Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


“Whole Systems, Whole Students”

November 10th, 2012 / in research horizons, Research News / by Ed Lazowska

At last week’s meeting of the Council of the Computing Community Consortium – held at Microsoft Research in Redmond WA – UC Berkeley’s Eric Brewer gave an inspirational presentation about the ability of students to design and build “whole systems.”

Simply looking at the slides can’t possibly do justice to Eric’s presentation – especially since Eric agreed to an informal discussion-oriented session.  But the slides are here.

The basic theme:  smartphones, 3D printers, Arduino, the “maker” culture, etc., are creating a revolution – a “gadget” and/or “whole system” revolution.  We in academia are behind the 8-ball, and we should catch up.  The result will be more and better students.

Eric described his own favorite project – an amazing (and amazingly beautiful) chandelier.

In addition to Eric’s slides, check out Make magazine, and the October issue of Wired.

Additional related materials:

“Whole Systems, Whole Students”

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