Dr. J. Gregory Morrisett
Wednesday, March 30,
Pickle Lounge,
Colket Center, Roanoke College, 7pm
When you install a piece of software, such as a video game or a device driver for a new camera, how can you ensure that the code won't do something bad, such as installing a key-stroke
Videos
Boston Museum of Science/NECN
Check out the videocast about
our research!
Background on Micro Air Vehicles
An excellent
introduction to
how the military is using micro air vehicle technology for
surveillance and other battlefield applications.
Insect-Inspired Robots in Action
Overview by BAE Systems (who
has sponsored research by PI Robert Wood) on some of the future,
practical possibilities for insect-inspired robots
Thursday, March 31, 2011
7 pm
VAC Auditorium
Honey bees are responsible for pollinating about 1/3rd of
the crops that we eat. Yet, bees are also dying at an
alarming rate due to a mysterious syndrome known as "colony
collapse disorder". If the bees disappear, what will
we do?
The goal of the NSF-funded Harvard RoboBees project is to
investigate whether it's possible to build an artificial
hive of bees that can pollinate crops. In addition to
pollination, we believe that coordinated swarms of flying,
micro-robotic insects will have many other applications,
from environmental monitoring to search-and-rescue.
But the challenges in realizing an artificial hive are
tremendous, and to address them, our researchers include a
mix of mechanical, materials, and electrical engineers,
Together,we're addressing hard problems from fabricating the
bees, to controlling them during flight, to coordinating
their collective action.
Presented by
Greg Morrisett
received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from
the University of Richmond in 1989, and his Ph.D. from
Carnegie Mellon in 1995. He served on the faculty of
Computer Science at Cornell from 1996-2003. In 2004, he
moved to Harvard as the Allen B. Cutting Professor of
Computer Science, and assumed the position of Associate Dean
for Computer Science and Engineering from September of 2007
to July of 2010.
Morrisett's research has focused on the programming language
design and implementation, as well as software security.
He is best known for his work on developing type systems
that guarantee strong safety and security properties for
low-level languages, including typed intermediate compiler
languages, typed assembly language, and Cyclone, a type-safe
dialect of C.
Morrisett has received a number of awards for his research on programming languages, type systems, and software security, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an NSF Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He served as Chief Editor for the Journal of Functional Programming, and as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and for Information Processing Letters. Morrisett currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Council, the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group, and Microsoft's Trusthworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board.