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DOI: 10.1145/1866739.1866763
Dennis;McCafferty

Q&a
a Journey of Discovery
Ed Lazowska discusses his heady undergraduate days
at Brown University, teaching, eScience, and being chair
of the Computing Community Consortium.

aS aN UNDeRGRaDUate student at Brown University, Ed Lazowska hardly seemed destined to become a leader in computer science. Actually, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He started as an engineering student, switched to physics, and briefly considered chemistry. Essentially, he was “adrift.” (His description, not ours.)

It wasn’t until he fell under the tutelage of computer science professor Andy van Dam that he discovered what really excited him: the process of discovery.

“We had access to an IBM 360
mainframe that occupied an entire
building,” Lazowska recalls. “Despite
its size, it had only a couple hundred
megabytes of disk storage and 512 ki-
lobytes of memory. Today, your typical
smartphone will have 1,000 times the
processing power and storage of this
machine. During the day, it supported
the entire campus. But between mid-
night and 8 a.m., we were allowed to
use it as a personal computer. We were
building a ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-
get’ hypertext editor—Microsoft Word
plus the Web, minus networking. It
was revolutionary.”
Four decades later, Lazowska is ded-
icated to making the same transforma-
tional impact on countless computer
science students. After graduating
from Brown in 1972, he received his
Ph.D. from the University of Toronto
in 1977, and joined the University of
Washington faculty, focusing on the
design, implementation, and analy-
sis of high-performance computing
and communication systems. Today,

Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he served as department chair from 1993 to 2001. He also directs the university’s eScience Institute and chairs the Computing Community Consortium, a National Science Foundation initiative that seeks to inspire computer scientists to tackle the societal challenges of the 21st century.

how invigorating were those early days
at Brown under van Dam?

It was an amazing time. He had a
crew of 20 undergraduates who were
his research assistants. Typically, re-
search assistants were graduate stu-
dents, but Brown had few computer
science graduate students at the time.
Andy was asking us to join him in dis-
covery—to figure out how to do things
that no one had done before. Up to
that time, including my freshman year
at Brown, I had been learning things
that people already knew. It blew my
mind that Andy was asking 19- and
20-year-olds to find answers to ques-
tions that he himself didn’t know.
People rise to the expectations and
challenges that are set for them. Andy
understood this.