Adam Usadi (ExxonMobil)
Adam Usadi received a BS in Physics from Dartmouth College, a MS in materials science from Hiroshima University, and a PhD in Space Physics from Rice University. Adam worked for Goldman Sachs where he supported precious metals trading. At ExxonMobil's Upstream Research Company in Houston he worked on problems in reservoir modeling and seismic processing including numerical formulation and discretization methods, mathematical solvers, parallelization, and new hardware applications. At ExxonMobil's Corporate Strategic Research company in New Jersey he's worked in the Complex Systems Science section on new human-computer interface methods in the geosciences and applications of machine learning methods. In 2008 he became Section Head of the Complex Systems Science section where he leads the groups in data mining and fusion as well as supply chain optimization.
Keynote (Friday, Feb 20, 2009 8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.)
As ExxonMobil searches for new sources of energy, decides how to develop and process these resources, and sustains existing operations while improving efficiency and safeguarding the environment, technology will play a critical role in meeting these challenges. We'll take a look at some of these technologies as well as the advanced modeling, information processing and decision support systems that complement them.
Igor Perisic (LinkedIn)
Dr. Igor Perisic is the Director of Search at LinkedIn. In the past he has worked as a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, Director of Entopia's research program, Statistical Consultant at Turn, and CTO at Healthline.com. Dr. Perisic holds a bachelor of science in mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a doctorate in statistics from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Perisic has published several scientific articles related to the educational, Biostatistical, data-mining and information retrieval fields. Dr. Perisic has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including several NSF and NIH funds, and Swiss National Science Foundation grants. His current interests are in the areas of statistics, data mining, social networks analysis, search algorithms, semantic engines, unstructured data analysis, knowledge management, and information retrieval.
Keynote (Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:45 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.) Download the Slides
Social network sites have experienced tremendous growth over the last 3 years. This growth is ongoing where major sites are still seeing a doubling of their member base on an annual basis. As they have become ubiquitous they have started to affect our social and professional fabric. We will discuss some potential of Social Network Sites as a platform for a Web2.0 type of extension to what is happening inside the work place. Indeed, by looking at what was or is a traditional picture of Knowledge Management it would seem that Social Network Sites are able to circumvent some traditional challenges. As all journeys have a beginning, we’ll start by some aspects of Social Networking Sites that are usually under the cover; its search engine.
Sandy Payette (Fedora Commons)
As Executive Director of Fedora Commons, Sandy bridges research and innovation with practical applications and open source software deployment. Her original research at Cornell University Information Science led to the founding of the Fedora Project which, in 2007, she successfully directed into the Fedora Commons non-profit organization. Sandy continually collaborates with scholars, scientists, and practitioners nationally and internationally to further the mission of Fedora Commons and to continue her research in scholarly communication, digital libraries, digital preservation, and information modeling. Sandra also spent ten years in industry leading information technology projects at Corning Incorporated, a Fortune 500 company. Her leadership led to early adoption of computing and information technologies by executives and senior management, helping to forge new processes and techniques for strategic business analysis.
Building Scholarly and Scientific Information Infrastructure: Open Source, The Cloud, and the Role of “High-Tech” Non-Profit Organization (Thursday, February 19, 2009 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.)
The World Wide Web has unleashed the unprecedented sharing and dissemination of information and the recent phenomenon of “Web 2.0” takes things one step further by turning the Web into a distributed platform for collaboration and participation. Scientists and scholars are increasingly looking to social networking and information sharing technologies as a means of sharing ideas, objects, and data. At the same time, we are faced with significant social and technical challenges in managing large amounts of data and assuring long-term sustainability of digital information. I will discuss three important social dimensions of emerging information infrastructure within the scholarly and scientific domain: openness, scale, and trust. Symmetrically, I will discuss the significance of three important technology trends: open source software, cloud computing, and “high-tech” non-profit organizations.
Mary Lou Maher (NSF)
Mary Lou Maher is the Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division at the National Science Foundation, where she established the CreativeIT Program. Before joining the NSF, she was Professor of Design Computing at The University of Sydney and co-director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition. Mary Lou completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering at Columbia University in 1979, and a Master of Science and PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. She was an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University when she moved to The University of Sydney in 1990. Her research interests span a broad area of design computing, specifically virtual environments and representation of design knowledge. Her current research topics are: designing 3D virtual worlds, collaborative virtual environments, agent-based virtual worlds, situated case-based reasoning, tangible interfaces to design models, intrinsic motivation as a model for curious agents, and the study and development of novel HCI and communications technology in supporting collaborative design.
