2008 Conference Information: Invited Speakers

Elizabeth Churchill

Talk Title: Tools and Talk: Conversational Code and the Changing World of the Internet

Abstract: The Internet has always been about communication, conversation and collaboration. In this talk I will draw on a number of research projects that have looked at the communicational aspects of collaborative work. I will describe some recent studies focused on the design of developer networks and of craft communities online. I will consider the ways in which certain tools, applications and platforms do and do not support collaborative conversations. Through this work, I will recast information search as a social practice, complementing - and perhaps challenging - the dominant vision of search as the attempt by an individual to satisfy an information need. I will open discussion to how this shifting view affects the design of social search technologies.

Biography: Elizabeth Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research where she leads the Internet Experiences research group. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to consider how to design effective communication situations- both face to face and technologically mediated. Influences on her work include psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture and film studies.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, she worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Before that she was the lead of the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto.

Applications developed and/or evaluated include cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards and animated interface personas.

Mary Czerwinski

Talk Title: Building a Better World via the User-Centered Design of Technology

Abstract: Today’s information workers are characterized by their ability to easily handle interruptions, multi-task, switch tasks quickly, and make sense of enormous amounts of information in high-pressure situations. Current and future technologies, including various wearables and sensing devices, ensure that robust communications and information transmissions can occur almost anywhere, any time. Our ability to log, collect, and visualize event data has become more sophisticated, allowing us to analyze trends and identify patterns across many areas of individual and group behaviors. How do we use these technological trends to ensure that we are designing tools that improve productivity, insight, and an overall sense of user control? In this talk, Mary discusses her research group’s approach to the user-centered design of advanced user interfaces, and she describes several of their research projects.

Biography: Mary Czerwinski is a research area manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. The group is responsible for studying and designing advanced technology and interaction techniques that leverage human capabilities across a wide variety of input and output channels. Mary’s primary research areas include spatial cognition, information visualization and task switching. Mary has been an affiliate professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington since 1996. She has also held positions at Compaq, Rice University, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation, and Bell Communications Research. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington.

Kathleen Fisher

Talk Title: Programming Language Ideas Escape the Lab: A Declarative Data Description Language for Managing Ad hoc Data

Abstract: XML. HTML. CSV. JPEG. MPEG. These data formats represent vast quantities of scientific, governmental, industrial, and private data. Because the formats have been standardized and are widely used, many reliable, efficient, and convenient tools exist for processing such data. In an ideal world, all data would be in such formats. In reality, however, we are not nearly so fortunate. Instead, vast amounts of data exist in ad hoc formats, which do not typically have readily available tools. Every day, network administrators, financial analysts, computer scientists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, and physicists deal with ad hoc data in a myriad of complex formats, wasting valuable time on low-level chores like parsing and format translation instead of actually using the information stored in their data.

In this talk, I will describe the PADS data description language that colleagues and I have designed and built to address this problem. PADS allows users to describe both the physical layout of ad hoc data sources and semantic properties of that data. From such descriptions, the PADS compiler generates libraries and tools for manipulating the data, including parsing routines, statistical profiling tools, translation programs to produce well-behaved formats such as XML, and tools for running queries over raw PADS data sources. The descriptions are concise enough to serve as “living” documentation while flexible enough to describe most of the ASCII, binary, and Cobol formats that we have seen in practice. The generated parsing library provides for robust, application-specific error handling. As I describe PADS and its associated tools, I will highlight how various ideas from the programming language research community have informed the design and implementation of the PADS system.

Information about PADS and a list of the many people who have contributed to the system is available from the project web site: www.padsproj.org

Biography: Kathleen Fisher is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs Research, where she has worked since receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1996. Throughout her career, Kathleen has worked to apply ideas from the programming language research community to other domains. In one such example, she co-led the effort to design and build Hancock, a domain-specific language for cleanly and efficiently computing signatures. A signature is an evolving profile of an entity described in a massive transaction stream. Examples of entities include IP addresses or telephone numbers. AT&T uses such signatures to detect various kinds of fraud, saving significant amounts of money by doing so.

Kathleen is currently serving as Chair of SIGPLAN, which is the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages for the ACM. She serves on the steering committee of CRA-W, which is the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women, where she works to encourage more women to pursue research careers in computer science. She is an editor of the Journal of Functional Programming, and has served as program chair for the research meetings FOOL (Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages), CUFP (Commercial Uses of Functional Programming), and ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming).

In another example, Kathleen is currently working on the PADS project, which she initiated and co-leads. The goal of this project is to facilitate the management of ad hoc data, data that is not in XML nor in a relational database. PADS allows data analysts to write declarative descriptions of such data, including physical layout information and semantic constraints. From such descriptions, the PADS system generates a variety of tools and applications for manipulating the data. Recent work focuses on automatically generating such descriptions from sample data sets.

