Keynotes

Laws of programming with concurrency

Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research

The algebraic laws for programming with concurrency are as simple as (and very similar to) the familiar laws of arithmetic. Yet they are stronger for reasoning about the properties of programs than the axioms of Hoare Logic and the rules of an operational semantics put together.

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, commonly known as Tony Hoare, is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language.

Building Better Online Courses

Peter Norvig, Google

We now have many choices in designing a course, whether it is in the classroom, online, or a hybrid. This talk will cover some of the mechanics of running an online course, including the factors involved in building a community. And we will discuss whether building a course is like building software: in the early days, software was crafted by individuals, but over time we established processes that enabled large groups to build much larger systems. Today, courses are still crafted by an individual teacher — if we want to build a larger class, serving more students, and more potential paths through the material, do we need a new set of course building processes? How can we assure that our courses will continually improve in quality?

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc; previously he directed the core search algorithms group. He is a AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow, and American Academy of Arts & Sciences Member. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes.