President Emeritus
William Mong Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science
National Tsing Hua University
Hsinchu City, Taiwan

 

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The IT Revolution - since the 1950's

Monday, 10 October 2016 - Gala dinner special talk

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Abstract:

In his poem “Auguries of Innocence”, William Blake (1757 – 1827) said prophetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
Eternity in an hour.

I shall try to interpret Blake’s poem in terms of some of the important aspects in the development of modern digital computation – Silicon, Cloud, Yottabyte and Gigahertz.

Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) once said: “Mathematics makes men subtle; logic, able to contend, and histories, wise.” To ponder the future trend of computation, besides mathematics and logic, one might want to go back to the debut of modern digital computation in the middle of the 20th century. As an early eyewitness of some of the events in such an exciting era, I shall try to recall some of the stories I heard.

Disclaimer: according to George Santayana (1863 - 1952) “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.”

 

About the speaker:

Prof. Chung Laung Liu completed his primary and secondary school education at Sheng Kung Hui Choi Kou School in Macau, received his B. Sc. degree at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, and his S. M. and Sc. D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. His teaching career spans over forty years, at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and the National Tsing Hua University, where he is now the William Mong Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science. His academic administrative duties include serving as Associate Provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign from 1996 to 1998, and as President of the National Tsing Hua University from 1998 to 2002.

His research areas are: computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, computer-aided instruction, real-time systems, combinatorial optimization, and discrete mathematics. He has published over 180 technical papers, and 8 technical books. In addition, he has published 9 books which are essay collections. He serves on the Boards of a number of high tech companies and educational and charitable foundations in Taiwan. Since 2005, he hosts a weekly radio show on Technology and Humanities in radio stations in Hsinchu, Taipei, and Taichung.

He received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Macao and the National Chengchi University. He is a member of Academia Sinica, and a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. Among the major awards he received are: the Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award from IEEE, the Phil Kaufman Award from CEDA, Technical Achievement Award from Real Time Systems Technical Committee, IEEE, Technical Achievement Award from Circuits and Systems Society, IEEE, and Education Medal from IEEE.