Once upon a time, Computer Systems was a broad field encompassing everything from hardware to software. The incredible growth and success that our field has experienced over the past half a century has had the side effect of transforming systems into a constellation of siloed fields. I'm going to make the case that we should return to a broad interpretation of systems, undertake bolder, higher risk projects, and be intentional about how we interact with other fields. I'll support the case with examples of several research projects that embody this approach.
About Margo I. Seltzer
Margo I. Seltzer is Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare. She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system.
Dr. Seltzer was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB and is now an Architect for Oracle Corporation. She serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the (US) National Academies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group. She is a past President of the USENIX Assocation and served as the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association Board of Directors and on the Computing Community Consortium. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010, and the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award in 2017. Professor Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
About the Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture
The Lecture honors the memory of Professor Donald B. Gillies. He was among the first mathematicians to become involved in the computer field, helping to calculate the first Sputnik orbit and later discovering three new prime numbers in the course of checking out ILLIAC II. It is hoped that the Donald B. Gillies Lectureship in Computer Science will continue to enrich the lives of students and colleagues as an appropriate memorial to a man whose intellectual excellence and moral purpose made him a distinguished teacher and scientist. See the website for additional information.
