Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, University of California, Berkeley
Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Designing Distributed Systems of Electronics, Mechanical and
Biological Components
Thursday | November 24, 2011 | 17:00 | IST Campus Klosterneuburg | Raiffeisen Lecture Hall
Information technology moves rapidly to an increasingly decentralized and collaborative environment (the
Cloud) with rich interfaces to the physical world (the Internet of Things). In particular, it has been predicted
that by 2020 thousands of devices per person will be available. These devices will make it possible to
make the computing infrastructure invisible to humans and to support societal scale applications that are
unthinkable today.
However, even today, we are facing a number of severe challenges in designing applications that should
be monitored carefully with respect to security and privacy concerns.
Design of complex distributed system is essentially about connections:
Connection of concepts, Connection of objects, Connection of teams.
Products of the future will be connected across physical and virtual domains. Connections can produce
systems that offer more than the sum of the components but they can also lead to systems that are less
powerful than the sum of the components or that are so compromised by their interactions that they do not
work at all. And this situation is getting worse: a nightmare waiting to occur!
An efficient management of interactions among deployed parts of a larger system requires principles that
are common to the design methods developed at the bleeding edge of technology. I will examine the
evolution of design principles and of multiscale systems. I will point to a number of exciting fields such as
energy efficiency, synthetic biology, aircraft and cars where advances are constantly made towards the
mastering of distributed system design.
Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli holds the Buttner Chair of EECS, University of California, Berkeley. He cofounded Cadence and Synopsys. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Cadence, Sonics,
ExpertSystems and Accent, of the Science and Technology Advisory Board of GM, of the Technology
Advisory Council of UTC, and of the Executive Committee of Italian Institute of Technology. He received
the Kaufman Award for "pioneering contributions to EDA" and the IEEE/RSE Maxwell Medal "for
groundbreaking contributions that have had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and
electrical engineering or related fields". He is an author of over 880 papers, 15 books and 3 patents. He is
a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Please register for the lecture (and shuttle bus) by hitting the reply button or via email to
events@ist.ac.at
Free shuttle busses are provided to / from the campus:
Shuttle 1: 16.15 from U4 Heiligenstadt/ public bus stop
Shuttle 2: 16:00 from TU Vienna, Hotel Johann Strauss, 1040, Favoritenstrasse 12
Return from campus at 19:00 to point of origin for registered participants.
IST Lectures aim to introduce eminent researchers presenting their work to a scientific audience and to the
general public. All lectures are given in English. Refreshments are also served.