Spin the globe, looking for elite computer-programming talent.

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He acknowledged this is a departure from his earlier career as a tenured professor in computer science at two elite universities: Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford universities.

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Who, after all, could imagine the likes of Dickie Bird - an old-fashioned Yorkshireman, if ever there was one - emerging from a an ICC conference in Cape Town armed with a laptop computer, as the eight elite umpires did last March.

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Gupta, a 37-year-old native of Hyderabad, got into the elite Indian Institute of Technology a year early, then won a scholarship for a computer science M.

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Thirty years ago -- well, NASAs elite Ames Research Center, supported by the Department of Defense, could barely assemble one measly mip of computer power.

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