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Microsoft researcher, a computing pioneer, wins Turing Award
10 MariStockAnalyst.com - News
<ul><li>Mar. 10--For inventing a prototype of the modern PC, Microsoft researcher Chuck Thacker has won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for a lifetime of contributions to computing. </li><li>The Association for Computing Machinery announced Tuesday that Charles Thacker, who goes by Chuck, is the 2009 winner of the Turing, named after Alan Turing, a British mathematician often considered the father of computer science. </li><li>The association said in a statement that Thacker was chosen for his work on building the Alto, the first modern personal computer.</li><ul>[More...] -
Today in Sport – as it happened
10 Marwww.guardian.co.uk
Discuss the day's big issues, send us your favourite links, follow us on Twitter and take a look at our 2010 sport calendar
9.08am: Good morning and welcome to our daily sports news blog. Throughout the day we'll update this page with news, links and what's expected to happen in the hours ahead. Time permitting, we'll try to wade in below the line, answering your questions and comments.
We'll let you know what's coming up today after our morning meeting shortly, but in meantime what do Milan need to do to win at Old Trafford tonight? Richard Williams suggests stylish, extravagant, attacking football is at the heart of both Leonardo and his side. GSR
9.53am: We've just had the morning meeting and here's what to expect through the day.
• There's a Liverpool press conference at 9.30am ahead of the Europa League match against Lille tomorrow
• We'll have more on the Pakistan cricketers who have been banned from the squad due to the usual internal squabbling
• The latest on Ricky Hatton and whether he is about to hang up his gloves
• Paul Wilson is blogging on the trouble with trying to use technology in football
• Tonight we'll have live coverage of Manchester United v Milan and a Tom Jenkins gallery of all the best images from Old Trafford GR10.21am: Vitali Klitschko has revealed how Lennox Lewis's mother stopped him getting a rematch with the former world heavyweight champion:
"Lennox promised me but his mum decided he wasn't going to fight. He invited me to London, without managers. He said he wanted to talk just together. I came to the room and his mum is there. We talked for two hours and his mum was looking at me and scanning me. After that I went away and he called me a couple of hours later and said, 'Sorry, but no'. I felt it wasn't his decision, his mum decided"
11.06am: The BBC has turned down a request from Downing Street for the Prime Minister to appear on the Match of the Day 2 sofa as a guest. JA
11.17am: Chester City have been wound up at the high court, according to reports. We can but hope that the final crumbling of the shoddy edifice created by the owners will allow the club's long-suffering supporters to move on. Chester Phoenix anyone? The ever-excellent Twohundredpercent.net have followed the sorry saga from the start, and the full list of articles can be found here, via the Chester Mad site. It's well worth the time, if you can spare it. One of those football stories that has you shaking your head in sad disbelief. JA
11.47am: A little bit more on Chester City. The Chester Chronicle is reporting that no one from club's parent company was present at the high court today, meaning that the club's 125-year existence was ended in less than 30 seconds. If you needed an illustration of the contempt with which the owners have treated the club's fans look no further. JA
12.43pm: "Sometimes you move your fingers. It was nothing." That's Rafa Benítez's view of Gerrard-V-sign-gate. JA
1.43pm: Facing off this evening and on video as Sir Alex and Leonardo share their thoughts about Becks and the prospect for each side in tonight's game. GSR
2.00pm: Godfather of computing Alan Turing rightly received an apology last year after his prosecution for homosexuality led to his death. But apart from giving geeks worldwide the chance to philosophise about how machines might pass the Turing Test, he was also an accomplished physical athlete. Here John Graham-Cumming argues he should be remembered at the 2012 Olympic Games. GR
2.12pm: Only a few days to go until the Formula One season begins in Bahrain, with rule changes and a spectacular array of drivers promising excitement from the off. Felipe Massa thinks Ferrari are in better shape now than they have been for years. Hopefully not the sort of shape they were in when the team and Michael Schumacher won absolutely everything... GSR
2.55pm: "I hope the semi-finals is a minimum", says Fabio Capello of his target for England in South Africa this summer, before going on to reveal who he'd like to meet in the final. GSR
3.34pm: 25% of Premier League season ticket holders may quit their club, according to a survey. Saying it is different from actually doing it of course, but has the tide finally turned? JA
3.44pm: Mid-afternoon quiz question time, courtesy of our friends at Opta: The list of leading Premier League scorers since the start of 2005-06 reads:
Wayne Rooney 77
Cristiano Ronaldo 75
.. and then who? JA4.09pm: It's not Frank Lampard. If someone below the line gets it, I'll announce it. Otherwise I'll give it til, ooh, 4.45pm?
