Symposium

The proceedings are available here.

Photos are available on the Reception page.

The Edward A. Lee Festschrift Symposium was held on Friday October 13, 2017 in Berkeley, California at the Berkeley City Club. This day-long symposium was to celebrate the scholarship and teaching of Edward A. Lee, the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

The theme of the symposium is "Principles of Modeling," because Edward has long been devoted to research that centers on the role of models and is a fervent advocate of a principled use of models in science and engineering. Edward is interested in the use and limitations of models, their formal properties, their role in cognition and interplay with creativity, and, finally, their relationship with reality and physics. He warns not to "confuse the map with the territory" and cautions that "all models are wrong," but identifies tremendous value in the use of models, given that they provide meaningful abstractions. He also emphasizes that, for engineers, modeling is a "two-way street," as they can, unlike scientists, manipulate both the model and the thing being modeled. Edward's research covers a broad range of topics, among which are: determinism, time, concurrency, cyber-physical systems, and signal processing.

The symposium is dedicated to Edward's lifelong ideas and influences, and some of Edward's closest collaborators and most prominent colleagues delivered talks during the event. They were also invited to contribute a paper to a so-called Festschrift, which have been published by Springer in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (available here). The term "Festschrift" is borrowed from German, and could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory (piece of) writing (literally 'party-writing'; cognate with 'feast-script'). Sometimes, the Latin term liber amicorum (literally: "book of friends") is used for a Festschrift (Wikipedia).

The program is available here.

This special one-time event replaced the Ptolemy Miniconference that was originally scheduled to take place this year on October 13.

Acknowledgements

Organizers

This event was organized by Patricia Derler, Marten Lohstroh, and Marjan Sirjani with support from Christopher Brooks and Mary Stewart.

Publisher

We thank Springer for publishing the contributed essays in their special "Festschrift" LNCS series and making them electronically available via Springer Link.

Sponsors

We are grateful to Prabal Dutta, Edward A. Lee, Jan Rabaey, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, and Sanjit Seshia for sponsoring this event.

Volunteers

Thanks to Tommasso Dreossi, Jessica Gamble, Antonio Iannopollo, Gil Lederman, Mehrdad Niknami, Matt Weber, and Ben Zhang for their assistance during the event.

Dates

Friday, October 13, 2017
Symposium at the Berkeley City Club