You know what I'd really like to see? It would be great if the organizing committee could invite Rob Pike to give a talk: an update to "Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant" (preferably with an accompanying article, so we're not left with just the talk slides).
The reason for this is that the original article does not take into account (and hardly could've predicted) the emergence of another organization, namely Google, that has the resources and the people with the right technical ability to rival Bell Labs of old and could potentially, if it isn't already, invest a considerable amount in researching, building and developing novel and interesting systems. Having observed both the fall from grace of BL and the rise of Google, it would be nice (at least to me) to learn how this changes, if at all, the spectrum of the original article. Note that it's not important to know whether Google is building its own OS, but just to observe the effects of it being the proverbial 800lbs gorilla in the room :) andrey
