Dave Farber: Obituaries and Archival Materials

As you know by know, our beloved Professor Dave Farber passed away last month. The impact of his loss will resonate for a long time. Here is my list of articles about his passing, plus a few other things. Let me know if you see other articles that should be included. (Picture above: we cooked Dave turkey on Christmas Day, 2025.)

Perhaps my favorite quote from this set of sources is from Dave Crocker, in the Wall Street Journal:

His mind was, from what I could see, largely undisciplined, which is how he could make these connections so unexpectedly and usefully, but not always usefully. He would say things that put things in juxtaposition because his mind just wandered in various ways.

To me, that's high praise.

Notices from Keio University & Japanese Organizations

• Keio CCRC Obituary Notice
• A Tribute to Dave Farber by Jun Murai at CCRC
• From the WIDE Project (in Japanese and English)
• My eulogy for Dave at his funeral

Other Employers

• UC Irvine

Major Newspapers

• Japan Times
• New York Times
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• Wall Street Journal
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Trade Organizations

• Communications of the ACM In Memoriam
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Internet Hall of Fame
• ISC

Historical Materials Archived at Keio

•  The DCS Archives of technical papers
• 50th Anniversary of DCS discussion
• Autobiographical materials and reminiscences in interviews (in four parts)

Other Historical Materials

• Computer History Museum
• Wikipedia

Eulogy for Dave Farber

[Photo is at Miyajima, Hiroshima, on Dave's 90th birthday trip: Keiko Okawa, Yukie Shibuya, Yasuo "tsucchy" Tsuchimoto, Kaori Suzuki, Rod Van Meter, Dave Farber, Jun Murai, Catharina Maracke]

 My comments from Dave Farber's funeral on February 13, 2026:

David Jack Farber.
Born April 17, 1934.
Passed away February 7, 2026.
Occupation: professor.

Those are the basic facts you will see on a census form.

Worked on telephone switching systems, built distributed systems, helped kick off important precursors to today’s Internet, served as chief technologist at the FCC, taught at five universities – those are the things you’ll read in the obituaries in the newspapers, and we heard about them yesterday from Manny, Jun, and Jiro. We heard from Manny about family, and Dan about Dave’s love of food and of Japan. (For those of you who didn’t join us last night, we hope to make the video available later.) And in a few minutes we will hear from Vint Cerf, whose career Dave helped shape.

Dave literally changed the life direction of several Keio students that I know of, and doubtless affected many more in ways I’ll never get to hear about. As a Keio faculty member, I’m deeply grateful for that. After Vint, we will hear from Taro, who is one of those whose life was changed.

So what more is there to say?

If I had to describe Dave, I would pick the 3 Cs: connection, clarity, and curiosity. Yesterday we talked about all three of these.  Dave's ability to connect people might be the true core of his career – it’s the thing that brought us all here today.  Dave was exceptionally clear in his explanation of things – and also saw clearly. Dave’s curiosity was endless; personally, it’s the thing I admired most about him, and he and I had long conversations about wide ranging topics (yes, including quantum computing), and it might be the core of his longevity.

A few days ago, while helping Manny clean up the apartment, we found a number of articles that Dave had printed out for later reading. I found a couple of things I had written on Dave’s desk – my blog entry on web3, and my class and research group policy on the use of AI. That's certainly an example of his curiosity.

Dave was not a particularly religious person, though he was proud of his Jewish heritage. G.G. was raised Greek Orthodox. I was raised American Baptist. One place where all of these things overlap is in the Book of Ecclesiastes (which, by the way, takes its English Christian name from the Greek). Ecclesiastes is known as Kohelet (which I’m sure I’m not pronouncing right) in Hebrew.

So, with your permission, I’d like to read a little from the King James Version of Ecclesiastes. It will be a familiar passage, and it’s one that’s often used in Christian funerals, at least in America, but it should resonate with everyone regardless of religion, I hope.

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Dave knew all of these things. Dave did most of them rather frequently. We have done about half of these things just in this last week, talking about Dave and preparing for today.

Dave was much more than a colleague and mentor. Dave was my friend, and I will miss him.

My condolences again to Manny, Mei, Carol, Nate and Sam. Thank you for sharing Dave with the rest of us. May his memory be a blessing.

Go in peace, Dave.  G.G. and Joe are waiting for you.

TDC toolkit new release!

 If anybody out there is using our Multiharp toolkit for counting photons, a new release is out:

https://crates.io/crates/tdc_toolkit
https://docs.rs/tdc_toolkit/latest/tdc_toolkit/multiharp/device/struct.MH160DeviceConfig.html
https://github.com/moonshot-nagayama-pj/tdc_toolkit

Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the team who do the hard work!

