Abstract:

There will be no lecture today.  I prefer to deal with the issues the audience wishes to deal with.  I do care passionately about education and also have more than casual interest in microarchitecture and some issues that are neither about education nor microarchitecture.  Ergo, the following bullets.  We can talk about any of them, or about something totally different, if you prefer.  If I am clueless about your question, I am not ashamed to say I don't know;

•  The Correct way to introduce freshmen to computing.
• My Ten Commandments of Good Teaching.
• The best way to prepare CS and ECE students for AFTER graduation.
• The Microprocessor ten years from now.
• What will computers be able to do in 20 years?
• Programming, and why Objects too early can be harmful.
• Should football players be required to take courses.
• Should computer scientists have to study humanities.
• Four years of college: Is anything worth learning?
• How to get a job after graduation, ...and how to keep it.
• Is writing necessary in an engineering education.
• Computer Architecture, often considered dead, is alive and well.
• What is the defining document of the United States of America
• Political correctness can have counterproductive consequences.
• Real affirmative action requires more than lip service.

 Bio:

Yale Patt is a teacher at The University of Texas at Austin.  He is also the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Distinguished University Teaching Professor at UT.  He has done fundamental research in microarchitecture, producing (with his students) among other things the HPS paradigm, the Two-level Branch Predictor, creative mechanisms for dealing with the memory wall, and Wish Branches. He has been advocating heterogeneous multiprocessors since 2002, amply sprinkled with "refrigerators."  More importantly, he gets to teach the freshman course in computing to 400 freshmen at UT every other Fall using the book he wrote with Professor Sanjay Patel of UIUC.  He also has had an extensive consulting practice working with microprocessor manufacturers.  He has received a number of awards for his research and teaching, most notably the 1996 ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award and the 2000 ACM Karl V.  Karlstrom Award.  He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and ACM.  His most important claim to fame, however, is that he is the PhD advisor of Hyesoon Kim and Moinuddin Qureshi and the PhD advisor of the PhD advisor of Tom Conte.  More detail can be found on his website: www.ece.utexas.edu/~patt.