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Interviews are organized by the month and year in which they first appeared. To find an interviewee by name, use the search bar (at upper right).

Interviews

2012

  • Writing secure programs: an interview with Steve Lipner
    by Peter J. Denning
    May 2012

    Protecting computing systems and networks from attackers and data theft is an enormously complicated problem. The individual operating systems are complex (typically more than 40 million lines of code), they are connected to an enormous Internet (on order of 1 billion hosts), and the whole network is heavily populated (more than 2.3 billion users). Hunting down and patching vulnerabilities is a losing game.

  • Bringing architecture back to computing: an interview with Daniel A. Menascé
    by Peter J. Denning
    April 2012

    Over the past 10 or 20 years, the subject of machine organization and system architecture has been deemphasized in favor of the powerful abstractions that support computational thinking. We have grown accustomed to slogans like "computing is bits, not atoms"---suggesting that bits are not physical and the properties of the physical world are less and less important for understanding computation.

  • Dark innovation: An interview with Jerry Michalski
    by Peter J. Denning
    March 2012

    As computing technologists, we tend to think of innovations in terms of new products or services supported by, or made of, computing technologies. But there are other types of innovation besides products. There are process innovations, such as McDonald's method of making hamburgers fast; social innovations, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving; and business model innovations, such as Starbucks replacing a coffee shop with an Internet cafe. In all these categories, we tend to think of innovations as new ways of doing things that positively impact many people.

  • A 10 Point Checklist for Getting it Off the Shelf: An interview with Dick Urban
    by Peter J. Denning
    January 2012

    Far too many R&D programs in industry as well as government result in reports or prototypes that represent fundamentally good ideas but end up gathering dust on a shelf. Ellison "Dick" Urban, formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and now the Director of Washington Operations at Draper Laboratory, has had considerable experience with technology transition. We talked to him about his guidelines for success.

  • The Law, the Computer, and the Mind: An interview with Roy Freed
    by Gil Press
    January 2012

    2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the first educational program on computer law, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Continuing Professional Education of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association (ALI-ABA). In 1971 at an ACM conference, Roy Freed and six colleagues founded the Computer Law Association (CLA), an international bar association (renamed later as the International Technology Law Association).