Alfred Aho
Columbia University
Programming Language Compilers for the 21st Century
Abstract: Compiler construction has long been viewed as a software engineering task that has elegantly blended theory with practice. Today, however, the theory of compiler design is struggling to keep up with the increasing diversity in software, languages and machines. This talk will review some of the challenges that trends in software systems, programming languages and computer architecture are placing on the compiler designers of the future.
Biography: Alfred V. Aho is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. He received his PhD in EE/CS at Princeton University and then conducted research at the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs. He subsequently served as General Manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at Bellcore (now Telcordia) and as Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University.
He is well known for his research in algorithms, compilers and theory of computation, and his 10 textbooks in computer science. He created the widely used scripting language AWK with Brian Kernighan and Peter Weinberger. Dr. Aho is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Waterloo.
