Ruth Stalker-Firth

When Jurassic Park was on at the cinema, I remember laughing out loud with a couple of my computing mates when the young girl, Lex, looks at a computer screen and says: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.” At the time, UNIX didn’t have much in the way of a graphical-user interface (GUI), unless you wanted to write one yourself. And it definitely looked nothing like the screen she recognised. Nowadays, a quick look around the many Linux and UNIX distributions demonstrates that GUIs are everywhere. There are probably some as fancy as the screen she was looking at before she got the Jurassic system up and running again to save them all from being eaten by dinosaurs.

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In the 1990s, Erich Gamma changed the way I thought about software engineering forever! Gamma visited the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where I was a PhD student, in order to give a seminar on design patterns.

The idea of extracting a solution template from a piece of software to turn it into a pattern which can be reused, was to me, an exciting step forward in software engineering. Instead of reusing software from a library that needs to be maintained and ported as necessary, abstracting the solution and creating a pattern repository gives software engineers a toolbox of meta-level solutions.

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In 1996, I listened to Lofty Zadeh, the daddy of fuzzy logic, give his keynote speech at the ‘Artificial Intelligence in Design’ conference, Stanford University. He described the excitment of artificial intelligence in the 1950s and how Marvin Minsky, father of frames, told a press conference that 50 years on, computers would read and understand Shakespeare. When Zadeh asked Minsky what possessed him make such a claim, Minsky said that he didn’t know, he had just gotten carried away.

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Car use in the UK has risen an astonishing 70% in the last two decades and will apparently continue to rise, causing no end of headaches for structural engineers. When they design bridges, engineers need to anticipate factors such as current and future traffic on the bridge at any given time. (more…)