4.18pm: Ah, Percinho has got it in one. It is indeed Darren Bent with 67 goals. Meanwhile, in the sporting world away from impromptu quizzes, the Ivory Coast have appointed Philippe Troussier for the summer's World Cup. JA
6.13pm: Portsmouth have been forced to make 85 staff members redundant as part of their ongoing cost-cutting measures. Chief executive Peter Storrie will remain in his role despite tendering his resignation. EF
6.20pm: That's it blog-wise for today, but we'll leave you with today's offering of the Fiver, which recalls the momentous world events which have occured since the first leg of Milan v Manchester United. Paul Doyle will have the minute-by-minute of the return game coming up while we will also be covering Real Madrid v Lyon. Feel free to continue the debate below the line and see you tomorrow. EF
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Pistol fired on Olympic honour campaign for Turing
10 MarThe Register
Celebrated cryptographer was accomplished runner
The campaigner who led a successful effort last year to secure a public apology for the UK government's mistreatment of Alan Turing is calling for recognition of the celebrated cryptographer during the 2012 London Olympics.…
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An Olympic honour for Alan Turing | John Graham-Cumming
10 Marwww.guardian.co.uk - science
The 2012 Olympics offer the perfect chance to mark the anniversary of a great mathematician – and marathon runner
Last year I led a campaign to obtain an apology for the mistreatment of the British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's prosecution for homosexuality led to the death of a true genius at the age of only 41 in 1954. On 10 September last year, Gordon Brown issued an apology that recognised Turing's stature as one of the greatest Britons. But Britain has a final opportunity to unapologetically recognise Alan Turing in two years' time, at the 2012 Olympics.
It's now well known that Turing laid down the foundations of computer science in the 1930s, helped shorten the second world war by breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and investigated artificial intelligence. He went on to design early computers during the late 1940s and just before he died he was untangling the process of morphogenesis to understand why and how living beings take the shape they do. Only today are scientists appreciating the work he did in his last years, and every computer user can be thankful for his theoretical Turing machine, which captured the essence of the machines we all use.
What is less known is that Turing was also an accomplished physical athlete. He was an excellent marathon runner, with a best time of 2 hours 46 minutes. He ran for a local club in Walton, Surrey while working at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. He is also said to have run between London and Bletchley Park for meetings during the second world war, and at age 14 he cycled 60 miles from Southampton to school at Sherbourne during the general strike of 1926.
The last time Britain hosted the Olympics, in 1948, Turing tried out for the British Olympic marathon team. He came fifth in the trials. He ended up attending the games as a spectator taking along two of his young nieces as guests. That year Britain took a silver in the marathon when Thomas Richards ran for 2 hours 35 minutes. Alan Turing was only 11 minutes slower.
2012 has great significance: it's the centenary of his birth on 23 June. To celebrate "Alan Turing Year", mathematicians and scientists across Britain and around the world are arranging events throughout the year. Celebrations of Turing's work will be held in Manchester (where he was living and working when he died) and at Bletchley Park. There's even a suggestion that Unesco should designate 2012 the year of computer science.
Turing's life also deserves celebration far from the places he's most associated with. As Britons, we live in a world Turing helped create: computers have permeated our lives and his work at Bletchley Park with thousands of others helped bring the war with Nazi Germany to an end. As London shows off what's great about Britain through the Olympic games, let's show off a great Briton of whom we should be proud. What better way to honour Turing than by naming the 2012 marathon the "Turing marathon" and inviting his surviving nieces to witness the event? One of them could even be invited to fire the starting pistol that will set the runners off. Those little girls are elderly now, but their memories of Uncle Alan are bright. Inviting them would be a fitting tribute.
Of course, detractors may be concerned about sullying the games by associating an individual with an event. But such concerns didn't stop Greece in 2004 from naming their entire Olympic stadium after Spiridon Louis (who won the marathon event in 1896). Honouring the life of a man would be a welcome antidote to the heavy commercialisation surrounding the games.
Others may worry about raking over the embers of the dark days of anti-homosexuality laws. But there's little need to be concerned: celebrating Turing doesn't mean focusing on just that one aspect of his life; it means recognising a mental and physical athlete, a mathematician and marathon runner, and a man to whom we owe so much. It's rare that events coincide to give us one moment in time when a man like Turing can be celebrated in all his complexity. Let's not miss the chance in 2012.
• This article was commissioned after the author contacted us via a You Tell Us thread
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Ethernet co-inventor wins $250,000 Turing Award
10 MarGeek.com
Despite being named after Alan Turing, the annual Turing Award does not pertain specifically to individuals who contribute to the advancement of computer sentience (a la the Turing Test, a nerd favorite) but rather rewards “an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting [...]
