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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

2017

  • Art Scott and Michael Frank on energy-efficient computing

    Clock speeds of computing chips have leveled off dramatically since 2005, and putting more cores in systems on a chip (SoC) has produced more heat, adding a new ceiling to further advances. Leading-edge researchers, like Mike Frank, and dedicated technologists with a wealth of experience, like Art Scott, represent a new vanguard of the leap-forward beyond Dennard scaling and Landauer's limit. Art looks for ways to reduce energy consumption and Mike looks for ways to "architect" future chips according to principles of reversibility. Is the future in reversible, adiabatic computing and simpler architectures using posit arithmetic? My guests think so.

  • Mixing computation with people: an interview with Marianne Winslett

    In this interview, we learn about five fascinating subjects: security in manufacturing, negotiating trust in the web, updating logical databases, differential privacy, and scientific computing (including its security issues). This is a confluence that has, at its roots, the thorny problems that arise when you mix computation with people. Some beautiful technical results, many originated by Marianne Winslett, now address those challenges, but some surprises crop up along the way.

  • Cybersecurity skeptics now embracing formal methods: an interview with Gernot Heiser and Jim Morris

    There is new hope for those who despair securing computer systems from external hackers. The recent DARPA HACMS project demonstrated conclusively that "certain pathways for attackers have all been shut down in a way that's mathematically proven to be unhackable for those pathways." Continuing research at DARPA and IARPA will eventually shut down all the pathways, and the external hackers will be out of business permanently.