Rice University computer science professor and RUCCAM member Robert “Corky” Cartwright was recently featured in a Computer Science Profile article on his gift for programming languages.
“The gap that programming languages fill,” he said, “is between a human’s understanding of what they want to compute – usually in some kind of mathematical model – and how to translate that description into code the device can execute.”
Cartwright’s current focus is energy efficiency. Like spoken languages, both syntax (structure) and semantics (meaning of the symbols, characters, and words) are critical. Cartwright is exploring ways to economize on the energy required to execute a command by changing the language used to write the command.
Read more in csprofiles.rice.edu.