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Charles Thacker, Turing Award Winner, Recognized For Work On First Modern PC
9 MarThe Huffington Post
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A Microsoft researcher has won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of technology's most coveted prizes, for his work helping design and build what is widely considered the first modern personal computer.
While at Xerox Corp.'s famed Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in the 1970s, Charles Thacker led the hardware development for the Alto, which featured innovative display and other technologies that helped inspire future generations of computers.
Thacker, 67, was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computers.
The Turing Award is funded by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. It is named for the mathematician Alan Turing.
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Computing Prize Winner Did Not Rest On His Laurels
9 MarWSJ.com - Digits
Computing organizations, like groups in other disciplines, regularly hand out awards to pioneers who helped shape the field. Charles Thacker certainly did that, but didn’t stop there.
The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday is naming Thacker the latest recipient of the A.M. Turing award, which comes with $250,000 and carries prestige akin to a Nobel Prize in the industry. Thacker is being recognized largely for the Alto, a machine developed in 1974 at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center that is often called the world’s first personal computer. The ACM is also citing Thacker’s contributions at Xerox PARC to the invention of Ethernet–the most widely used technology for local networks–as well as work on tablet-style computers since becoming a researcher at Microsoft in the 1990s.
“This guy is a real genius,” says Alan Kay, a researcher who worked with Thacker at PARC and a fellow Turing award winner. “We don’t like to sling that word around in our field, but he is one. He is magic.”
Thacker says the manager in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor, was a psychologist who inspired scientists there to pursue a broad vision of computers as devices that could transform documents and other communications media. But to most people at the time they were a lot less inspiring, managed largely by interacting with green-screen terminals that could only display simple text.
Thacker, who is 67, says his work to fulfill Taylor’s vision was aided by advances such as dynamic random-access memory chips–pioneered by Intel–which could store data temporarily at a lower cost than prior technologies. That allowed the PARC team to equip the Alto with what came to be known as “bit-mapped” computer displays; these could render more complex images, such as pages with text in multiple fonts that looked like paper documents. The display technology was the foundation of the Alto’s graphical user interface, a software technology that would later be a distinguishing feature of Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.
Another key invention at PARC was the first laser printer, an outgrowth of Xerox’s heritage in document-handling. Ethernet, Thacker recalls, was largely dreamed up as a way to help the Alto send files to the new device for printing. “We really wanted to use that printer,” he says.
After leaving PARC in 1983, Thacker helped start a new lab for Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, where he spent 13 years. He later joined Microsoft–first at a lab started in Cambridge, England, and subsequently at a lab the software giant set up in Silicon Valley lab, where he remains.
Thacker’s chores in the 1990s included working on the company’s version of a tablet computer, which in those days was seen mainly as a device that could be used to take notes with a pen-style pointing device. After suffering a series of stumbles, Microsoft managed to work many of the bugs out of such devices–which now offer handwriting recognition in the range of 92% accuracy, Thacker estimates–and convinced computer makers to make and sell them. “I totally credit him with the resurrection of the tablet,” says Gordon Bell, another well-known computer researcher who started at DEC and now works for Microsoft.
But tablets have so far largely been confined to specialized business applications. “We saw nothing like the hockey-stick growth we thought would happen,” Thacker says. (He declines to express an opinion yet about Apple’s iPad. “I haven’t figured it out,” he says).
Thacker’s most celebrated contribution in recent years stems from economic and technological changes in the electronics industry. The phenomenon known as Moore’s Law, an oft-quoted aphorism for how quickly chip makers shrink their circuitry, is good for buyers of those products but causes problems for people who want to develop and test new computer designs.
Creating chips using the latest manufacturing process now can take years and millions of dollars. “It’s too expensive to build the kind of hardware we used to,” Thacker says.
But Moore’s Law simultaneously helped provide a solution. The trend has boosted the capability of chips known as FPGAs–field programmable gate arrays–which companies use as an alternative to designing chips from scratch for some kinds of applications.
Thacker was urged to exploit the technology by David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley (Thacker’s alma mater). Microsoft helped fund the development of what is called Bee3, for Berkeley Emulation Engine–which is essentially a circuit board with four FPGA chips that can be programmed to act like a parallel computer to allow students to develop and test computer designs. Thacker says 100 of the systems are in use at leading universities that work on hardware designs, and the technology is also being used by Microsoft research.
“His most recent project is one of his most significant,” says Patterson of Thacker. “He’s not a guy who has ever thought about retiring.”
The Turing award is named for Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computing pioneer who is credited with helping Allied forces crack the German Enigma code during World War II. One of the other notable aspects to Thacker winning the prize is the fact that he is a hardware specialist; since Maurice Wilkes won the award in 1967, recipients have primarily been known for achievements in software or other aspects of computing.
“I never expected to get this award,” Thacker says. “I was just flabbergasted.”
