Brief: Gillies lectures set for today, Friday

Butler Lampson, a senior corporate consulting engineer for Digital
Equipment Corp. will give the annual Donald B. Gillies lectures at the UI.

Lampson's lectures, free and open to the public, will take place in
1320 Digital Computer Laboratory.

"Putting Telecommunications on the Technology Curve," Lampson's first
lecture, is scheduled for 8 p.m. today. It will explore the time lag
between telecommunications innovations in the laboratory and their eventual
commercial development, and what can be done to speed the transition.

In his second lecture, at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Lampson will speak on
"Interconnecting Computers: Architecture, Technology and Economics." The
talk will concern the structure of computer systems that hierarchically
connect layers of processor and storage elements to form larger units.  He
also will discuss how different levels of the hierarchy interact on the
basis of such factors as cost, availability, connectivity and bandwidth.

Lampson, a designer of computer technology, is a member of the National
Academy of Engineering. In 1992, he received the Turing Award, the
Association for Computing Machinery's highest honor.

The Gillies lectureship was established as a memorial to former computer
science professor Donald B. Gillies who taught at the UI for 19 years; he
died in 1975. The next year, the UI Foundation endowed the lectureship and
a major contribution was made to it by Digital Equipment Corp.