Computer Science 39K, Section 1
Information Technology Goes to War! (2 units, P/NP)
Professor Randy H. Katz
Wednesday 4:00-6:00, 310 Soda Hall, CCN: 26254

Necessity drives invention. In this seminar, we will examine the intertwined historical development of information technology, broadly defined as computing, communications, and signal processing, in the twentieth century within the context of modern warfare and national defense. Topics include cryptography/cryptanalysis and the development of the computer; command and control systems and the development of the Internet; the war of attrition and the development of the mathematics of operations research; military communications and the development of the cellular telephone system; precision munitions and the development of the Global Positioning System. While we will endeavor to explain these developments in technical terms at a tutorial level, our main focus is to engage the students in the historical sweep of technical development and innovation as driven by national needs, and discuss whether this represents a continuing framework for the twenty-first century. This course requires NO background in information technology or computer science–ANY freshman or sophomore student at Berkeley has the necessary technical background. An interest in military affairs, economics, politics, history, and/or technology is essential. This is not a lecture class–class meetings are organized around live play where students form teams and interact with each other to illustrate the concepts to be discussed. A desire to participate and "play along" is important–no "wall flowers" please! This seminar may be used to satisfy the Historical Studies breadth requirement in Letters and Science.

Randy Howard Katz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983, where since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. He has published over 250 refereed technical papers, book chapters, and books. His textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions, and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. He has supervised 45 M.S. theses and 39 Ph.D. dissertations (including one ACM Dissertation Award winner and ten women). His recognitions include thirteeen best paper awards (including one "test of time" paper award and one selected for a 50 year retrospective on IEEE Communications publications), three best presentation awards, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the CS Division's Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration, the IEEE Reynolds Johnson Information Storage Award, the ASEE Frederic E. Terman Award, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the ACM Sigmobile Outstanding Contributor Award. In the late 1980s, with colleagues at Berkeley, he developed Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), a $15 billion per year industry sector. While on leave for government service in 1993-1994, he established whitehouse.gov and connected the White House to the Internet. His BARWAN Project of the mid-1990s introduced vertical handoffs and efficient transport protocols for mobile wireless networks. His current research interest is the architecture of Internet Datacenters, particularly frameworks for datacenter-scale instrumentation and resource management. Prior research interests have included: database management, VLSI CAD, high performance multiprocessor (Snoop cache coherency protocols) and storage (RAID) architectures, transport (Snoop TCP) and mobility protocols spanning heterogeneous wireless networks, and converged data and telephony network and service architectures. Website: http://www.cs.Berkeley.edu/~randy