Illinois Computer Science Professor Gul Agha joined the College of Engineering's Illinois Innovators podcast this month.
His widely cited work, "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computing in Distributed Systems," provided a basis for a number of research projects in concurrent programming. Actor frameworks have been used to program Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Chat, the British National Health Service Portal, and hundreds of commercial cloud applications.
Agha, who also is Director of the Open Systems Laboratory, discussed his work and concurrent computing.
"A lot of the computational power in the real world comes from multiple activities happening at the same time. ... The actor model captured that in a computational sense and said, 'OK, let's assume we have lots of parallel activity. How are we going to organize this?'"
Listen to the podcast.