[Pl-seminar] Gerry Sussman at GBC/ACM-IEEE CS, 9/18/08

[Mitchell Wand]

>From Peter Mager:

Joint meeting of GBC/ACM  and Boston Chapter of IEEE Computer  Society
> Thursday, September 18, 2008, 7-9 pm
> Broad Institute Auditorium (MIT Building NE30) Main St (between Vassar and
> Ames Sts), Cambridge, MA
>
>
> Evolvability and Robust Design
>
> Presented by
> Gerald Jay Sussman
> Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology
>
> It is hard to build robust systems: systems that have acceptable behavior
> over a larger class of situations than was anticipated by their designers.
> The most robust systems are evolvable: they can be easily adapted to new
> situations with only minor modification. How can we design systems that are
> flexible in this way?
>
> Observations of biological systems tell us a great deal about how to make
> robust and evolvable systems. Techniques originally developed in support of
> symbolic Artificial Intelligence can be viewed as ways of enhancing
> robustness and evolvability in programs and other engineered systems. By
> contrast, common practice of computer science actively discourages the
> construction of robust systems.
>
> Robust designs are built on an additive infrastructure: there are exposed
> interfaces for attaching new functionality without serious disruption of
> preexisting mechanisms. Indeed, the ability to harmlessly duplicate a
> mechanism and then modify the copy to supply useful new functionality is one
> of the principal ploys appearing in natural evolution. What are the
> preconditions that support such augmentation? Can we engineers arrange our
> systems to be extensible in this way? Are there exploitable analogies
> between the techniques that we have created to make extensible artifacts and
> the mechanisms that we find in biological systems?
>
> One powerful idea in biological systems is the use of space to distribute
> function. In principle, each cell of a multicellular organism is capable of
> living by itself. But a multicellular organism is a community of cells that
> are spatially differentiated to build particular structures and to perform
> particular functions. How is this arranged? We now understand how this can
> this contribute to reliability, but do we understand how it contributes to
> flexibility?
>
> I will address these and related issues, and show, in terms of explicit and
> concrete examples, how some of the insights we glean can inform the way we
> do engineering in the age of information.
>
> Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic (formerly Matsushita) Professor of
> Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
> received the S.B. and the Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He has
> been involved in artificial intelligence research at M.I.T. since 1964. His
> research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used
> by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the
> process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and
> engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in
> computer architecture and in VLSI design.
>
> Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the widely
> used introductory computer science textbook, "Structure and Interpretation
> of Computer Programs," which has been translated into French, German,
> Chinese, Polish, and Japanese. As a result of this and other contributions
> to computer-science education, Sussman received the ACM's Karl Karlstrom
> Outstanding Educator Award in 1990, and the Amar G. Bose award for teaching
> in 1991.
>
> Sussman's contributions to Artificial Intelligence include problem solving
> by debugging almost-right plans, propagation of constraints applied to
> electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, dependency-based explanation and
> dependency-based backtracking, and various language structures for
> expressing problem-solving strategies. Sussman and his former student, Guy
> L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.
>
> Sussman saw that Artificial Intelligence ideas can be applied to
> computer-aided design. Sussman developed, with his graduate students,
> sophisticated computer-aided design tools for VLSI. Steele made the first
> Scheme chips in 1978. These ideas and the AI-based CAD technology to support
> them were further developed in the Scheme chips of 1979 and 1981. The
> technique and experience developed was then used to design other
> special-purpose computers. Sussman was the principal designer of the Digital
> Orrery, a machine designed to do high-precision integrations for
> orbital-mechanics experiments. The Orrery was designed and built by a few
> people in a few months, using AI-based simulation and compilation tools.
>
> Using the Digital Orrery, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to discover
> numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets. The Digital
> Orrery is now retired at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
> Sussman was also the lead designer of the Supercomputer Toolkit, another
> multiprocessor computer optimized for evolving systems of ordinary
> differential equations. The Supercomputer Toolkit was used by Sussman and
> Wisdom to confirm and extend the discoveries made with the Digital Orrery to
> include the entire planetary system.
>
> Sussman has pioneered the use of computational descriptions to communicate
> methodological ideas in teaching subjects in Electrical Circuits and in
> Signals and Systems. Over the past decade Sussman and Wisdom have developed
> a subject that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper
> understanding of advanced Classical Mechanics. Computational algorithms are
> used to express the methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena.
> Expressing the methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous
> and computationally effective. Students are expected to read our programs
> and to extend them and to write new ones. The task of formulating a method
> as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful
> exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized procedurally, a
> mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute
> results. Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer, have produced a textbook,
> "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics," to capture these
> ideas.
>
> Sussman is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
> Engineers (IEEE). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering
> (NAE), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
> (AAAS), a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
> (AAAI), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a fellow
> of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the New York
> Academy of Sciences (NYAS). He is also a bonded locksmith, a life member of
> the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute (AWI), a member of the
> Massachusetts Watchmakers-Clockmakers Association, a member of the Amateur
> Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMOB), and a member of the American Radio Relay
> League (ARRL)..
>
> This joint meeting of the Boston/Central New England Chapter of the IEEE
> Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be held in the Broad Institute Auditorium
> (MIT building NE-30). The Broad Institute is on Main St between Vassar and
> Ames streets. You can see it on a map at
> http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level2&centerx=710846&centery=496467&oldzoom=level3&map.x=340&map.y=72.
> <
> http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level2&centerx=710846&centery=496467&oldzoom=level3&map.x=340&map.y=72>
> The auditorium is on the ground floor near the entrance.
>
> For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org
>
>
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