Previous Fora / 2003
Speakers
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Professor William A. Wulf |
Bill Wulf received the first Computer Science Ph.D. ever awarded at the University of Virginia in 1968. He then joined Carnegie-Mellon University as Assistant Professor of Computer Science, becoming Associate Professor in 1973 and Professor in 1975. In 1981 he left Carnegie-Mellon and founded and served as chairman of Tartan Laboratories until 1988. He then became the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. In 1990 he returned to the University of Virginia as AT&T Professor, and later became University Professor. Dr. Wulf is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 he was elected President of the National Academy of Engineering. He has directed over 25 Ph.D. theses and is the author or co-author of three books and over 40 papers.
Bill Wulf's research interests revolve around the hardware/software interface, and thus span programming systems and computer architecture. He designed Bliss, a systems-implementation language adopted by DEC, and was one of the architects of the DEC PDP-11, a highly successful minicomputer. He designed and constructed the C.mmp multiprocessor, and Hydra, one of the first operating systems to explore capability-based protection. He developed PQCC, a technology for the automatic construction of optimizing compilers, and designed the WM pipelined processor. Professor Wulf's recent research has been the design of scalable high performance memory systems, computer security, and hardware-software co-design.
Besides his activity as engineer and researcher (he claims to be both, but at the same time a hybrid, which is not quite either) as President of the NAE Professor Wulf promotes a broad understanding of technology for all members of society, including the underlying scientific, mathematical, design and problem-solving principles. In the framework of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities he helps humanities scholars exploit information technology.
Professor Wulf also puts an emphasis on the change engineering and computing culture in order to strengthen engineers' own responsibility in continually re-educating themselves.
Selected Publications
"Hydra/C.mmp: An Experimental Computer System", W. A. Wulf, R. Levin, and S. P. Harbison, McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 1980.
"Access Ordering: Achieving Optimal Effective Memory Bandwidth," S. Moyer and W. Wulf, Journal of Complexity, June 1994.
"The Codesign of Embedded Systems: A Unified Hardware/Software Representation", Sanjaya Kumar, James H. Aylor, Barry W. Johnson, and Wm. A. Wulf, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
Resources on the Web
Homepage of William A. Wulf at the University of Virginia
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/wulf.html
National Academy of Engineering
Interwiev with Professor Wulf