International Institute of Information Technology

(Formerly Indian Institute of Information Technology)

DEEMED UNIVERSITY

Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500 019, Andhra Pradesh

Telephone: 91-40-23001967 Fax: 91-40-23001413

URL: http://www.iiit.net & http://www.iiit.ac.in

2^nd Distinguished Lecture

on

Computer Systems Research: Past and Future

By

Dr Butler Lampson

11th January, 2005

Synopsis of Distinguish Lecture

People have been inventing new ideas in computer systems for nearly four decades, usually driven by Moore's law. Many of them have been spectacularly successful: virtual memory, packet networks, objects, relational databases, and graphical user interfaces are a few examples. Other promising ideas have not worked out: capabilities, formal methods, distributed computing, and persistent objects. And the fate of some is still in doubt: parallel computing, RISC, and software reuse. The most important invention of the last decade, the World Wide Web, was not made by computer systems researchers. In the light of all this experience, I will talk about the topics that I think will be exciting to work on in the next few years.

Brief Bio-Data of Dr.Butler Lampson

Dr. Butler Lampson Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Corporation and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. Dr. Butler Lampson is an Architect at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was on the faculty at Berkeley, at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC, and at Digital'~Ys Systems Research Center. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, and WHSIWYG editors. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, and several programming languages. He holds a number of patents on networks, security, raster printing, and transaction processing. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the ACM's Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996, and the Turing Award in 1992.