Laura Haas

Talk Title: Getting It Together: Empowering People through Information (Integration)

Abstract: We depend on information, in both our work and personal lives. But the information we need is scattered in many different data sources: on the web, in our personal devices, in documents and in databases, or hidden within application programs. Often we need to get information from several of these sources to complete a task. However, this can be a difficult or time-consuming endeavor. This talk describes some information-intensive tasks, choosing examples from such areas as healthcare, science, the business world and our personal lives. It will discuss the barriers to getting information together and delivering it to the people that need it, in a form they can understand, review key research on information integration and information interaction, indicate how the combination may enable real progress, and illustrate where research challenges remain.

Biography: Laura Haas is the IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Computer Science at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. Laura leads research in information software across IBM’s eight worldwide research labs. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM’s Software Group. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 LUW was developed), on Garlic, a system which allowed integration of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement, and an IBM Corporate Award for her work on information integration technology. Dr. Haas is Vice President of the VLDB Board of Trustees, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and a member of the board of the Computing Research Association.

Anna Karlin

Title: A Survey of Some Recent Research at the Border of Game Theory, Economics and Computer Science

Abstract: The emergence of the Internet as one of the most important arenas for resource sharing between parties with diverse and selfish interests has led to a number of fascinating and new algorithmic problems and issues at the intersection of game theory, economics and computer science. In this talk, we survey recent research at this intersection, with a specific focus on the design and analysis of auctions.

Biography: Anna Karlin is a Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987. Before coming to the University of Washington, she spent 5 years as a researcher at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. Her research is primarily in theoretical computer science: the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly probabilistic and online algorithms. Her work is often at the interface between theory and other areas, such as economics and game theory, data mining, operating systems, networks, and distributed systems.

Her main passions are her daughter Sophie, work, espresso, movies, tango and playing and listening to rock and roll music. Her main distinction in this latter domain is having been, in her youth, part of “an obscure and very bad band of furry Palo Alto geeks” (according to the Rolling Stones) called Severe Tire Damage. STD was the first band to broadcast live over the Internet.

Deidre Meldrum

Talk Title: Automation to Understand and Ultimately Improve Health and the Environment for the Future

Abstract: Advances in automation combined with molecular biology, nanotechnology, chemistry, materials and communications are enabling significant technology advances that permit deeper understanding of human health, disease and our environment. In turn, new diagnostic capabilities and real-time monitoring systems are being developed to detect and respond to, or in some cases prevent, changes in living organisms and the environment.

Automation and its role in the rapidly evolving fields of medicine and the environment will be addressed by presenting relevant ongoing research in centers in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University along with other relevant results in these fields.

The Centers for Bioelectronics and Biosensors, EcoGenomics, Environmental Biotechnology and Nanobioscience are developing novel molecular, biological, chemical and electronic sensors and tools to take us from understanding how human cells and microorganisms work to personalized medicine and environmental monitoring. Technologies from the centers, including new polymer materials, sensors, microfluidics, nanotechnology and micro-optics are being integrated into microscale instrument modules to measure multiple parameters in living cells in real-time to correlate cellular events with genomic information (e.g. gene expression and genomic rearrangements).

These modules enable scientists to pursue and solve scientific questions that require analysis of heterogeneous cell populations. The microsystem modules are used for real-time quantitative assessment of expression of different genes and the resulting phenotypes as a function of environmental (and cell-to-cell) interactions.

The technology is being applied to fundamental problems of biology and health including cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Further development of the technology to make it small, robust in the real environment (human body, oceans, etc.), fast, and low power will enable in vivo diagnostics in humans and real-time monitoring of microbial populations in the environment. The talk will delve into exciting possibilities for the future.

Collaborations with other schools at ASU, including the new School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Global Institute of Sustainability, will further enhance the vision of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering as well as the applications of these automated biomedical and environmental technologies and their impact on a global society.

Biography: Deirdre Meldrum is Dean of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, Director of the Center for Ecogenomics, Director of the NIH Microscale Life Sciences Center, and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research is in developing novel automated systems, sensors, and microscale devices for applications in genomics, human health and disease, and oceanography. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of AAAS, and was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She received the B.S. in Civil Engineering from University of Washington, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Before becoming Dean of Engineering at ASU she was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington for 14 years.

http://www.fulton.asu.edu/fulton/
http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/centers/eg/

AnnaLee Saxenian

Talk Title: Venture Capital in the ‘Periphery:’ The New Argonauts, Global Search, and Local Institution Building

Abstract: The emergence of centers of technology entrepreneurship and innovation outside, but closely connected to, the advanced core of the world economy, is one of the most striking features of contemporary capitalism. This talk explores the growing role of global, or external, search networks (that firms and other actors rely on to locate collaborators who can solve part of a problem they face, or require part of a solution they may be able provide) in these economic transformations. Networks of first-generation immigrant professionals from U.S. technology industries–whose members are referred to here as the new Argonauts, an allusion to the ancient Greek Jason and the Argonauts who searched for the Golden Fleece–are naturally occurring search networks. They are ideally positioned to search beyond local routines and identify opportunities in their home countries for complementary “peripheral” participation in the global economy. By collaborating with their domestic counterparts, the new Argonauts have contributed to the development of institutions, like venture capital, that support entrepreneurial experimentation in locations ranging from Taiwan and Israel to China and India. Venture capital is an exemplary search network: it is organized to search systematically for, and foster the development of, entrepreneurs and firms that can collaborate in the co-design of new products and services. This suggests that the most significant contributions of the Argonauts to their home countries are not direct transfers of technology or knowledge, but their participation in external search and domestic institutional reform.
 

