• Speaker: David Ackley (University of New Mexico)
  • Date: April 26th, 2013 (Friday)
  • Room: CIT 368
  • Title: "Robust-first computing: Beyond correctness and efficiency"
  • Abstract:
Efficiency and robustness are mortal enemies, inherently opposed on the value of redundancy, which robustness requires but efficiency eliminates. This talk argues that, by emphasizing efficiency alone, computer science is often optimizing the wrong thing, and we could do better, and should, by recognizing and managing the tradeoff explicitly. An illustration of efficiency's costs is presented, along with discussion of possible computing mechanisms when robustness is emphasized even over correctness. An ACM paper on the topic is available.