Green Computing 2015

The fourth Winton Symposium was held at the Cavendish Laboratory on September 28, 2015.  This year's theme was “Green Computing” covering topics ranging from new materials and architectures for low power consumption computing, to computer-based applications which can benefit our environment.

Session I

The opening speaker for the Symposium was Dr Mike Lynch, founder of Invoke Capital and Autonomy.Autonomy now part of HP is a global leader in software that processes human information or unstructured data. His talk was titled "The green light for new compute: What will we need all that compute for?"

Professor Andy Hopper, Head of Department, The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, discussed how to harness the power of computing technology to generate a better understanding of the Earth and its environment. His talk "Computing for the future of the planet" wcovered the consumption of energy by computing and balanced this with the numerous benefits that can be achieved.

Link to presentation "Computing for the future of the planet"

Session II

Dr Krisztián Flautner, former VP of R&D at ARM who now leads ARM's Internet of Things Business Unit, focused on the challenges and opportunities and the current sate of play in various segments of the Internet of Things in his talk, "From Ubiquitous computing to the Internet of Things and beyond".  ARM  designs scalable, energy efficient-processors and was voted in 2014 by Forbes as the third most innovative company in the world. The company is also one of Cambridge's most successful and has shipped over 60 billion ARM-based chips, with ARM technology in use in 95% of smart phones.

Professor Luca Cardelli, Microsoft Research and University of Oxford, gave a talk on "Molecular Programming".  He discussed how encoded information in DNA can determine their physical properties and explore the possibilities of using DNA for new computing architectures.

Link to presentation "Molecular Programming"

Session III

"New Materials and Approaches for Advanced Electrochemical Energy Storage" was the title of the talk by Professor Linda Nazar, Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo.  She has being named an Officer of the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest civilian honours, for her work on advanced battery systems for clean-energy storage.

Professor Hideo Ohno, Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, is one of the founders of the field of Spintronics, where device functionality exploits the electron spin degree of freedom.  His talk 'Nonvolatile VLSI made possible by Spintronics" described prospects of devices based on spin with very low power consumption.