Dr. Peter Norvig

Dr. Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field (with 94% market share).

Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at 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. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence.
For this year's symposium he will be speaking about:

Practice makes perfect: How billions of examples lead to better models of language, pictures, and other things

The Internet gives us access to billions of pages of information, along with billions of pictures and hundreds of millions of videos. Of course, a person could never look at all of them, but computers are faster than humans -- what can a computer learn from all this information? In this talk we will see that a computer might not learn in the same way that a person does, but it can use massive amounts of data to perform selected tasks very well. We will see that a computer can correct spelling mistakes, translate from Arabic to English, and recognize celebrity faces about as well as an average human -- and can do it all by learning from examples rather than by relying on programming.

* Bio and picture taken from Peter Norvig personal website.

Joyce Bromberg

Joyce Bromberg is director of WorkSpace Futures Research at Steelcase Inc and has been since 2002. In this role, Joyce is responsible for user-centered research for vertical markets and Phase 0 research for new product development. Sometimes called “pioneering research,” this activity utilizes her 25 years of industry experience in the areas of observation, synthesis and design.

Previously, she was the director of Space-Planning Research and Environment Design, where she was responsible for all research and development activities related to space planning, the design of Steelcase environments, and was the lead developer of community-based planning, a space-planning methodology and web-based tool set.

Joyce joined Steelcase in 1982 as an interior designer. In 1986, she was promoted to Interior Design project manager, designing many award-winning showrooms and industry/trade show events. She then was appointed manager of Strategic Planning for the architect and design market. She has also served as director of Surface Materials and Advanced Concepts.

Joyce is a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and has a BA in Art History from The State University of New York at Stony Brook. She lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., with her husband Carl, a highenergy particle physicist.

Title of talk: Applying User-Centered Design to Create the Workplace of the Future

* Bio and picture taken from the HERS sebsite

Plenary Speakers

David Cohn

Dr. David Cohn is Director, Business Informatics at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. He supervises a research team focused on modeling, transforming and integrating information and business structures for on demand solutions. He directs IBM’s worldwide research strategy in support of Business Design & Implementation.

Prior to his current position, Dr. Cohn was Director of IBM’s Austin Research Laboratory which focuses on exploratory VLSI design, electronic CAD tools and high-productivity system design and is home of IBM's Low-Power Initiative. He also served as Director, Strategic Projects at Armonk assisting the Chairman and corporate executives in formulating and assessing IBM’s worldwide business strategy. Before joining IBM, he was Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Notre Dame.

For this year's symposium he will be speaking about:

MDBT & Business Entities: Unifying Process & Data Modeling

Both business process modeling and data management are key to understanding and implementing business operations. Classic business process modeling is "activity" centered and deals with data only as it is used by activities. By contrast, data management focuses on the "data lifecycles needs of an enterprise" and ignores activities. However, refining and implementing nontrivial business operations requires that data management and business processes be seamlessly melded. To achieve this convergence, we have developed an "entity-centric" approach to operation modeling and IT solution implementation. This talk introduces the approach and discusses its use in solution development. It also touches on the relationship between the artifact-centric perspective and SOA and REST.

* Bio and picture taken from IBM Research.

Anthony Pensa

Tony Pensa has been with the Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since 1969. His initial assignments at Lincoln Laboratory were associated with re-entry systems and air traffic control programs. Subsequently, Pensa developed and implemented coherent integration tracking, which led to the realization of U.S. operational deep space radar capability.

Since 1988, Pensa has served on the Industrial and Professional Advisory Council for Penn State’s College of Engineering. In 1991, he was chairman of the committee for Penn State’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), acting as chairman of the 2001 study on “Sensor Technology for Difficult Targets.” Pensa also has been a member of the Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on Space Superiority and the DSB/SAB Task Force on National Security Space.
He is the recipient of the NRO Directors Award for Distinguished Service, the Air Force Award for Distinguished Service, and the NASA Group Achievement Award.
Pensa received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State.

Title of talk: Evolution of MIT Lincoln Lab into Net-centric Information Fusion

* Bio and picture taken from IST.

Piero Bonissone

Dr. Bonissone has published more than one hundred articles in the area of expert systems, approximate reasoning, fuzzy sets, pattern recognition, decision analysis, and interactive interfaces. Articles published in IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Information Science, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, IJCAI Proceedings, ACM Proceedings, and numerous book chapters. He received 33 patents from the U.S. Patent Office for his work on reasoning with uncertainty and fuzzy logic (and 20 more are pending).

Title of talk: Industrial Applications of Computational Intelligence at GE

* Bio and picture taken from Dr. Bonissone's personal web page.