
He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in  
2000. In 2000, he also received the Rice Graduate Student Association  
Teaching and Mentoring Award.


LOCATION DETAILS:
The School of Information Technologies is located in the new
School of IT Building (J12), 1 Cleveland Street at the eastern
end of the Darlington campus of the University of Sydney.
Maps are available here (see coordinates L25/L26):
   http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/largemap00a.html