Iowa State honored the inventor of the electronic digital computer with three days of workshops and speeches on a variety of computer topics.

The International Symposium on Modern Computing began Thursday and concluded Saturday. The academic symposium brought in the world’s experts and attracted computer professionals, professors and students.

The conference was free to ISU students, who accounted for about half of the 530 registered participants, said Vasant Honavar, professor of computer science.

Though many were graduate students in computer science or computer engineering, undergraduates and students in majors such as physics and math also came, he said.

“Most of the talks were packed,” Honavar said.

Honavar helped coordinate lectures on computational intelligence, including “Machine Learning Methods” and “Wearable Computers: The Next Cusp in Computing?”

Computational intelligence was one of three tracks at the symposium, which was broader than most technology conferences, he said.

The other two tracks were application-specific IT infrastructure and high performance computing/grid computing.

“We were looking at the future of computing in these areas,” Honavar said.

Dale Grosvenor, retired professor of computer science, said he enjoyed the wide range of topics.

“The computer has applications in many fields,” he said.

One lecture focused on the applications of high-performance computing in biology, while another focused on high-energy physics, Grosvenor said.

Throughout the conference, participants were reminded that none of these applications would be possible without the work of John Vincent Atanasoff, professor at Iowa State from 1930 to 1942 and creator of the world’s first electronic digital computer.

Atanasoff, who died in 1995, was born Oct. 4, 1903. His parents were Bulgarian immigrants, and Bulgaria also honored Atanasoff’s 100th birthday with a similar computer conference earlier this month.

Today Atanasoff’s name still has celebrity status in Bulgaria, said Emil Yalnazov, deputy ambassador of Bulgaria to the United States.

Yalnazov spoke at the opening ceremonies Thursday night and also attended the conference.

Another speaker at opening ceremonies, John Gustafson, principal investigator, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, Calif., reflected on Atanasoff’s fame in Iowa and the United States.

As a student at Iowa State, Gustafson said he walked past the poster of Atanasoff in old Physics Hall and downplayed its significance.

He said he thought every university probably thought they had the first electronic computer.

He said it wasn’t until he left Iowa State that he realized the true importance of Atanasoff’s work.

“One of the systems analysts showed me a historical paper written by Atanasoff, and that’s when it hit me … ‘You mean it’s true?'” he said.

Gustafson led the project from 1994 to 1997 to construct a replica of Atanasoff’s computer, a project that helped prove the invention worked.

“The first computer hasn’t gotten enough credit,” he said.

It used parallel processing, which was rediscovered by the computer industry in the 1980s, and digital communication, which is only now appearing in digital TV, radio and phone communication.

“To a computer architect to see that these things were done that long ago was amazing,” Gustafson said.

“[Atanasoff] was a real visionary. He was way ahead of his time.”