Aho visited the Institute today!

Alfred V. Aho delivered a talk today at the Institute today! Yes, the A in AWK (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan) was on his first visit to India, and decided to talk to us about "The Quintessential Problems in Computer Science". He had 5 unsolved problems, though he was quite explicit about the fact that PhD students better not try to solve these problems. Here's the list (the words are my own):

1. Understanding problem complexity, the "is P == NP question?"
2. Learning to model complex systems, via an algorithmic approach (as opposed to the ad-hoc means we use now to build models)
3. Building secure and scalable systems
4. Building reliable systems, with an enchanting detour into how he conducts his compilers' class in Columbia University
5. Making computers more "human-like" and "intelligent"
6. When will we exceed Moore's Law?

Number 6 was Bill Gates's addition to the list.

Lots of people made it to the teensy seminar hall of the CSA department to hear him and given my experience with David Filo's (of Yahoo! fame) talk, I landed up at the venue a good 45 minutes early! Good decision that turned out to be, since everybody's who's read the Dragon Book made it a point to attend.

Yes, I'm sure many were very disappointed that he chose not to talk about compilers.

[I'll update this post with photographs which a friend of mine took!]