Two Solitudes
Greg Wilson - Mozilla Foundation
April 11, 2014, 1 p.m. - April 11, 2014, 2 p.m.
MC103
I have spent much of the last fifteen years trying to build bridges between the two solitudes of computing: academic researchers on the one side, and working developers on the other. These efforts have largely failed, but have done so in interesting ways. This talk will explore why the wide gulf between research and practice persists, and outline a new plan for trying to narrow it based on scurvy, smoking, and statistics. Greg Wilson is the creator of Software Carpentry, a crash course in computing skills for scientists and engineers. He has worked for 25 years in high-performance computing, data visualization, computer security, and academia, and is the author or editor of several books on computing (including the 2008 Jolt Award winner "Beautiful Code") and two for children. Greg received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1993, and presently runs the Software Carpentry project for the Mozilla Foundation.
