The AlpineInker : Randy Pausch

A Tribute to Randy

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:10:00 GMT

The final grains of sand slipped through the hourglass, as we knew they must. Still the finality of it hit me hard. July 25, 2008. Randy Pausch has died. My friend and mentor are lost.

I worked with Randy, my Ph.D. advisor, at the University of Virginia between 1991 and 1997. He left for Carnegie Mellon shortly after I graduated. Note I did not say that I worked for Randy: I worked with Randy. He always insisted that I say it that way. He was my colleague, not my boss. To this day I am always careful to speak the same way of my colleagues and the team of people that I manage.

As fate would have it, I had a demo scheduled during an executive keynote at the Microsoft Research 2008 Faculty summit on July 29, the Tuesday right after Randy died. Hundreds of faculty from around the world attend the summit every year. Many people who had known Randy would be in the audience, including the legendary Andries van Dam, Randy's undergraduate advisor. I couldn't let the opportunity pass without reflecting on this profound loss. I didn't practice my tribute and I didn't tell anyone I would do it. I just did it.

Randy talks about brick walls and overcoming them in The Last Lecture. It only occured to me just now, but my speech was in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, just down the hall from the pièce de résistance of the Microsoft art collection: a graffiti-covered chunk of The Berlin Wall - perhaps the biggest brick wall ever thrown up, in mankind's foolishness, to be torn down by those with greater ambitions.

My slot was only for 10 minutes. I had very little time to say anything substantive, and I still had to do my demo. I thought about it a lot. In the end what I most wanted to say again to Randy was "Thank You!" - thank you for being a great mentor. So I did exactly that, the image below projected on a massive screen twenty-five feet tall. It was literally the biggest Thank You that I could offer to Randy.

I also realized that I couldn't just leave it at that and plow right into my talk and technology demo. I first had to create a sense of closure, where of course the wound was still fresh and there was none. So this is what I said.

I think of Randy's life as an unfinished book. What is there is amazing and touched millions. I know the succeeding chapters would have been brilliant and fantastic. But the next page must remain forever blank.

A Reminiscence of Randy - Eating Like Kings

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:12:00 GMT

My PhD advisor Randy Pausch continues to be on my mind a lot this week. His book "The Last Lecture" came out last Tuesday. It's already the #1 bestseller on Amazon. I was a bit tardy ordering my copy, but it's supposed to arrive on Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

In the meantime some fond memories of the time I spent working with Randy keep cropping up.

An exciting time I remember is when Randy's original research group at the University of Virginia was right on the cusp of getting big time funding. For a long time we had been operating in what Randy always called the "eat what you kill" model of research funding, where we had to be content with devouring the various small fry we could catch when it came to dollars to fund our research.

But Randy had made some connections with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and from DARPA the real dollars flowed to support big, ambitious research efforts. Just the right Call for Proposals was out. Randy had schmoozed the principal decision maker and convinced him that he had the killer research project that would light the world on fire.

This project ultimately became Alice. I remember some students expressing concern that having funding from the Defense Department might torque the direction of the research in an undesirable way. Just to make the point, I remember Randy had one of the students design up a pink tank that shot out bunnies, or something cute like that. Alice was going to stay fun and playful.

But the big problem remained. The proposal was due the next day. It was subject to peer review so something just thrown together was not going to get the good reviews necessary for DARPA to fund it.

This proposal was about the big bucks. One of the students calculated that we could use the money to buy a fresh pizza once every five minutes for years on end. Randy took note of this and zipped a quick email to the entire research group to get everyone excited about working on the proposal: IF WE PULL THIS OFF, WE'LL EAT LIKE KINGS!

Somehow I had become known as "the writing machine" -- the best writer in Randy's research group. So Randy and I spent a long night where Randy emailed me a steady stream of points to raise in each paragraph. My job was to "turn them into real text" as fast as I could. Some of the other senior students were there as well, helping Randy to strategize the points while I pounded away to produce "the real text."

But we still had a big problem. We needed to deliver a paper copy of the proposal to the office in Washington, D.C. We were way past the FedEx deadline of 4pm, and indeed wrapping up the proposal went well into the early afternoon of the deadline day. But Randy had a solution for this as well. One of his students rode a motorcycle, and off he raced to DC with the proposal in hand. He burst into the DARPA office less than 5 minutes before the deadline and slapped it on the desk.

We had pulled it off. The proposal was accepted. We got the funding. Randy's research group had officially hit the big time. We ate like kings.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:14:00 GMT

I mostly write this blog for fun, but today I have something important to share.

