Jewish High Tech Community

In the movie "Groundhog Day", the protagonist (Bill Murray) keeps living the same day over and over again until he gets it right. So it is with the computer industry. In my forty years as a computer scientist, at three startups, and several large well known corporations and universities, I and many of my colleagues have worked on the same general problems over and over again. We often get it right locally, but the same problems keep coming up. In this non-technical talk I'll describe several of these problems and my never-ending quest to solve them. We'll take a look at topics like: computer science theory, programming methodology, programming languages, operating systems, parallel processing, and mobile networking. I'll describe what my contributions were from a historical context, and why these problems recur.

About the Speaker

Ike Nassi is an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at SAP. He and his group explore advanced new enterprise technologies and applications for use in multinational corporate environments. He started SAP's Global Business Incubator, whose goal is to start up new businesses within SAP, and is modelled after the venture capital industry.

He also started the SAP Sponsored Academic Research Program. From September 2009 through January 2010 he was in residence as a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to joining SAP, he founded Firetide Inc, a wireless mesh networking company based in Los Gatos, California. At Firetide he served as Executive Vice President and CTO, and was a Chairman of Firetide's Board of Directors. He is now a senior advisor to the company.

Dr. Nassi has also been an industry consultant and entrepreneur specializing in computer and networking technology and products. His consulting assignments have been with several startup companies, startup divisions within established companies, and venture capital firms.