Wednesday Keynote Recap
Mike Santori, National Instruments business and technology fellow, kicked off the second day of NIWeek 2007 by discussing the company's evolving vision, touching on the past 20 years of virtual instrumentation, and looking toward the future with graphical system design. Santori emphasized the importance of ongoing feedback and a two-way dialogue with customers, and included a call to action for LabVIEW programmers by introducing NI Labs, an online forum to try out NI products under development and submit feedback to NI developers.
NI R&D and product engineering staff then joined Santori for several software and hardware demonstrations that illustrated graphical system design and how National Instruments LabVIEW addresses the growing challenges of machine design. NI developers showed how easy it is to design, prototype, and deploy a mechatronics application involving a laser etching machine using NI LabVIEW software and modular hardware.
Following Santori, Jeff Kodosky, NI cofounder and business and technology fellow, expanded on the company's vision for graphical system design. Kodosky began by describing the history of the LabVIEW block diagram and an evolving LabVIEW vision that takes advantage of modern graphics technology to better represent application components and how they are connected and to improve support for multiple targets. With the LabVIEW System Diagram, currently under development, engineers and scientists can use LabVIEW as an "executable white board" that provides varying degrees of abstraction as well as a configuration and behavioral specification that is both flexible and rigorously defined.
Kodosky, known as the "father of LabVIEW," concluded by discussing the challenges of multicore programming and how the inherent parallelism of LabVIEW allows LabVIEW users to "continue to do what [they] have always done and reap the benefits of multicore" while the industry struggles to come to grips with multicore machines.
View a video of the keynote
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