Physics Colloquium by John Savage, Computer Science, Brown University on cybersecurity
Cyberspace—Taming the Wild West
John E. Savage
Department of Computer Science, Brown University
October 26, 2010 (Tuesday) at 3:30pm (Refreshments at 3:15pm)
SCI 107, Metcalf Science Center, Boston University
Cyberspace often looks like the Wild West. Hackers attack at will, take control of territory (botnets), and
generally act with impunity. Unfortunately, there is much more at risk in cyberspace than in a small Wild
West town. Important parts of our national infrastructure can be severely damaged and significant portions
of our national wealth can be stolen or degraded. In this talk I will give an overview of the problems
we face and highlight steps that can and have been taken to address them.
Dr. John E. Savage earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1965 specializing in coding and information
theory. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1965 and the faculty of the Division of Engineering at Brown
University in 1967. In 1979 he co-founded the Department of Computer Science at Brown and served as
its second chair from 1985 to 1991. By the early 1970s his research interests changed to theoretical computer
science. Today they include computational nanotechnology, cyber security, the performance of multicore
chips, and reliable computing with unreliable elements. He was awarded Fulbright-Hays Research
Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. He is a Fellow of AAAS and ACM and a Life Fellow of IEEE.
During the 2010 academic year he served in the U.S. State Department as a Jefferson Science Fellow.
Call: Winna Somers (wsomers@bu.edu) (617) 353-9320
Host: James Stone