Jim's Coredump

This opinion piece appeared in the EPFL Forum Magazine  (p. 22), but since most people will never see it there, I thought I'd post it. [I hope the student editors of the magazine read Martin Vetterli's interview on open science and apply the same spirit to this reposting.] Data Privacy and its Consequences  Prof. James Larus School of Computer and Communications Sciences, EPFL Public perception is slowly changing in regards to data privacy. From fighting terrorism to getting targeted advertisement instead of random ads, many people feel as if giving up a bit of privacy may not be such a bad thing. But is it? James Larus, Professor and Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL, sheds light on this complex issue.  What is your privacy worth? Probably more than you expect. Most people unknowingly trade away detailed, specific personal information for a “handful of trinkets” and, in doing so, have made companies like Google,...

Dave Patterson and John Hennessey won the ACM's Turing Award this year for their outstanding research contributions to RISC computers and a methodology for quantitative computer architecture. A video of their acceptance lecture  is online. This is a well-deserved award to two great researchers and teachers who have had a profound influence on industry and generations of students. I've known Dave since I arrived at UC Berkeley in 1981, and I want to thank Dave for his profound influence on my career. In fact, if it wasn't for him, I would be doing something else, in some other field. When I arrived at UCB in 1981, I loved computing but wasn't too excited about computer science. The undergraduate computer science program at Harvard (which was then hidden in the Applied Math department) was theoretical and rather dry. When I was accepted to graduate school at UCB, I wasn't sure I wanted a PhD, but I was sure I wanted to live in California, so I accepted their offer...

Addendum (Nov. 5, 2017): I brought up the idea from the previous post at a couple of larges CS conferences (OOPSLA and SOSP), and even male faculty members saw the value of it. Faculty with small children report they travel like I used to, by making the most minimal trips possible (typically only spending 2 days at a conference with the tightest possible flight connections). No one particularly enjoyed this, but it is widely seen as necessary to balance professional advancement and family responsibilities. In addition, I was approached by Philippe Vollichard, the person at EPFL responsible for sustainability, who saw this blog post and pointed me to an ETHZ initiative to reduce university travel because of its large carbon footprint. EPFL has a similar report (which doesn't appear to be online??), with the conclusion that the carbon footprint of airplane travel at EPFL is as large as the daily commute to and from campus and larger than energy consumption on campus. ...