Gérard Philippe Berry is a French computer scientist, Professor at Collège de France, member of French Academy of Sciences (Académie des sciences), French Academy of Technologies (Académie des technologies), and Academia Europaea. Researcher at Ecole des Mines and Inria since 1973, he was the Chief Scientist Officer of Esterel Technologies from 2000 to 2009. He held the 2007-2008 yearly Liliane Bettencourt chair of Technological Innovation and the 2009-2010 yearly Informatics and Digital Sciences chair at the Collège de France.

Berry's work, which spans over more than 30 years, brought important contributions to three main fields: lambda calculus and functional programming, parallel and real-time programming languages and design automation for synchronous digital circuits. Berry is best known as the conceptor of the Esterel programming language. (1)

Berry visited Iceland this fall and agreed on an interview for Tölvumál. When he was 17 years old he found a computer that at that time did not even have electronic memory, but when he was trying to program it he became fascinated by the difference between himself and the computer. He realised how stupid but completely exact the computer was, opposite to what he considered himself to be. He was interested in math and computers, and he wanted to be the clever man working with the stupid machine. At that time computer science was a new and exciting discipline developing fast. This fascinated the young man.

During the years Berry has worked both with software and hardware. His works on control software for airplanes and other systems led the development of the Esterel programming language, which was then also applied to the design of electronic circuits.

He started the Esterel Technologies company that was working both with software and hardware, but later focused more on software. “Software is easy to change and is flexible, but hardware is not, and a bug in a chip costs a lot so you have to be very exact when working with hardware. It is a similar challenge to build software programs that drive safety-critical systems like airplanes and to qualify them. More surprisingly, the technical background is not really different”.

Berry considers the current development of software often to be of poor quality and as an example he mentions software for cars: “You cannot have bugs in software for airplanes, but somehow it is considered less important to make bug-free software for cars. Today’s cars have far too many software bugs, including w.r.t. cyber- security. Security is a big deal, since designing a secure system or patching an unsecure system is difficult. There has to be more emphasis on security.”

Berry has worked in academia, but he soon in his carrier realised that he could not follow the applications into its partner companies. They use algorithms and ideas from academia, but the real developments are done in secret so academia cannot have a deep impact. This is why he switched to industry when his technology became mature.

Presently, Berry is working at the Collège De France, which was established in 1530 by King François 1st as a more open alternative to the Sorbonne. The King wanted the institution to teach everything to everyone. Today there are 42 professors in different subjects including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, oriental studies, philosophy, social sciences, and other fields. The Collège does not provide degrees, but has many excellent research laboratories and a splendid research library. The duty of the professors is to teach a brand new course each year and all their teaching is open to everyone. The goal is to teach science in the making, science that is being done now, science that is used now. Most courses are recorded and put on the web as hour-long video or audio programs. This is very challenging for the teachers: you have constantly to be up to date with what is going on in your subject, to be open for new and different teaching methods, and to think of how to simulate the attendants and get them interested. The teaching is in French, but it is dubbed in English and for some professors in Chinese.

Berry is preoccupied with education, “To teach and educate is a big challenge. People do not know much about informatics, they do not know how all the new systems works, and there is a lack of training in the area. There is a challenge to educate people, not only those who already studying computer science, but also those who are not yet interested in computing. Information is everywhere, but knowledge of how to collect, process, analyse, and use is lacking, while understanding computing should be a part of everyone’s life. We need to open education, open peoples mind, but there is lack of teachers to teach informatics and computing. How and what to teach is an exciting question, which also implies to know how other sciences work because they all get computerized. School teachers that are teaching young kids should know enough about programming so they can get the kids interested in the field. MOOCs could be the opportunity to train teachers in computing.” Berry sees exciting opportunities in this, especially for teachers who need to change their teaching to reach out to all, not only those who are already motivated. “If you look at science in the 20th century, the main issues were matter, energy and waves, but not informatics. It will be the number one topic in the 21th century”.

Politicians do not know about computing, they do not understand the field, they are always too late to realise what the problems are and may set laws that are outdated from the beginning. In Europa most politicians are not familiar with science and computers. They do not understand the field and often do not even use computers themselves. As an example, lots of time and money was spent on setting laws to forbid illegally downloading video and music from the web, even when everyone had started to use streaming instead. They were hooked on a problem that was bound to disappear, they did not see ahead or follow the technical development.

Finally, Berry has this message to people in the computer industry in Iceland: Open your mind, open your mind, there will be more surprising times ahead, in computer science we are as physics were in 1920 so there are exciting times ahead.

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Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Berr