Barbara Liskov (MIT) - Finding the Great Problems

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Barbara Liskov was already breaking new ground in 1968, when she became one of the first American women to earn a doctorate in the emerging discipline of computer science. After receiving that PhD at Stanford, she went on to design several influential programming languages, including CLU, an important precursor to Java. More recently, as an Institute Professor at MIT and head of the institute’s Programming Methodology Group, she has undertaken crucial research on distributed systems, information security and complex system failure issues. She is one of fewer than 100 individuals to receive an A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery. In a conversation with host Ann Miura-Ko, a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and founding partner of the venture capital firm Floodgate, Liskov explores how she discovered the nascent field of computer science, how she recognized and surmounted a number of fundamental computing challenges, and shares her concerns and hopes about how computing will continue to transform our lives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner.
0:13.0	On this episode, we're joined by Barbara Liskoff,
0:16.0	Institute professor at MIT's Computer Science
0:19.0	and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Ann
0:21.4	Miracow, Stanford Lecturer and a founding partner at Floodgate. Barbara was one of the first
0:26.2	American women to earn a doctorate in computer science and is one of fewer than a hundred
0:31.3	individuals to receive the prestigious Turing Award. In 2019, she was recognized as a Stanford engineering hero for the profound
0:40.1	impact she has had on the world through her work. We have a lot of young people here today,
0:47.0	and I was fascinated by the fact that you grew up in the Bay Area. You grew up in San Francisco,
0:53.7	went to UC Berkeley, went away for a little bit, came back to Stanford.
0:58.6	So we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story.
1:03.5	Okay, well, as you said, I grew up right in San Francisco. It's a very different place now that it was then.
1:09.9	And I was always interested in math and science, even though at that time, even more so than
1:16.0	today, it was not considered the thing that women should be doing.
1:20.2	But I persevered, and I went to Berkeley, and I majored in math.
1:24.4	Were there early influences that pushed you along that?
1:28.3	You know, I don't think so.
1:29.3	I think that my parents, my mother was a housewife, my father was a lawyer.
1:35.1	They had no particular reason to push me toward engineering and so forth.
1:41.8	But they were certainly encouraging.
	...

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