“New faculty members are the future of the School”
Martin Vetterli, James Larus, Rüdiger Urbanke © 2023 EPFL / Alain Herzog - CC-BY-SA 4.0
After a lifetime of research that has included eight years as Dean of EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC), Professor James Larus has delivered his Honorary Lecture, marking his retirement from EPFL.
In 2013, on his first day at EPFL, James Larus recalls walking across the Diagonale wondering “What did I get myself into”? A lot, as it turns out! And, last night, hundreds of colleagues, students and special guests gathered at the Rolex Center to hear some of his reflections on a lifetime of contributions to computing.
Larus studied computer science at Harvard and then completed a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. After becoming a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, he went on to work at Microsoft, where he is most proud of his work on the Singularity Project, a new operating system constructed in safe, high-level programming languages, as well as building a hardware accelerator for the Bing search engine.
As Dean of the IC School, as well as head of the Very Large Scale Computing Laboratory, Larus has overseen education, research and technology transfer in a field that is continually evolving at lightning speed and has been described as ‘the most influential in the last 50 years’.
“My overriding memory, which grew on me gradually, is what an exceptional place EPFL and IC are; not only the location but also the people and the extraordinary level of support that the Swiss provide for the ETH domain. No other universities in Europe or the US can match this combination,” Larus reflected.
At EPFL he is most proud of hiring many great new faculty members. “They are the future of the school,” he says, “they have already greatly improved education and are having a large impact with their research and service.”
Larus says it’s evident that universities don’t have the physical or financial resources to do research on the same scale as today’s tech giants, but that in academia there is the time to try to work out which way the future is going and think ahead three, five, ten years to try to come up with solutions to hard problems. So what does Larus’ crystal ball tell him is around the corner?
“Completely predictable is that a key area of focus in computer science in the coming decade will be artificial intelligence and machine learning. I could also see improved security and reliability of software as another research priority and my wild guess would be biologically inspired and based computing.”
And Larus’ takeaway advice for students and young researchers coming through the ranks? “Collaborators matter, luck is sometimes better than brains, never take a job without a goal and always do new things!”
So what new things will Larus be enjoying in his retirement? “I’ll be taking an extended vacation and doing some traveling but then I plan to look for a new job — 65 is far too young to retire!”
We wish Jim all the best as he embraces the new opportunities and challenges ahead.