Who are some of the eminent computer scientists invited to the conference?
Zhang: Every year the international conference on “Computing in the 21 st Century” invites top experts in computer-science research as well as eminent computer scientists from China and abroad to come and talk to China’s computer-science researchers, as well as to professors and students from China’s leading institutions. Since 1999, three Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award recipients (widely considered the computing world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), have attended, as well as several dozen famous scholars from China and abroad. Among these are Turing Award winners, Butler Lampson, Raj Reddy, and Jim Gray, laser-printer inventor Gary Starkweather and many other prominent scientists from the field of computer science, including American university professors Andy van Dam, Ed Lazowska, Richard Newton, Rick Rashid, who is senior vice president in charge of Microsoft Research’s worldwide operations, and Dan Ling, vice president of Microsoft Research. Attending the
