Meeting Great People

Well, time for me to start blogging here. So I've been in Stanford for a month, finally settling in.

One of the most exciting things here in Stanford is that you get to meet people who invented the many tools you use and who helped bootstrap your field of study. Exciting was my feeling when I attended the talk by Don Knuth. One question that struck me as important was how he felt computer science should advance. His impression of the current state of affairs is worrisome, because many people are depending too much on libraries instead of really understanding what is being done. In retrospect, this really is one of the more important problems that arise during development work. It is easy to misunderstand the functionality of methods you're using when rushing to get things done, and you get punished by nasty bugs that might take hours to debug. The lesson then is, use libraries for development speed-up, but never speed-up beyond the point where you cannot really understand what cryptic-function() is doing.

Another interesting seminar was given by Subhasish Mitra, a young assistant professor whose research group recently demonstrated a working circuit on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It's amazing how they could "dis-entangle" the naturally wound-up CNTs algorithmically and even prove the correctness of the circuits built. We're enjoying much richer computing power on our handhelds than just a few years ago. If VLSI-scale circuits were made available on CNTs, it'd be difficult to imagine how much more computational power we'd get out of handhelds. We might want to start dreaming of applications that are seemingly impossible from today's technological standpoint, but definitely doable with small computing devices that are hundreds of times more powerful.