To the extent that I am a good researcher, I owe a tremendous debt to Randy Pausch. Randy advised my PhD studies at the University of Virginia. Randy is a great guy, always brimming with humor and enthusiasm. Randy is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is 47 years old, has a beautiful wife, and they have three children ranging from 2 to 6 years old.

Randy will die soon.

Randy has pancreatic cancer. Randy is doing everything possible to raise awareness while he still can. Time is short. As Randy says, "We don't have a Michael J. Foxx because people die too fast." Randy recently gave absolutely riveting testimony before Congress (YouTube video) to help raise research funding for pancreatic cancer. Join in and help us fight the good fight by donating to the Lustgarten foundation, and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).

As Randy summarized his situation in the video, "I've metastasized to my liver and spleen, which means there's a 100% chance that I will be dying."

Randy tells it like it is. He has always been known for this. I've heard people say that he has no tact. But typically this was said by people who didn't like being told how it is. It's a pity because the only way to better yourself is to listen to constructive criticism from smart people around you. And the most constructive criticism is that which is brutally honest.

Pancreatic cancer is absolutely lethal. A friend of my family saw his father diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; the man was dead six weeks later. Median survival from diagnosis is 3 to 6 months. Seventy-five percent of patients are dead by one year. 5-year survival is 4%.

And, as Randy noted in his testimony to Congress "It is one of the only cancers you can point to and say, in the last 30 years, we've made no progress." That is shameful.

It's been given up as too hard. But Randy has an answer to that too.

"I don't believe in too hard."

Back in my graduate days of working with Randy, whenever someone was stuck and said they couldn't figure out a problem, or that they didn't think something would work, Randy would never accept that kind of answer. "That's proof by I'm not smart enough," he would say. Randy was serving notice: that was not going to cut it in these parts.

This gets to gist of why pancreatic cancer research needs serious governmental support. And it needs your help too.

In the research game, you learn the most by going after the hardest problems. That's where the big breakthroughs that have ripple effects throughout an entire discipline happen. You solve the hardest part first because that gives the most fundamental insights.

Let's not let pancreatic cancer fall on the floor by way of "We're not smart enough."

In his congressional testimony, Randy further laid out the case:

By funding pancreatic cancer research, we will be going after the hardest problem. If you go after the hardest problem, you can't go for the halfway solutions.

The trick is to seed the junior hotshots... this is going to be cracked by somebody younger... it's gonna have to be a breakthrough. They [the hotshot young researchers] need the strong sense that the funding is there. The smart people work on what there's money to work on.

Let's empower the best and brightest in the research community to set their teeth into this problem. But they need the dollars to make it happen. It won't come in time to help Randy, but it might come in time to help his children: research shows there's a genetic link to pancreatic cancer. Let your lawmakers know this is important. Donate to the Lustgarten foundation and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). I'll be donating a dollar for every InkSeine download this year, up to the maximum Microsoft matching contribution - so that will double the dollars.

The Last Lecture: How did Randy come to be delivering testimony to Congress?

Well, in the last six months Randy has become an "accidental celebrity." There's a tradition in academia of giving a "Last Lecture." Hypothetically, if you were going to die, what would you tell your students?

Randy got to do it for real. He has a reputation for being a great speaker, and he didn't disappoint.

Randy's last lecture was entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." Although hundreds of people attended, this is really a lecture that was delivered for three persons; Randy says "I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on a beach for my children." But six million people ended up watching the last lecture online. He's given a condensed version of it on Oprah. His story will be featured in a one-hour interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC this week ("the last lecture, a love story for your life," Wednesday April 9^th, 10 pm / 9 central).

But what I'm most eagerly awaiting is the publication of his book "The Last Lecture," which will be published on Tuesday, April 8.

Of course, Randy's main motivation for writing this book is again for his children. All he cares about are the first three copies. But Randy shared so many nuggets of wisdom with me over the years that I really look forward to savoring his gift of a few more. I remember Randy saying once in his early bachelor days that "I don't plan to have kids, but my students are my children..." and I think that is perhaps more true than he ever realized.

Resources:

Randy Pausch's page with his videos and information about pancreatic cancer
Web site for Randy's book, The Last Lecture (you can order it on Amazon)
Watch the interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC this week ("the last lecture, a love story for your life," Wednesday April 9^th, 10 pm / 9 central)
The last lecture on YouTube
Randy's day-to-day update blog