Title: How Computing Helped us Win the Cold War

Behind the supreme military might of the USA is its supreme computational power. This talk tells three stories from the cold war era that highlights this point. When the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, how did two US scientists figure out its orbit and pinpoint its location? How did a theoretical paper published by a Soviet scientist help Lockheed build the first modern stealth aircraft F-117 Nighthawk? Why was the Soviet Mars program plagued by reliability problems?

About The Speaker

Lin Zhong is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) with Rice University. He received his B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been with Rice University since September 2005. At Rice, he leads the Efficient Computing Group to make computing, communication, and interfacing more efficient and effective. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI, IEEE PerCom, and ACM MobiSys (3), and ACM ASPLOS. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Duncan Award from Rice University, and the RockStar Award from ACM SIGMOBILE. He is a Fellow of IEEE. More information about his research can be found at https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~mobile/.