Queue Portrait: Robert Watson

Queue Portraits

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George Neville-Neil, Queue's Kode Vicious, interviews Robert to learn about an exciting computer science research project at Cambridge.

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Robert Watson is a security researcher and open source developer at the University of Cambridge looking at the hardware-software interface. He talks to us about spanning industry and academia, the importance of open source in software research, and challenges facing research that spans traditional boundaries in computer science. We also learn a bit about CPU security, and why applications, rather than operating systems, are increasingly the focus of security research. What are the challenges in the evolving hardware-software interface? Could open source hardware provide a platform for hardware-software research? And why is current hardware part of the problem? George Neville-Neil, Queue's Kode Vicious, interviews Robert to learn about an exciting computer science research project at Cambridge.

Comments

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Robert W. McCall | Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:36:32 UTC

Thanks for the excellent interview with an interesting, cutting-edge researcher. My one gripe is that the questions are posed in text only within the video, ie: not read aloud. I understand that the idea is to keep the focus on Mr. Watson, but it prevents an audio-only consumption which should be possible given the fact that the video component is strictly portrait-based.


Rishiyur Nikhil | Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:51:07 UTC

Excellent video. For too long, there has been an almost complete cultural divide between hardware designers and software engineers. I hope this interview helps to eliminate this wholly unnecessary gap, and move us towards a more organic "whole system" view of computation and security.


Peter G. Neumann | Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:33:13 UTC

This is a marvelous interview. Very insightful and far-sighted. This really brings home the importance of understanding hardware, software, programming languages, system engineering, networking, security, reliability, and so many other aspects of computer research and development. It should be seen by every ACM member and others as well.


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