Nov 6 Thu ICI BERKELEY'S Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli on Taming The Computer Frankenstein
TAMING DR. FRANKENSTEIN: “TAMING DR. FRANKENSTEIN: MAKING THE COMPOSITION OF COMPUTERS, MECHANICAL AND ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS SAFE AND SECURE”
Information technology moves rapidly to an increasingly decentralized and collaborative environment (the Cloud) with rich interfaces to the physical world (the Internet of Things). In particular, it has been predicted that by 2020 thousands of devices per person will be available. These devices will make it possible to make the computing infrastructure invisible to humans and to support societal scale applications that are unthinkable today.
However, even today, we are facing a number of severe challenges in designing applications that should be monitored carefully with respect to security and privacy concerns. Design of complex distributed system is essentially about connections: Connection of concepts, Connection of objects, Connection of teams. Products of the future will be connected across physical and virtual domains. Connections can produce systems that offer more than the sum of the components but they can also lead to systems that are less powerful than the sum of the components or that are so compromised by their interactions that they do not work at all.
And this situation is getting worse: a nightmare waiting to occur! An efficient management of interactions among deployed parts of a larger system requires principles that are common to the design methods developed at the bleeding edge of technology. I will point to a number of exciting fields such as energy efficiency, synthetic biology, aircraft and cars where advances are constantly made towards the mastering of distributed system design.
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli holds the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been on the Faculty since 1976. He obtained an electrical engineering and computer science degree (“Dottore in Ingegneria”) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy in 1971. In 1980-1981, he spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the Mathematical Sciences Department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. In 1987, he was Visiting Professor at MIT. He has held a number of visiting professor positions at Italian Universities, including Politecnico di Torino, Universita’ di Roma, La Sapienza, Universita’ di Roma, Tor Vergata, Universita’ di Pavia, Universita’ di Pisa, Scuola di Sant’Anna.
He was a co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in the area of Electronic Design Automation. He was the Chief Technology Adviser of Cadence. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Cadence (and a member of its Strategy Committee), Sonics, Expert Systems, and of KPIT Cummins. He was a member of the HP Strategic Technology Advisory Board, a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Board of General Motors, and is a member of the Technology Advisory Council of United Technologies Corporation, of the Scientific Council of the Tronchetti Provera foundation and of the Snaidero Foundation.
He is an author of over 800 papers, 17 books and 2 patents in the area of design tools and methodologies, large-scale systems, embedded systems, hybrid systems and innovation. Dr. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been a Fellow of the IEEE since 1982 and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor bestowed upon a US engineer, since 1998.
Read MoreInformation technology moves rapidly to an increasingly decentralized and collaborative environment (the Cloud) with rich interfaces to the physical world (the Internet of Things). In particular, it has been predicted that by 2020 thousands of devices per person will be available. These devices will make it possible to make the computing infrastructure invisible to humans and to support societal scale applications that are unthinkable today.
However, even today, we are facing a number of severe challenges in designing applications that should be monitored carefully with respect to security and privacy concerns. Design of complex distributed system is essentially about connections: Connection of concepts, Connection of objects, Connection of teams. Products of the future will be connected across physical and virtual domains. Connections can produce systems that offer more than the sum of the components but they can also lead to systems that are less powerful than the sum of the components or that are so compromised by their interactions that they do not work at all.
And this situation is getting worse: a nightmare waiting to occur! An efficient management of interactions among deployed parts of a larger system requires principles that are common to the design methods developed at the bleeding edge of technology. I will point to a number of exciting fields such as energy efficiency, synthetic biology, aircraft and cars where advances are constantly made towards the mastering of distributed system design.
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli holds the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been on the Faculty since 1976. He obtained an electrical engineering and computer science degree (“Dottore in Ingegneria”) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy in 1971. In 1980-1981, he spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the Mathematical Sciences Department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. In 1987, he was Visiting Professor at MIT. He has held a number of visiting professor positions at Italian Universities, including Politecnico di Torino, Universita’ di Roma, La Sapienza, Universita’ di Roma, Tor Vergata, Universita’ di Pavia, Universita’ di Pisa, Scuola di Sant’Anna.
He was a co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in the area of Electronic Design Automation. He was the Chief Technology Adviser of Cadence. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Cadence (and a member of its Strategy Committee), Sonics, Expert Systems, and of KPIT Cummins. He was a member of the HP Strategic Technology Advisory Board, a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Board of General Motors, and is a member of the Technology Advisory Council of United Technologies Corporation, of the Scientific Council of the Tronchetti Provera foundation and of the Snaidero Foundation.
He is an author of over 800 papers, 17 books and 2 patents in the area of design tools and methodologies, large-scale systems, embedded systems, hybrid systems and innovation. Dr. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been a Fellow of the IEEE since 1982 and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor bestowed upon a US engineer, since 1998.
