Professor David Hawking: Things I’ve learned in 50 Years of computing

ANU Computing Leadership Seminar Series brings alumni and friends to share their career stories.

Did you know this year is the 50th birthday of ANU Computing? Professor David Hawking (BSc Hons'75, PhD'99) will be a special guest for the gold anniversary as he witnessed and grew together with ANU Computing in the past 50 years. He would share his learnings -- The Useless and the Useful. The talk will outline Professor David Hawking's rather non-linear career, which involved studying, teaching, software engineering, IT administration, research, commercialisation of research, and employment in a university, a government agency, a small start-up, and a huge multinational. 

Professor David Hawking will categorise the knowledge and skills he has gained into the ephemeral and the enduring. Topics like making career choices, models of research commercialisation, how to get the best out of people, code efficiency, and green computing will also be covered in the session. 

Find out more about the history of 50 years of ANU Computing in Prof Hawking's book: The History of ANU Computing and stay tuned at our event page. The official celebration of 50 years of ANU Computing will be held in April 2022. The special event will be held at the National Gallery of Australia and will feature David Thodey AO as a keynote speaker. 

Biography

"I came to ANU in 1971 to study physics and ended up with a double major in psychology and honours in CS. I tutored CS for nearly 5 years, managed ANU's first undergrad computing facility, then became a campus evangelist for text processing, laser printing, networking, and microcomputing. I supported two ANU supercomputers, wrote a text retrieval system in my spare time, was seconded to the ACSys CRC, gained a Ph.D. by published work, joined CSIRO as a research scientist, satisfied external earnings targets by licensing enterprise search software, grew revenue to the level of embarrassment, spent five years in the Funnelback spinoff, then four working on the Bing web search engine.  I retired in 2018 and have since written The History of ANU Computing and Funnelback and Me.  Since leaving ANU employment in 1998, I've been an Honorary in the School and supervised ten PhDs.  And, yes, I still write code. "

 --  Professor David Hawking

Find out more about Prof Hawking at his personal page: https://david-hawking.net/.