Mar 16, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. -

Future developments in handheld computing will be the subject of a lecture by Vaughan Pratt, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University and chairman and chief technology officer of Tiqit Incorporated. The lecture will be held on Wednesday, March 23, at 7 p.m. in Galileo Hall at Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Blvd. The event is free and open to the public.

Pratt's talk, "The Handheld Software Phenomenon: An Expensive Crisis Brewing," will address issues relating to the three principal categories of computer used directly by most people today: the desktop, the laptop and the handheld as realized in PDAs and cell phones. Whereas the desktop and the laptop use the same software, handheld software along with its associated accessories presently lives in an insular world of its own.

"While this does not present a serious problem as long as handheld applications remain simple," Pratt said, "There is an emerging need for handheld computers supporting more sophisticated applications, more familiar development and maintenance environments and the huge catalog of existing mainstream applications. While this need could eventually be addressed by incremental improvements to today's handheld platforms, it would be met more quickly, economically and effectively with a category of handheld computer fully compatible with today's laptops in both software and accessories, differing only in having a user interface suitably adapted to its smaller size." Pratt will review the rationale, challenges, progress to date and likely opportunities for this essentially nonexistent but necessary category.

Vaughan Pratt is professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. From 1972 to 1980, he served on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT before returning to Stanford as a full professor. His research has covered a wide range of areas including natural language processing, algorithms, program verification, foundations of concurrency and technologies for emerging computer categories. He directed the Sun workstation project at Stanford from 1980 to 1982, then helped found Sun Microsystems, designing the Sun logo and Sun's Pixrect graphics interface. In 2000, he retired from Stanford to found Tiqit Computers as a vehicle for understanding and creating momentum for the PC-compatible handheld market.

Pratt's lecture is part of The Dr. Bruce J. Nelson '74 Distinguished Speaker Series, which was created by Nelson's family to honor the memory of the late HMC alumnus. For more information about Bruce J. Nelson and the series, visit the Web site at: www.hmc.edu/speaker/.