Dilma Da Silva
Talk: Fifty years of Operating Systems Research: still relevant and exciting.
This talk presents operating systems research from a historic perspective, identifying a set of five resource management aspects that delineate most of the research done so far in operating systems. The talk also discusses the main challenges being investigated today and speculate on the next 10 years.
Bio:
Dilma da Silva is a researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, in New York. She manages the Advanced Operating Systems group. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1997. Prior to joining IBM, she was an Assistant Professor at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her research in system software addresses the need for scalable and adaptable system software. She has published more than 60 technical papers. Dilma is a member of the board of CRA-W (Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research) and a co-founder of the Latinas in Computing group. More information can be found at www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dilma.
J.T. Kimbell
Talk: Microsoft from the Inside, College from the Outside
As a recent graduate of the University of Iowa CS Program, former ACM President, and current Microsoft employee I've had the chance to look at where I am now and what I did in college that brought me here. Given that I don't have the same level of technical genius as the other fantastic speakers here, I want to present about something I know best: my experiences. I'll share what I found worthwhile or useless from college. Do grades matter? If so, why do they matter? What about a Master's degree? Participation in clubs? What do I wish I would have done? Note done? I will also share my perceptions of Microsoft as a company and as a workplace and how my perceptions of the company have changed. Do I still think they are an Evil Empire? Do I still use Linux? Am I a PC? This talk is full of things I would've found interesting while in college, and I hope that they can motivate and enlighten you. Time for questions will be included in the talk.
Bio:
JT Kimbell is currently a Program Manager on the Windows Embedded team at Microsoft as has been in this position since the summer of 2009. Previous to that you could find him wandering the halls of MacLean Hall or holed up in the 201A, the ACM Office as he attended the University of Iowa from 2004-2009, graduating with a BS in Computer Science as well as an MCS. We'd list more information about JT, but nobody cares where he went to high school or about the time he worked as "Milk and Coke" for Burge Cafeteria. In his free time, JT enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, reading books, playing and watching sports (especially football) and playing video games. Don't be afraid to stop and say "Hi" if you see him, he's more than happy to stop and chat.
Vasant Honavar
Talk: On the Transformative Nature of Computational Thinking - Some Examples from the Sciences and Humanities
Computer Science is often equated with the ubiquitous information technologies that are enabled by it, e.g., the World-Wide Web, electronic mail, digital media, computer games, and complex software for data processing and simulation. Few need convincing that the technologies enabled by advances in computing and communications have become familiar and indispensable fixtures in our everyday lives. However, the transformative impact of computing in our quest to understand ourselves and the world around us, traditionally a preoccupation of the established sciences and the humanities, is not as widely recognized. I will argue that the sciences as well as the humanities are fundamentally about re(presenting), organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, communicating, and sharing information-bearing artifacts - be they descriptions of worlds real or imagined worlds. Computer Science is the systematic study of information processing, regardless of whether such information is encoded in bits and bytes in a computer memory, our brains, our genomes, or information-bearing artifacts of our creation, such as the works of literature, art, or products of our culture. Hence, the central thesis of this talk is that computing provides an orderly, formal framework as well as an exploratory apparatus for the sciences as well as the humanities. I will elaborate on this thesis, drawing on examples from the sciences and the humanities.
Bio:
Dr. Vasant Honavar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1990. He is currently a professor of Computer Science and of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Iowa State University where he directs the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning & Discovery. His research interests include artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, machine learning, bioinformatics, computational systems biology, data mining, semantic web, and social informatics. Prof. Honavar's current research focuses on information integration and knowledge acquisition from diverse data sources, learning predictive models from richly structured data, knowledge representation and inference in federated knowledge bases, specification-driven composition, substitution, and adaptation of services, secrecy-preserving query answering, and applications of machine learning in characterizing and predicting macromolecular sequence-structure-interaction-function relationships.
John Hart
Talk: Assistive Technology for the Aesthetically Impaired
We have inexpensive cameras for creating digital content like pictures and video, powerful image and video editing software for manipulating the content and popular social internet websites for sharing our results. But while most of us know how to operate these tools, we have no idea how to use these tools to make our digital content attractive and effective. For example, apps like Photoshop provides a wealth of tools for improving photographs, but no advice on how to use these tools to make a picture look better. This talk analyzes this situation, targets it with a novel research initiative, and summarizes some of our recent challenges and results for tools to assist users untrained in the established principles of the visual arts.
Bio:
John C. Hart is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studies computer graphics, computational topology and computational aesthetics. His work there on high-performance graphics, shape modeling and rendering are supported by Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, NAVTEQ, NVIDIA and the NSF. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, a co-author of "Real-Time Shading," a contributing author for "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach" and an executive producer of the documentary "The Story of Computer Graphics." He received his B.S. from Aurora University in 1987, and a Ph.D. in 1991 from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nick Street
Talk: Applications of Data Mining in Health Care
Data mining - the automatic discovery of relevant patterns in
large-scale data - is a fast-growing field that combines machine
learning, database analysis, and applied mathematics. In this talk I
will highlight some recent research that uses predictive data mining
to facilitate more effective and individualized health care. The
questions we will consider include: How can a patient choose the best
hospital for a procedure? How can a physician choose the best
diagnostic test to reach a fast, cheap, and correct diagnosis? And,
how can a nurse minimize a child's distress during a painful medical
procedure?
Bio:
W. Nick Street received a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, an M.S. in Computer Science
from DePaul University in 1990, and a B.A. in Math and Computer
Science from Drake University in 1985. He is currently an associate
professor and Henry B. Tippie Research Fellow in the Management
Sciences Department at the University of Iowa, and has joint
appointments in the Computer Science Department and the College of
Nursing. He is also the director of the interdisciplinary program in
Health Informatics.