Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist at Sun Microsystems and one of the most influential people in the computer industry today, will present a public lecture at the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU-Boulder on Thursday, April 15.
The one-hour lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 2 p.m. in the Math 100 Auditorium, located at the intersection of Colorado Avenue and Folsom Street. A limited quantity of free visitor parking will be available in the Regent Drive Autopark, Lot 436, for those who obtain a flyer at the parking lot entrance to put on their dashboard.
Joy will present the inaugural lecture in the Mervyn Young Memorial Lecture Series on Computing Technology and Society. The lecture is co-sponsored by the department of computer science and the Herbst Program of Humanities in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.
"In a fast-changing field like computing there is never a shortage of questions about future directions," said Karl Winklmann, chair of the department of computer science. "We are very much looking forward to interacting with a person of Bill Joy's stature."
Since joining Sun in 1982, Joy, 44, has led the company's technical strategy, designing Sun's network file system and SPARC architecture. During the last two years, he has led design investigations for the architecture of UltraSparc IV and has driven the business and technical strategy for the Java programming language.
Recently, he led the team that developed Jini, a technology that enables just about any electronic device to be networked through the Internet. He is currently researching new architectures for human-computer interaction, involving new kinds of interfaces, system and application software architectures and ways of storing information.
Joy also co-chairs the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, which is focused on accelerating the development and adoption of information technologies that will be vital for American prosperity in the 21st century. The committee is calling for a doubling of the nation's investment in research on information technology.
"This is mainly an investment in the key asset of the information age -- trained people nurtured at universities," Joy told the New York Times. "It's a societal investment. What we need to create is a Silicon Continent, not just Silicon Valley."
Although Joy works for Sun Microsystems headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., he has lived in Aspen since 1991.
He plans to meet with faculty and administrators in the engineering college before and after the public lecture.
The College of Engineering and Applied Science has had a growing relationship with Sun Microsystems since the company moved its Enterprise Services division -- which provides support, consulting and education services -- to Broomfield, Colo., last year. Larry Hambly, president of Sun Enterprise Services, and Bill Richardson, vice president and general manager of Sun Educational Services, serve on the college's advisory boards.
Joy got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1975 and his master's in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982.