Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was “The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints”. He spent many years as a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs’ for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, and a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest was software development tools. He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun’s Developer Products Group and the CTO of Sun’s Client Software Group. He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun. After a year off, he spent some time at Google and is now the chief software architect at Liquid Robotics where he spends his time writing software for the Waveglider, an autonomous ocean-going robot.

Abstract: In this talk, James Gosling–CMU alumnus, inventor of Java, and noted software expert–will talk about his recent work with ocean-going and driving robots, especially from his unique software perspective. His recent work centers on the use of these robots, which are self-sustaining for long periods, for collection of data about the ocean and the atmosphere above. James will show some videos (some live), and encourage discussion and questions