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Modeling
Systems: Understanding the Internet
Allen B. Downey,
Ph.D., Associate Professor of Computer Science, Franklin
W. Olin College
of Engineering
Presentation
Description:
The Internet is an engineered
artifact, so it is natural to interpret its design in terms of goals and
constraints, problems and solutions. At the same time, the Internet has grown
over time in ways that were unplanned, producing effects that were
unforeseen. To understand these
effects, we have to approach the Internet as a found object, using the tools
of the empirical sciences. In this talk, I will explore these complementary
approaches first by analyzing the layers of abstraction that underlie current
networks and then by presenting recent discoveries of emergent properties in
the Internet.
About the
Speaker:
Before coming to
Olin, Dr. Allen Downey taught at Colby
College
and Wellesley
College,
and held research positions at the San
Diego Supercomputer
Center
and Boston
University.
He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
California/Berkeley in 1997, with a dissertation on operating system support
for large-scale parallel computation. His undergraduate and master's degrees
are from MIT, in civil engineering.
Dr. Downey is the author of several textbooks, including three versions of
"How to Think Like a Computer Scientist," an introduction to
computer science using Java, C++, or Python. These books are available under
the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that teachers are free to
copy and modify the text as well as contribute material. In 2001, Dr. Downey
founded Green Tea Press to print and distribute free textbooks.
Dr. Downey has enjoyed teaching since his first year of graduate school, and
is active with the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
(SIGCSE). He has developed novel classes in operating systems and scientific
computation. Dr. Downey believes that engineering and computer science are a
valuable part of a broad, liberal education, and that the thinking skills
students develop at Olin are ideal preparation for the 21st century.
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