Citations Collection

Cerf and Kahn (1974)

Cerf, V. G., & Kahn, R. E. (1974). A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. IEEE Transactions on Communications,
22(5) 637–648.

Cerf and Kahn’s proposal describes a transmission control program (TCP) for sharing data between computers connected via an “internetwork”.

The protocol was later developed into a modular architecture called TCP/IP. The term “internetwork” is better known today by its shorthand: “internet”.

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Olukotun et al. (1996)

Olukotun, K., Nayfeh, B. A., Hammond, L., Wilson, K., & Chang, K. (1996). The Case for a Single-Chip Multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS VII), 2–11.

A multi-core processor contains multiple separate processing units, packaged on the same integrated circuit. This provides a significant performance advantage over single-core designs, when executing programs that use parallel computing techniques such as multithreading.

Pioneered by Kunle Olukotun and colleagues from Stanford in the mid-1990s, multi-core designs have since become the standard for general-purpose consumer devices as well as specific applications that include graphics, networking, and signal processing.

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Buterin (2013)

Buterin, V. (2013). A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.

17-year-old Vitaly Dmitriyevich "Vitalik" Buterin co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 after learning about the cryptocurrency from his father, a computer scientist. Three years later, with support from the Thiel Fellowship, Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo to work on Ethereum full-time.

Buterin initially proposed to augment Bitcoin with the ability to run a programming language, turning it into a decentralized general-purpose computer. The idea failed to gather support from the Bitcoin community, and Ethereum was born as a new platform.

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Russell (1978)

Russell, R. M. (1978). The CRAY-1 Computer System. Communications of the ACM, 21(1), 63–72.

The CRAY-1 was a highly successful supercomputer designed by Seymour Cray in the 1970s. The vector processor design that underpinned it and its successors radically outperformed competitors until the 1990s. Cray Research expected to sell a dozen machines when they brought it to market, and priced them accordingly. They ended up selling over 80 units for more than $5M each.

The article that situates a description of the technology and evolution of CRAY-1 in computer science literature was authored by Richard M. Russell, whose responsibility at Cray Research was marketing and sales.

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Kay and Goldberg (1977)

Kay, A., & Goldberg, A. (1977). Personal Dynamic Media. Computer, 10(3), 31–41.

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg envisioned a design for a “dynamic medium the size of a notebook” – laptop and tablet computers.

At the time, technologies like LCD displays and lithium-ion batteries were not yet available. Despite the absence of hardware on which their vision could be built, the team at Xerox PARC made significant progress in building the software components which could one day power diverse creative applications. The paper presents a variety of prototypes for drawing, animation, music, simulation, architecture, and more.

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Ishii and Ullmer (1997)

Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997). Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces Between People, Bits and Atoms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
 (CHI '97), 234–241.

Tangible user interfaces are designs where people interact with digital information through physical artifacts.

The 1997 CHI paper by Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer of the MIT Media Lab lays out the vision, technologies, and examples for TUIs, building on three key concepts: interactive surfaces, graspable physical objects, and ambient media for background awareness.

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Rumelhart et al. (1986)

Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E.,
& Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning Representations by 
Back-propagating Errors. Nature, 323, 533-536.

Backpropagation is an algorithm that is widely used in machine learning to train neural networks.

Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams coined the term and described the algorithm with two publications in 1986, but the mathematics of the technique were independently rediscovered many times, with predecessors dating back to the 1960s.

Neural networks became popular in the 2010s, as GPU hardware – better-suited than CPUs to run backpropagation – became powerful and cheap. What followed was an abundance of applications in speech recognition, machine vision, natural language processing, and more; reviving excitement about machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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Sutherland (1968)

Sutherland, I. E. (1968). A Head-mounted Three Dimensional Display. In Proceedings of the December 9–11, 1968,
 Fall Joint Computer Conference, Part I 
(AFIPS '68 (Fall, Part I)), 757–764.

Ivan Sutherland's 1968 paper documents a design for a head-mounted display that renders images which respond to the viewer's head movements: the world's first virtual reality system.

Published during Sutherland’s tenure at the University of Utah, the AFIPS paper represents many years of work by Sutherland and colleagues at MIT and Harvard.

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Nakamoto (2008)

Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic
 Cash System.

The mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto began working on the code for bitcoin in 2007. The domain bitcoin.org was registered and a website published in August 2008. On October 31, Nakamoto posted the white paper on a cryptography mailing list, describing the implementation of a digital cryptocurrency.

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Zadeh (1965)

Zadeh, L. A. (1965). Fuzzy Sets. Information and Control, 8(3), 338–353.

Zadeh's theory of fuzzy sets extends the classical notion of a set in mathematics.

In classical set theory, the membership of elements in a set is defined in binary terms: an element either belongs or does not belong to the set. Fuzzy set theory allows for gradual membership of a set's elements, described mathematically with membership function valued in the range [0, 1].

Introduced by Zadeh and other scholars in the 1960s, fuzzy set theory has a wide range of practical applications, including but not limited to pattern recognition, robotics, bioinformatics, and social sciences.

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McCarthy et al. (1955)

McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a summer workshop – essentially an extended brainstorming session – held in 1956. It is considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field.

John McCarthy, then a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, was interested in organizing a gathering of scholars to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines. In 1955, McCarthy requested funding for a summer seminar at Dartmouth from the Rockefeller Foundation. The formal proposal, signed by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, is credited with introducing the term "artificial intelligence".

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Turing (1950)

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.

Alan Turing's seminal work on artificial intelligence considers the question: "Can machines think?"

According to Turing, as neither "machine" nor "thinking" can be defined unambiguously, it is apt to replace the question with another that is expressed in unambiguous terms. Hence, Turing suggests another question: Can the machine win an "Imitation Game" by impersonating a human, acting in a manner that is indistinguishable from a thinking being?

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