SPEAKER: ANDREAS NOWATZYK
Member of the Research Staff, Digital Western Research Laboratory
ABSTRACT:
Reflecting back on this particular aspect of the CMU-SCS culture from
nearly a decade of experience in industrial research and development, I can't
overemphasize the importance on supporting and maintaining a healthy dose of
non-conventional, risk-friendly, speculative research. Not all research can
be aimed at the blue sky, there are many pressing problems to be solved and
paradigms are not worth breaking unless they are fully explored and
understood. I think that deciding when to engage in evolutionary research
and when to take on risks is one of the most difficult challenges that a
researcher faces.
SPEAKER BIO:
1 Mouse = 17,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes:
Computational Challenges in High-Throughput Microscopy
One of the many exciting aspects of entering the Computer Science department
as an aspiring graduate student was the presence of numerous 'unofficial'
projects that were not clearly affiliated with any of major project that were
listed in ARPA, NSF and other funding reviews. Yet, these often ambitious,
frequently speculative and not always sound projects managed to survive
prospered and were strangely tolerated by the faculty. Every once in a
while something truly interesting emerged from this skunk-work activity. It
wasn't until much later, when my friends and I found ourselves engaged in
one of these fly-by-night projects (Deep Thought), that I began to understand
how this worked out and in particular, how instrumental Professor Raj Reddy
was and is to foster this environment.
Andreas Nowatzyk received diplomas in physics and computer science from
the University of Hamburg, Germany and a PhD in computer science from
Carnegie Mellon University in 1989, where he worked on high speed
communication systems and multiprocessing. He was a senior staff engineer
in the technology development group at Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
where he led the S3.mp project. He is currently a member of the
research staff at the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corp.
Besides pursuing his main research interests in scalable multiprocessor
architectures, he participated in many interdisciplinary projects in
physics, aeronautics, image processing. He contributed to the "Deep Thought"
chess machine.