Are Computers Just Simple Machines? Dogmas, Fallacies, Pitfalls
We all are users of computers – from smartphones to tablets and towards laptops and desktop computers. These complex electronic machines actually determine our means of life and even our very own future. For a layman, these computing machines do the magic which is absolutely beyond common understanding. On the contrary, how a combustion engine works along with other parts of the car is widely understood. This lecture starts from the foundation of what computing means and how a processor performs such computing while briefly covering different domains related to processing. We will also be explaining the role of compilers and operating systems. In overall, we will highlight certain misconceptions among general public, for example, is software really untouchable contrary to a hardware or it is merely flow of electrons on a processor?
About the speaker
Dr. Waqar Hussain is currently working as Senior Research and Development Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor, Trondheim, Norway.
Previously, he worked as a Principal Researcher at ARM, Norway. In academia, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Finland. he also worked as Visiting Scientist at the Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago and at RWTH, Aachen, Germany. His research interests include design and development of homogeneous and heterogeneous multicore and manycore systems that are specialized for application specific, reconfigurable and general-purpose processing.
He is the technical program committee member for several high-level conferences including Design and Automation Conference (DAC), USA, International Symposium on Applied Recongurable Computing, International Symposium on System-on-Chip, International Conference on ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs, NORCHIP and International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). He has also been reviewing articles of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transaction on Industrial Electronics and Elseviers Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.