Announcements

Online Registration Now Closed

Online Registration is now closed. If you did not registered online, please register onsite. The registration desk will be located in the atrium at the entrance to the ballroom.
If you have any concerns about registration please contact Phillip Ayoub at pja143@psu.edu

Preliminary Program now available

A preliminary program is now available on the program page. There will be some last minute updates in the next week or so. Please check the program page over the next week for the final program.

Peter Norvig and Joyce Bromberg to Keynote Symposium

A key executive with Google, the world’s leading Internet search company, will be the opening speaker for the 2008 College of Information Sciences and Technology Graduate Symposium at Penn State.

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, will speak in the ballroom of the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus, Thursday, January 31, from 7:30 to 8:15 p.m.

The speech will be a major highlight of the two-day IST Graduate Symposium, January 31 and February 1. Now in its third year, the theme for the 2008 event is “Creativity and Innovation: The Future of Information, Technology and the Enterprise.”

Featured on the second day of the symposium will be Joyce Bromberg, director of WorkSpace Futures-Research with Steelcase, Inc. Along with these talks will be panel sessions, poster presentations, tutorials and demonstrations involving graduate students from across Penn State, faculty members and guests from business and industry.

Peter Norvig has been with Google since 2001. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a leading textbook in AI.

Prior to joining Google, Norvig was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. Norvig has been a faculty member at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member in the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

Norvig has over fifty publications in computer science, concentrating on artificial intelligence, natural language processing and software engineering. He also is the author of a satirical PowerPoint presentation based on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the world's longest palindromic sentence.