For several years now I have been editor of the official Turing Award website at ACM. This was originally set up by Mike Williams in collaboration with the ACM IT staff. The main content consists of short biographical profiles of each award winner, accompanied with supporting materials such as an annotated bibliography, links to oral history interviews, Turing Award lectures, and so on. As the site was populated when I took it over, my main job has been either writing or commissioning and editing profiles of each new set of winners.
Recently, however, I've been engaged in something more substantial. ACM made a push to conduct (or in some cases acquire) videotaped oral history interviews with as many of the awardees as possible. The program has produced a growing body of interviews, typically two or three hours long. The videos went up on YouTube (https://www.acm.org/turing-award-50/turing-laureate-interviews), and I was able to feature them on a new "video history" tab on the awardee profiles. But alas long interviews with distinguished computer scientists turn out not to have the same viral appeal as videos of cats doing funny things or amiable geeks fixing old Commodore 64s.
So I proposed that ACM fund me to identify, compile, and edit into the profiles themselves a set of short video clips in which the awardees tell interesting stories about themselves or describe crucial aspects of their own work. I've now completed work on the existing body of video interviews, which led to the creation of 157 short videos for 35 of the awardee profiles. The video clips are all hosted in my new YouTube channel, Turing Awardee Clips, where you can browse them. We hope that some will be useful for teaching purposes -- particularly those where awardees describe the ideas, systems, or algorithms for which the prize was given. The videos themselves vary widely in length, tone, comprehensiveness, coherence of the interview subjects, etc. so the edited clips are more uniform and, in some cases, more accessible than the full interviews.
If you need cheering up, watch Silvio Micali on how he barely survived graduate school:
Or if you want to despair at how the academic job market today is not like that in the early days of computer science, hear John Hopcroft explain how he was hired at Princeton without having published anything:
Here are some examples of videos that might be useful for certain history or STS courses:
Finally, if you want to see them in context, embedded into the biographical profiles, here are links to all the profiles with video clips added:
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