Neil Gershenfeld Keynote Abstract Posted

As we have posted earlier, we are proud to have Neil Gershenfeld the Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT as one of our keynote speakers. The abstract for his keynote talk is now available at http://www.nanonets.org/keynote.shtml



TITLE: Programming Bits and Atoms

ABSTRACT: Software has served to isolate programs (and programmers) from knowledge of the underlying physical mechanisms used for computation. However, device scaling is leading to a limit in which the number of information-bearing degrees of freedom becomes comparable to the number of physical ones. At that point it will no longer be possible to distinguish between computer science and physical science, because they will be describing the same attributes. The density, velocity, and interaction of information is coupled by physical law; the same must be true of scalable models for computation and communications. I will explore the benefits of exposing rather than hiding the boundary between bits and atoms, including interdevice internetworking, conformal computing architectures, mathematical programming models, and digital fabrication processes.