Biography: AnnaLee Saxenian has made a career of studying regional economics and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. Her latest book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006), explores how and why immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley are transferring their technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in their home countries—China and India in particular—and launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. The “brain drain,” she argues, has now become “brain circulation”— a powerful economic force for the development of formerly peripheral regions that is sparking profound transformations in the global economy.

Saxenian is the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information and a professor in Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994), Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). She holds a PhD in political science from MIT, a master’s in regional planning from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Williams College.

Ellen B. Stechel, PhD

Talk Title: Implications of Frontier Nano Science and Technology for the Energy Sector

Abstract: Fossil Fuels are relatively cheap, easily distributed, and readily used but are a finite energy resource, have serious ecological and geo-political implications. Before the century concludes, the world will need to find abundant, cost effective, safe, secure, and sustainable alternatives or suffer a much reduced standard of living. Existing and emerging technologies will not be sufficient to sustain the growing aspirations of an increasing worldwide population; but frontier science and technology, especially nanotechnology and state-of-the-art computational science, hold the promise and potential to navigate the multitude of challenges, which include energy security, national security, economic-well being, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This presentation will highlight some promising opportunities to rise above these challenges.

Biography: Ellen Stechel is the Manager of the Fuels and Energy Transitions Department in the Energy Futures Group at Sandia National Laboratories, where she concentrates on building research programs and capabilities in energy technologies to simultaneously reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. She manages and develops programs to:

• produce renewable liquid hydrocarbon fuels from solar or nuclear energy and recycled CO2
• progress the development of viable fuel cell and reversible fuel cell technologies
• advance novel hydrogen generation concepts and technologies
• develop lower energy water purification technologies
• create new materials for gas and other separations as well as for detection of biological or radiological activity

Her department also has the responsibility for managing the Department of Energy’s, Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Facility on the North Slope of Alaska, which plays a critical role in reducing uncertainties in climate science models.

Stechel joined Sandia for the first time in 1981 as a technical staff member in the Condensed Matter Physics Department. From 1994-1998 she was the manager of the Advanced Materials and Device Sciences Department, which worked on experimental, theoretical, and computational projects in materials such as novel carbon forms, boron-carbide, and high temperature cuprate superconductors, with a number of applications and devices in mind. Stechel re-joined Sandia in 2005 to work on contract for the Department of Homeland Security, Science & Technology Division, Office of Research and Development developing strategies for Technology Transition otherwise known as the Technology Development lifecycle from basic research to commercialization or deployment. Upon completion of that temporary assignment, she returned to Sandia, Albuquerque to form her current department in the summer of 2006. Prior to re-joining Sandia, she worked at Ford Motor Company from 1998-2005 where she covered a range of energy and environmental programs at Ford and in Universities (e.g., Ford/MIT Alliance and BP/Ford/Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative,) including building a sustainability science program, overseeing Ford Research Lab’s atmospheric chemistry and climate change programs, as well as proving and deploying new low emission technologies on many of Ford’s North American vehicles. As a result of her varied career, her experience base has touched almost every aspect of the Science, Engineering, Technology, Business, and Policy Enterprise in a number of research fields, including chemistry, physics, materials, surfaces, the environment, and computational science.

Stechel received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Chemistry from Oberlin College, in 1974 and her master’s degree in Physical Chemistry and PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of Chicago, in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Her professional activities include: Senior Editor, J. of Physical Chemistry 1998-00, Chair of the Division of Physical Chemistry, American Chemical Society, 1998, and Co-Founder, Strategic Oversight, and Scientific Oversight for the Computational Materials Science Network (CMSN), DOE/Basic Energy Sciences.

Manuela M. Veloso

Talk Title: Multi-Robot Intelligence

Abstract: Robots are physical artifacts with a seamless integration of perception, cognition, and action. The presentation will be focused on teams of intelligent autonomous robots performing tasks in highly uncertain domains. Robots need to jointly assess the state of their environment, communicate with each other, make decisions, execute actions towards the achievement of team objectives, and learn from observation and feedback based on the outcome of their actions.

Biography: Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. She also received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1980 and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1984 from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon.

Veloso researches in planning, control learning, and execution for multirobot teams. Her algorithms address uncertain, dynamic, and adversarial environments. With her students, Veloso has developed teams of robot soccer agents, which have been RoboCup world champions several times.

Veloso is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and President-Elect of the RoboCup International Federation. She was awarded an NSF Career Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997.

Veloso created the new “V-unit” program several years ago, to provide an opportunity for graduate students to grow a Vision of how computer science and technology can affect non-traditional problems dealing with society, ecology, and sustained devlopment.

Veloso is the author of one book on “Planning by Analogical Reasoning” and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 200 journal articles and conference papers.