Breakthroughs of the Years

 Since 1996, Science magazine has named a single "Breakthrough of the Year" as well as several runners-up. This year's is the growth of renewable energy, especially solar. But what about the past thirty years, can we see any themes or a bigger picture? Here is a quick look at the categories, as roughly laid out by me:

• Life sciences: 17
• Human health: 8
• HIV (understanding, treatment as prevention, lenacapavir): 3
• Cancer (immunotherapy): 1
• Other (stem-cell therapy, genetic variation, COVID-19 vaccine, GLP-1): 4
• Evolution (evo in action, Ardipithecus ramidus): 2
• Other bio/life sciences (cloning Dolly, whole-genome sequencing, RNA interference, reprogramming, CRISPR, single-cell sequencing, AlphaFold): 7
• The physical universe: 9
• Cosmology and "deep" astronomy (accelerating universe, dark energy, gravitational waves, neutron star merger, black hole VLBI, JWST): 6
• Exploring the solar system (Spirit, Rosetta): 2
• Particle physics (Higgs): 1
• Technology: 3
• Nano/quantum tech (nanocircuits, quantum machine): 2
• Energy tech: 1
• Mathematics (Poincaré proof): 1

That's thirty years of astounding science, for the benefit of humankind as well as sheer curiosity.

It would be worthwhile to compare to the annual list at Physics World, and also to look at the runners-up and the "busts" of the year, which Science also reports, but that would be more work than I care to put in this morning.

It's humbling to be reminded that quantum information is at best a small corner of the global science and technology effort. Even the broader field of computing, with all it has done in the last thirty years, makes the list above only once, and at that for its contribution in understanding proteins rather than the technology itself. Of course, technology is very often about incremental accumulation of small advances, rather than "breakthroughs". Still, time invested in thinking about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going would be well spent.

Quantum Curricula

 (Just a quick note for now, more later.)

• EU European competence framework for quantum technologies (CFQT)
• ACM CS2023: ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science Curricula

Spelunking CACM, Vol. 25 (1982): Worms and Grapevines

 Wow, right away in January there are things I find relevant to our work today. One such is an article on a test to see if documentation of control flow or data structures helps more in understanding a piece of code, coming down firmly on the side of the data structure. Of course, that was a very limited test done with a short program and without the benefit of today's tools and practices, but it's nice to see where we were at the time.

I lived through the Morris Worm in 1988, and I knew the name came from a Brunner SF novel, but I either didn't know or had forgotten there were not just technical analyses but implementations and tests of worms before 1988! (The image at the top is taken from this article.) Fascinating study there on a multi-node, multi-segment worm that is extremely hard to kill. Prescient, and frightening. It has been a long time since we had something quite like it, despite the many forms and instances of malware; let's all hope we have built a resilient system, robust and well-defended against it happening again. The article also includes a nice summary of early ARPANET distributed programs, including pointing out that routing is itself a distributed computation -- an under-appreciated insight even today.

One article that I teach, even today, is on Grapevine, which is one of the seminal distributed systems. Everyone in computer systems should know about that work at Xerox PARC.

The ACM Classification System originated in 1964, and was redone here in 1982. With the obvious exception of quantum computing, I find that classification surprisingly solid, more than forty years later. It has since been revised, in 1991 and 1998, but not in over a quarter of a century, so people either don't use it or our forebears Simply Got It Right.

State of the art in AI in 1982? A 20-page effort to build an English grammar diagram useful for parsing sentences.

I haven't stopped to look more closely, but the February issue has several articles on queueing systems analysis.

A couple of personal interest: one on debugging via program slicing, a technique one of my Ph.D. graduates used for quantum programs, and one by Bill Swartout and Bob Balzer on the intertwining of specification and implementation. Just a few years later I would be the juniorest worker at USC/ISI, where they worked.

For what it's worth, fall of 1982 is when I entered college. Next year is my fortieth reunion, looking forward to seeing people I haven't seen in a long time.

AI Policy: Whew

 I am working on a policy for appropriate use of AI (especially but not only LLMs) in my classes and research group. It's an important task, and I'm trying to not just lay down a set of written rules to be blindly followed but a bit of history and a set of principles. I do expect the policy to be revised regularly as the technology evolves, but I want to clarify my own thinking and encourage students to both think for themselves and read as widely as possible.

This is a nontrivial task...

Takaichi Sanae: Japan's First Woman Prime Minister

237 votes for Takaichi Sanae (高市 早苗) on the first ballot in the Lower House. It's official, she will become Japan's first woman prime minister.

Interestingly, she worked for Democratic (and liberal) Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado as a congressional fellow in the late 1980s, when Takaichi was in her mid-twenties. Either she was still forming her political views or she didn't know enough about American politics to realize who she was working for, but for most of her political career she has been conservative to very right wing.

Koizumi Junior will become Defense Minister. I haven't seen a full cabinet lineup yet. Always interested in who the ministers with large research portfolios are, though I rarely know enough about them to have an opinion.

In the photo (mobile phone photo of a television) at the top, Takaichi sits in front of three former prime ministers at the back of the Diet Lower House. I know so little about Japanese parliamentary procedures that I have no idea how the seating chart works. (Actually, there are many more important things I also don't know.)