Keynote (Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.)
Human creativity is highly valued and not well understood with respect to computational systems. Using creativity as a focus I will talk about new ways of interacting with digital information that affect human perception in a way that enhances creativity, and computational paradigms that explore a search space that have potential to generate creative solutions or behaviors. New interaction techniques are typically considered as creativity support tools. New computational paradigms allow us to explore our understanding of both human creativity and computer creativity.
Frank van Ham (IBM)
Frank van Ham is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research's Visual Communications Lab. He obtained a MSc degree in Computer Science (with honors) from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands and a PhD in Information Visualization from the same institute in 2005 before joining IBM Research in 2006. His research background is in Information Visualization and large network analysis and he has (co-)authored over 20 papers in these areas. At IBM, Frank explores how information visualization can enhance collaboration and communication among users and how online environments enable broader access to these technologies.
Keynote: Democratizing Data (Friday, February 20, 2009 11:00 a.m.- 12:00 p.m.)
Advances in computer sensing, storage, processing and networking have allowed us to gather and store increasing amounts of data. As a direct result, the average information worker is now confronted with a veritable data mountain, yet has very little tools to make sense of it. The field of Information visualization uses the innate visual processing capabilities of the human brain to help users detect patterns, trends and anomalies in large data sets. Traditionally information visualization research has focused on creating visual tools that help a single user analyze a large data set for patterns. Alternatively (but often overlooked), information visualization can also be used for communicative purposes, where the main goal is not to detect unknown patterns, but to transfer insight from one user to another. In this talk, I will present and demo work my group did on an internet-based platform for collaborative information visualization, that allows user to upload their own data sets, visualize them and subsequently share them with others users.
Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter)
Dr. Abdur Chowdhury has launched over 20 commercial search products, filed more than twenty patent applications, and written over 80 publications. Dr. Chowdhury has served as the Chief Architect for Search at AOL and held positions at IIT Information Retrieval Lab, Georgetown Computer Science Department, and University of Maryland's Institute for Systems Research. Dr. Chowdhury also serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Dr. Chowdhury was co-founder of Summize.com working on organizing opinions from the web, which was acquired by Twitter in 2008 and now serves as Twitter's Chief Scientist.
Keynote (Friday, February 20, 2009 2:10 p.m. - 3:10 p.m.)
Twitter represents a new means of communicating, allowing people to share what they are doing in real-time and to monitor what others are doing as well while driving, getting coffee, or sitting at their computer; indeed anyone ‘connected’ to the system via Web, cellular phone, IM or email can stay attuned to whatever interests them. This new communications phenomenon, commonly referred to as micro-blogging, represents an exciting new area of communications and it is precisely the ‘micro’ part that distinguished the micro-blogs from other communication mediums like blogs, WebPages, and on-line reviews. These micro-blogs are immediate, ubiquitous, and scalable and since they are on-line, they are also typically accessible by anyone with an Internet connection. This talk will provide insights and viewpoints on the evolution and future direction of this exciting new communications technology.
Richard A. Behr
Dr. Richard Behr came to Penn State University in 1997 as Head of the Department of Architectural Engineering. He served in that capacity until 2007, when he was appointed the inaugural Charles and Elinor Matts Professor of Architectural Engineering and, shortly thereafter, the founding director of the Penn State Smart Spaces Center for Adaptive Aging in Place. His engineering research area is related to the structural performance and durability of architectural glass and building envelope systems under the effects of severe windstorms, earthquakes, and accelerated weathering conditions.
Keynote (Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.) Download the Slides: PPTX | PPT
Our society is just now confronting the leading edge of an enormous demographic challenge as we attempt to accommodate adaptively the aging of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. Some call it the “Silver Tsunami”! In July 2008, Penn State University embarked on a bold, interdisciplinary research initiative called the Smart Spaces Center for Adaptive Aging in Place. The goal of the Smart Spaces Center is to create interdisciplinary teams of Penn State faculty and strategic partners to develop research activities that take advantage of what we know about aging, home design, technology, community planning, and public policy advances to create innovative and practical solutions to enable elderly persons to remain at home as long as possible, while maintaining a high quality of life. This presentation will describe this new Smart Spaces initiative and will summarize some of the progress made to date.
