Along with coauthor J. Eliot B. Moss, Maurice Herlihy was recently given an award for the most influential paper by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group - Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - Computer Society Technical Community on Computer Architecture (IEEE-CS TCCA) for his 1993 paper, Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures. The presentation took place at the 35th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), held in Beijing, China on June 24, 2008.

This award recognizes his paper from the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Proceedings 15 years earlier that has ...

Q: How did you end up in Computer Science?

A: Long story short: As an undergraduate, I concentrated in math and I spent lots of time hanging out with grad students in Harvard’s math department, enough time to convince me that I did not want to be a math grad student. After I graduated, I found out about rent and had to get a job. I exaggerated my qualifications and got a minimum-wage job writing FORTRAN programs. I drifted through other programming jobs until one day the think-tank I worked for lost most of their funding. They were laying ...

Q: How did you end up in Computer Science?

A: I took a course about computers at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia around 1965 and never looked back.

Q: You’ve consistently taught the Introduction to Software Engineering course. How has the course evolved? What about the students?

A: Actually I taught the courses that kept getting split into separate courses and eventually yielded the current “Introduction to Software Engineering” course (CS101, CS190, CS132, CS32).

The course itself has evolved as the field has evolved. Today’s projects are larger and more complex, involving significantly more graphics and typically involving ...

On Friday, May 30, Chad Jenkins and the Brown Robotics Group hosted the Fourth Annual New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS). Researchers from Clark University, the University of Connecticut, Dartmouth, ENERGID, Harvard, MIT, Olin College, Roger Williams University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Union College, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Yale attended the one-day symposium to explore common research interests, to establish and strengthen collaborations, and to give students the opportunity to network and present their work. Fourteen presentations were given during the symposium, including “Sparse Incremental Learning for Interactive Robot Control Policy Estimation,” by Brown Ph.D. student ...