Wednesday, April 5, Volen 101, 2:00-3:30 pm. (Refreshments at 2:00pm)
When designing computer systems, or formal models to reason about those systems, computer scientists have typically viewed computation as the step-by-step process of producing a result. This way of thinking about computation is quite powerful, but on closer examination, it ill-characterizes many modern computational systems (such as the world wide web) and is ill-equipped to deal with many future challenges.
In this talk, I will use several examples drawn from my own research to present an alternative conceptualization of computation in terms of interactive architectures. In these examples, the computation is carried out by a community of interacting entities. In each case, the computation cannot be localized to any individual entity; instead, it resides in the constrained interactions among the computational constituents. I show how these interactive architectures can be used to better model not only the web, but other complex systems arising in robotics, information management, and software design.
Host: Liuba Shrira