Strong Turnout at NUS School of Computing Public Symposium

In the afternoon of 20 August 2008, a 300-strong audience thronged Seminar Room 1 at COM1 for the NUS School of Computing Public Symposium, featuring talks given by two eminent Computing professors: Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford W Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus) and H T Kung, William H Gates Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Professor Ullman (pictured left), who has served in the Visiting Committee of SoC for a number of years, has his interests include database theory, database integration, data mining and education using information infrastructure. He has received numerous awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the National Academy of Engineering. He also received the 1996 Sigmod Contribution Award and the 1998 Karl V Karstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Professor Ullman has served on numerous boards and panels, including the NSF advisory panel on Computer Science in the United States, the Technical Advisory Board of Google.com and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore. He was on the visiting committee of NUS School of Computing between 1994 and 2003. Professor Ullman is the author or co-author of 16 books and 170 technical publications.

In talk at SoC, Professor Ullman took the audience behind the scene to consider the elements of Google’s success from the technological perspective. He walked those present through the mathematical groundwork and pragmatics that underlie the well-known search engine, demonstrating how intellectual leaps, combined with creative software engineering led to something that has a profound effect on all of us. He also discussed the problem of scale, the critical need for speech, the spam problem, page rank, random walks on the Web, and other such considerations.

Professor Kung (pictured right), another leading scholar who has also served on SoC’s Visiting Committee for a number of years, has his interests in computer and telecommunications networks as well as their applications in business. Prior to joining Harvard in 1992, he taught at Carnegie Mellon, and led research projects on the design and experiment of novel parallel computers and switch-based networks. To complement his academic activities, Professor Kung maintains a strong link with industry. His awards and honours include: Election to the National Academy of Engineering; Distinguished Lecturer in Information Sciences, National Academy of Sciences International Science Lecture Series and Election to Academia Sinica (in Taiwan) and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In his talk at SoC, Prof Kung cast new light on the old story that information technology is a key enabling engine for economical growth. He noted that the fact that software systems play a critical role in this is often not sufficiently emphasised, perhaps due to its obviousness. He cited recent labour statistics numbers in the US showing that demand for computer scientists is projected to grow by 37% over 10 years. It is one of the top demanding fields. He argued how a good university education in computing can help prepare computing professionals to meet the demand, and in general, produce future technology leaders.

Click on the video screen above to view the NUS School of Computing Public Symposium, chaired by Associate Professor Teo Hock Hai.