Simons Foundation Funds Major Computing Institute at UC Berkeley

I was delighted to read in The New York Times that the University of California Berkeley has been selected as the home of a new Computing Institute to be headed by Richard Karp with support from  Christos Papadimitrou. Papadimitrou, you may recall, is credited for the term "price of anarchy,"  which I have written about in some of my work, including in  the Fragile Networks book co-authored with Qiang "Patrick" Qiang.

The Institute is being funded by the Simons Foundation.

The Simons Foundation was established by James Simons, who had been a faculty member at SUNY Stony Brook in Math (I had an offer from the department when I was on the job market finishing up my PhD at Brown University) and then went on to establish and lead the very successful hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. He is now one of the wealthiest people in the world but doesn't just sit on his gold.

I have written about the good work that his foundation has been doing in supporting research and education on this blog.

It is thrilling to see that this institute will be focusing on computing and will support research and applications in algorithmics and computational thinking that are now permeating so many disciplines.

I wish UC Berkeley lots of success in bringing disciplines together and in making discoveries through analyzing big data. I appreciated also seeing massively parallel architectures noted in the Times article and seeing Jeannette Wing quoted.  Yes, there are females that love to compute and to solve problems.