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Tony Wilson - " ... the day the music died ... "
6 MarManchester Digital Development Agency
Yes, I know the phrase is about someone else, but it sums up how I felt on Friday night after I heard about Tony’s death as the last item on the BBC 10pm National News. It’s also kick-started this blog again. I was going to start it again in September when we are launching the new MDDA website but this is as good a time as any.
I first met Tony in 1981 when I was part of the local organising committee for the People’s March for Jobs and Tony got us a slot on So It Goes (just for the record, now I've realised that this finished years before 1981, it must have been some what's on/music slot on Granada Reports) as we had a local folk band, the Houghton Weavers, who’d written a song to celebrate the march. Nearly ten years later and I was working for the Economic Development Department at Manchester City Council and we were trying to influence the Cable TV companies who were bidding for licenses to start laying cable across Manchester. In those pre-Internet days it seemed like this might be a way to create some form of ‘information super-highway’ but outside of the entertainment industry this was seen by the private sector, who wanted the City Council to invest in it, as a technology for the elite, for super business parks. Manchester would be “dead” unless it gave millions to subsidise these developments and develop it’s own “teleport” (no, not the Star Trek kind, but just about as expensive). Who was our big ally at that time? It was Tony, denouncing their narrow thinking and supporting the City Council in wanting something more inclusive, a ‘super-highway’ that everyone could access.
As we developed the Manchester Host with Poptel and the Internet started to open up Tony was always there to support us and to join in the creative thinking about where all this should and could go. We worked closely with Tony and Yvette in launching the first ‘In The City’, including giving them a grant from our technology fund to kick-off even more thinking about music and the digital world. The led on to ‘Interactive City’ as part of ‘In The City’ and to Tony’s support for the “Big Chip” Awards in the early days and for the founding of Manchester Digital.
The greatest collaboration was around Tony’s determination that Manchester should be properly recognised for the invention of the first ‘real’ computer, in June 1948 at Manchester University, known as ‘The Baby’ - the first computer with a stored program. He always said that anywhere else in the world there would be a whole visitor centre dedicated to this but here it’s simply a small blue plaque in an obscure part of the university. His original idea was for a “Festival of the Universal Machine” to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this great invention in June 1998. He also helped to get Alan Turing’s work in Manchester recognised and, although quite separate from the 1948 invention, this raised the profile and helped get everyone together with the University’s own ‘Computer 50’ and our own ‘Digital Summer’ celebrations in the summer of 1998.
Since then Tony has been banging on relentlessly, as only he can/could, about why can’t we have fibre into every building in the city? Just like every factory used to have its own railway line. This started with his IR2 – ‘Industrial Revolution 2’ – events a few years back and only a few weeks ago he was in the MDDA’s office with Yvette looking at what we are doing with URBIS and Clicks and Links on Second Life and having the same conversation. In spite of his illness he came along to MC this year’s Big Chip Awards and all of the fire was still there. We talked about the ‘fibre everywhere’ project again and we were planning to film Tony, working with his long-standing collaborators, The Boot Room, while we drove him round the city talking about his “Digital Trail” from the past into the future. That is just one small contribution that he would have been making to the future of this city which will be sadly missed.
I too loved the music, joined the Hacienda as soon as it opened (I think I was member number 144) and loved the idea that “the Hacienda must be built” (youngsters please look up ‘the situationists’ on Wikipedia). My most enduring memories of Tony will, however, be his ideas, sometimes crazy, always different and often inspirational, and the real commitment he had to this city, to the people he supported and to the utopian idealism that is so sadly lacking today and so very much needed. He’s probably the only other person that I think the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” should be dedicated to. I just want to say thank you for the laughs, the ideas and the support that you gave to me and to what we are trying to do here. May the great anarcho-syndicalist in the sky smile upon you across the endless sea of space and time.
Dave Carter. Levenshulme. Sunday August 12th.
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Sign up for your free account nowThis week's news on Alan Turing.
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Microsoft researcher, a computing pioneer, wins Turing Award
10 MariStockAnalyst.com - News
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Today in Sport – as it happened
10 Marwww.guardian.co.uk
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Pistol fired on Olympic honour campaign for Turing
10 MarThe Register
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An Olympic honour for Alan Turing | John Graham-Cumming
10 Marwww.guardian.co.uk - science
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Ethernet co-inventor wins $250,000 Turing Award
10 MarGeek.com
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Charles Thacker, Turing Award Winner, Recognized For Work On First Modern PC
9 MarThe Huffington Post
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Computing Prize Winner Did Not Rest On His Laurels
9 MarWSJ.com - Digits
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Tony Wilson - " ... the day the music died ... "
6 MarManchester Digital Development Agency
