cameo of software archeology

[Artur Dubrawski]

Team,

I do not think more than a couple of active members of the Auton Lab would
know Jeremy Kubica.
Jeremy was a PhD student and a postdoc here until he left to serve in tech
leadership roles at Google Pittsburgh in June 2006.

As a member of our Lab, he became famous for his incredibly scalable
software code designed to
track asteroids. It helped astrophysicists monitor trajectories of a
couple orders of magnitude
more space rocks than previously possible.

I had no idea that his software from 2005-2006 was still in active use
until a minor complaint received yesterday from one
of the astrophysicists. They reported an issue with recompiling the code
that turned out to be caused by 3rd party changes
to the gmake tool we have been using to build executables of the Auton C
language software in those ancient times.
So, Jeremy's code still works as it always did, and it compiles again
without a glitch after a minor tweak to its make file.

I am tempted to use this story to set the standard of expectation for the
products coming out of our software shop :)

I also would like to congratulate Dr. Kubica for creating a product that
has not aged out of relevance over such a long period of time.

However, the best part of the story is this: Jeremy is back at CMU!
Yes, he has apparently missed a turn on his way back and ended up joining a
different team on campus.
But we will be looking to collaborate and finally bring him fully back to
where he really belongs.

In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Jeremy back and in inviting
him to give a talk at one of our upcoming brainstorming sessions.
It would be great to hear about his past in the Lab, his experience at
Google, and about what he is working on now, or on any other topic
he might want to discuss with us.
(Jeremy: please pick one Monday in the near future, we hold these
brainstorming sessions from 3 to 4pm, in a hybrid mode).

And, maybe we could convince Jeremy to talk about his Auton C libraries at
one of our Coding Coftea meetings?
Jeremy: One of the key points of these meetings is to expose the new
generation of Auton Lab programmers to the wealth of
our C libraries. These meetings take place on Thursdays 12-1pm.

Cheers,
Artur
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