[Novalug] DC ACM, October Lecture and 50th Anniversary Announcements

William Fielder winter@frostmarch.com
Sun Sep 28 16:38:54 EDT 2008


Good day and well met,

I'd like to make two announcements on behalf the of the Washington, DC 
Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.  Both announcements 
should be of interest to the DC Area Linux community.

We have just published the latest electronic edition of the DC ACM 
newsletter, CompuTopics.  More information about the following events 
and others can be found within its pages:

http://www.dcacm.org/archives/CompuTopics/CompuTopics%20Oct%2008.pdf

-----------------------

I.

DC ACM, with kind support from the George Washington University Student 
ACM Chapter, is proud to present the October 2008 lecture.

Dr. C. Antony Hoare, "The Ideal of Program Correctness"

Program correctness is a scientific ideal for Computer Science, like 
accuracy of measurement is for physics, or purity of materials for 
Chemistry. It should be pursued independent of practical applications, 
exploiting scientific method to ensure that intermediate research 
results are cumulative. The research will answer the fundamental 
questions of software engineering such as 'What does a program do? How 
does it work? Why does it work? And how do we know that the answers to 
these questions are correct?' The research results should be 
incorporated in a research tool known as a program verifier. If the 
research is successful, its results should be transferred to software 
engineering practice, and contribute to saving a significant part of the 
current costs of programming error.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Hoare's interest in computing was awakened in the early fifties, 
when he studied philosophy (together with Latin and Greek) at Oxford 
University, under the tutelage of John Lucas. He was fascinated by the 
power of mathematical logic as an explanation of the apparent certainty 
of mathematical truth.

During his National Service (1956-1958), he studied Russian in the Royal 
Navy. Then he took a qualification in statistics and a course in 
programming given by Leslie Fox. In 1959, as a graduate student at 
Moscow State University, he studied the machine translation of languages 
(together with probability theory, in the school of Kolmogorov). To 
assist in efficient look-up of words in a dictionary, he discovered the 
well-known sorting algorithm Quicksort.

Throughout more than thirty years as an academic, Dr. Hoare has 
maintained strong contacts with industry, through consultancy, teaching, 
and collaborative research projects. He took a particular interest in 
the sustenance of legacy code, where assertions are now playing a vital 
role, not for his original purpose of program proof, but rather in 
instrumentation of code for testing purposes. On reaching retirement age 
at Oxford, he welcomed an opportunity to go back to industry as a senior 
researcher with Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He hopes to expand the 
opportunities for industrial application of good academic research, and 
to encourage academic researchers to continue the pursuit of deep and 
interesting questions in areas of long-term interest to the software 
industry and its customers.

Dr. Hoare won the ACM Turing Award in 1980 for his fundamental 
contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. He 
is also the recipient of the Harry Goode Memorial Award and the Babbage 
Medal.

When:
Thursday, October 2nd  7:30pm to 9:30pm

Location:
George Washington University
Media and Public Affairs Building
Room 310 (3rd Floor)
805 21st Street NW
Washington, DC
3 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro.

This lecture is free and open to the public. ACM membership is not 
required to attend.

-----------------------

II.

The first organizational meeting of the Washington, DC chapter of the 
Association for Computing Machinery was held in May 1958 and the chapter 
was recognized by the National ACM on November 1, 1958.  To celebrate 50 
years of serving the DC area IT community, the DC ACM is holding a Gala 
on Saturday, November 1, 2008 at the Silver Spring Hilton.  The dress 
code is "Black Tie Optional."  Tickets for the Gala go on sale to the 
public on October 1st.

Keynote Speaker: Bjarne Stroustrup, "50 years of C++ (including prehistory)"

Abstract:
This is a talk about the design and evolution of C++. As all programming 
languages, C++ owes a lot to earlier languages and evolves through the 
blending of ideas. This talk tries to answer some common questions about 
that success of C++: why did it succeed? At what did it succeed? How did 
it maintain a steady course over more than 25 years? At what did it not 
succeed? The scale of C++’s success was unanticipated and its continuing 
strength has left many language and business theorists puzzled, so 
explanations are required. Given the long time span involved and because 
no large system can be designed with 20-20 hindsight, a historical 
perspective is an essential part of any answer. A combination of 
technical, philosophical, and sociological issues must be considered. 
This talk focuses on the design aims of C++ and Dr. Stroustrup’s 
philosophy of incremental language evolution relying on feedback loops. 
It goes into some detail on the ISO standards process which has been 
central to the stability and evolution of C++. It gives a few – but only 
very few – illustrative code examples.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++. 
His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming 
techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is 
actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.  Dr. 
Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer 
Science at Texas A&M University in Austin. He has received numerous 
honors, including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award in 1993 and Dr. 
Dobb's Excellence in Programming award in 2008.


Schedule of Events

6:30 PM   Cocktail Hour (Cash Bar)
           Silent Auction begins

7:30 PM   Plated dinner begins

8:00 PM   Welcome and historical perspectives

8:30 PM   Silent Auction ends
           Keynote Speaker introduced

9:15 PM   Q&A

9:30 PM   Door prize drawing
           Results of Silent Auction announced

Cost of Gala Tickets:
October 1-18        $40/one ticket, $75/two tickets
October 19-29       $50/ticket
Full-time students  $25/ticket (anytime)


Regards,

William Fielder
Chair, DC ACM
www.dcacm.org




More information about the Novalug mailing list