He praised the great facilities and conference site, and expressed his hope that HIP would be the first step of an ongoing, more informal collaboration between with Harvard. He also agreed with Marilyn Walker's comments about organization. Geoffrey Knauth got a lot out of HIP, and commented that maybe it would be appropriate for the industry attendees to give a poster session as a way to inform the Harvard attendees about their areas of research interest. Brian Kernighan said that he thought HIP was very useful. He commented that there are only two real problems in computer science.
Computers are too hard to use, and programs are too hard to write.
Michael Jones said that it is important to know who your customers are and to have a vision of who will be able to use the research that you're working on. He commended the efforts of some of the Harvard researchers to work with real applications. Dan Ford observed that the market drives research now, and encouraged Harvard researchers to look more at where the market is going. He noted that many graduate students miss out on using PCs and commercial software, and thus are less relevant once they graduate. Dan pointed out that there are lots of smart people out there who are not in research positions, but are working for small start up companies.