Cambridge Computer Lab
The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 155 research students. The current Head of Department is Professor Ann Copestake. History The Department was founded as the Mathematical Laboratory under the leadership of John Lennard-Jones on 14 May 1937, though it did not get properly established until after World War II. The new laboratory was housed in the North Wing of the former Anatomy School, on the New Museums Site. Upon its foundation, it was intended "to provide a computing service for general use, and to be a centre for the development of computational techniques in the University". The Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science was the world's first postgraduate taught course in computing, starting in 1953. In October 1946, work began under Maurice Wilkes on EDSAC (''Electronic D ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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William Gates Building, Cambridge
The William Gates Building, or WGB, is a square building that houses the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, on the University's West Cambridge site in JJ Thomson Avenue south of the Madingley Road in Cambridge, England. Construction on the building began in 1999 and was completed in 2001 at a cost of £20 million. Opened by Maurice Wilkes, it was named after William H. Gates Sr., the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided 50% of the money for the building's construction. Building features The building has the following features: * The glass wall in the "fishbowl," a communal seating area in the building, is decorated with a paper-tape representation of the original EDSAC "Initial Orders" (boot program) written by David Wheeler and of a program written by Maurice Wilkes in 1949 to compute squares * The building's main thoroughfare, called "The Street", has tiles that match the binary, UTF-8 representation of 'Com ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Titan (1963 Computer)
Titan was the prototype of the Atlas 2 computer developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge, England. It was designed starting in 1963, and in operation from 1964 to 1973. History In 1961, the University of Cambridge found itself unable to fund a suitably powerful computer for its needs at the time, so the University purchased from Ferranti the main Atlas processing units and then jointly designed the memory and peripheral equipment. The joint effort led to a cheaper and simpler version of the Atlas that Ferranti could market, leaving Cambridge with the prototype version, named Titan. The Atlas hardware arrived in Cambridge in 1963, although software design was already underway. David Wheeler was in charge of the joint effort between the University and Ferranti. In 1965 the Cambridge side of the team decided to add a time-sharing facility for Titan, necessitating the acquisition of additional hardware. When Titan came into full se ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves. Challenges in natural language processing frequently involve speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation. History Natural language processing has its roots in the 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Computer Architecture
In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. History The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine. When building the computer Z1 in 1936, Konrad Zuse described in two patent applications for his future projects that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data, i.e., the stored-program concept. Two other early and important examples are: * John von Neumann's 1945 paper, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which described an organization of logical elements; and *Alan Turing's more detailed ''Proposed Electronic Calculator'' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Formal Semantics Of Programming Languages
In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax. Semantics describes the processes a computer follows when executing a program in that specific language. This can be shown by describing the relationship between the input and output of a program, or an explanation of how the program will be executed on a certain platform, hence creating a model of computation. History In 1967, Robert W. Floyd publishes the paper ''Assigning meanings to programs''; his chief aim is "a rigorous standard for proofs about computer programs, including proofs of correctness, equivalence, and termination". Floyd further writes: A semantic definition of a programming language, in our approach, is founded on a syntactic definition. It must specify which of the phrases in a syntactically correct program represent commands, and what conditions ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Formal Verification
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code. The verification of these systems is done by providing a formal proof on an abstract mathematical model of the system, the correspondence between the mathematical model and the nature of the system being otherwise known by construction. Examples of mathematical objects often used to model systems are: finite-state machines, labelled transition systems, Petri nets, vector addition systems, timed automata, hybrid automata, process algebra, formal semantics of programming languages such as operational semantics, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Usability
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, vehicle, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a ''usability analyst'' or as a secondary job function by designers, technical writers, marketing personnel, and others. It is widely used in consumer electronics, communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help) and mechanical objects such as a door handle or a hammer. Usability includes methods of measuring usability, such as needs analysis and t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Information Security
Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized/inappropriate access to data, or the unlawful use, disclosure, disruption, deletion, corruption, modification, inspection, recording, or devaluation of information. It also involves actions intended to reduce the adverse impacts of such incidents. Protected information may take any form, e.g. electronic or physical, tangible (e.g. paperwork) or intangible (e.g. knowledge). Information security's primary focus is the balanced protection of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data (also known as the CIA triad) while maintaining a focus on efficient policy implementation, all without hampering organization productivity. This is largely achieved through a structured risk management process that involves: * identifying inform ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Platform Virtualization
Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, presenting instead an abstract computing platform. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time. Concept The term "virtualization" was coined in the 1960s to refer to a virtual machine (sometimes called "pseudo machine"), a term which itself dates from the experimental IBM M44/44X system. The creation and management of virtual machines has been called "platform virtualization", or "server virtualization", more recently. Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by ''host'' software (a ''control program''), which creates a simula ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cambridge University Reporter
The ''Cambridge University Reporter'', founded in 1870, is the official journal of record of the University of Cambridge, England. Overview The ''Cambridge University Reporter'' appears within the University and online every Wednesday during Full Term, carrying notices of all University business. This includes announcements of University events, proposals for changes in regulations, Council and General Board decisions, as well as information on awards, scholarships and appointments (both at Cambridge and other universities). The weekly numbers are supplemented by special numbers, which contain additional information of use or information to members of the University, but not included in the weekly editions. These special numbers include the Lecture List, published at the start of the Michaelmas term and giving details of all the year's lectures; the Awards issue, which comes out in early November, and gives details of all available awards and grants; and the Class-Lists, pub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cambridge Ring (computer Network)
The Cambridge Ring was an experimental local area network architecture developed at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge starting in 1974 and continuing into the 1980s. It was a ring network with a theoretical limit of 255 nodes (though such a large number would have badly affected performance), around which cycled a fixed number of packets. Free packets would be "loaded" with data by a machine wishing to send, marked as received by the destination machine, and "unloaded" on return to the sender; thus in principle, there could be as many simultaneous senders as packets. The network ran over twin twisted-pair cabling (plus a fibre-optic section). There are strong similarities between the Cambridge Ring and an earlier ring network developed at Bell Labs based on a design by John R. Pierce. That network used T1 lines at bit rate of 1.544 MHz and accommodating 522 bit messages (data plus address). People associated with the project include Andy Hopper, David Wheeler, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cambridge Computer Lab Ring
The Cambridge Computer Lab Ring is a members' association for staff and graduates of the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. It was formed in 2002 as a non-profit, independent and voluntary members’ association, but was absorbed into the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory in 2012. It was named by Maurice Wilkes. The association was mentioned by Richard Lambert in the Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration as an example of how "universities, departments and faculties should develop their alumni networks in order to build closer relationships with their graduates working in the business community." Hall of Fame The association claims that, as of January 2018, there are 267 companies created by computer lab graduates and staff. A 'Company of the Year' is chosen from this list annually. * 2005 Sophos * 2006 Codian * 2007 Jagex * 2008 Xensource * 2009 Linguamatics * 2010 Ubisense * 2011 RealVNC * 2012 Trampoline Systems * 2013 Raspberry Pi * 2014 DeepMi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |