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Barbara Liskov, Institute Professor at MIT

Barbara Liskov

Biography: Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor at MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM. She has received the ACM Turing Award, the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award, the IEEE Von Neumann medal, and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers. Her research interests include distributed systems, programming methodology, and programming languages.

Presentation: Keynote: The power of abstraction

Time: Wednesday 09:00 - 09:50 / Location: Fleming Room

Abstraction is at the center of much work in Computer Science. It encompasses finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation. Furthermore, abstraction is the basis for program construction, allowing programs to be built in a modular fashion. This talk will discuss how the abstraction mechanisms we use today came to be, how they are supported in programming languages, and some possible areas for future research.

Barbara Liskov's keynote will be supported by Heather Willems, principal of ImageThink, a graphic facilitation company based in New York City that supports events and meetings by synthesizing key ideas into a visually-rich graphic mural.