ABSTRACT

While they might share common conservation goals, motivating advocates, scientists and policy makers to share public data is no easy task. Issues of trust, data provenance, statistical accuracy, and usability are all challenges that cause collaborative public GIS platforms to fail. Rhiza Labs CEO Josh Knauer will give an overview of databasin.org, a free online website for the conservation community using Google Maps/Earth, that is winning accolades from both scientists and advocates for its scientific integrity, robust mapping and analytical tools and ease of use. Prior to writing a single line of code, the DataBasin design team conducted in-depth interviews with both data producers and consumers to understand how best to motivate users to share public data. The result is a system that delivers valuable tools that meet the needs of a diverse user-base and offers a unique publication model that rewards everyone for collaborative behavior.

This is part of a larger project to build a peer-to-peer Information Commons of public data: several papers describing our technological and collaborative innovations are available at http://www.maya.com/infocommons/magic.html#papers.

Speaker: Josh Knauer – Chief Executive Officer, Rhiza Labs
Josh has been a social entrepreneur for the past 20 years, creating and leading successful organizations in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. His ability to spot emerging trends in technology and how they can be used for the betterment of society and the environment have caused him to be considered a leading expert in the field. He’s been featured in Time, Fortune, Newsweek and Wired magazines, and was even named a New Media Hero by the Utne Reader.

Prior to heading up MAYA Design’s Information Commons research effort, Josh founded and was the Executive Director of the EnviroLink Network, the Internet’s largest and most complete environmental information resource, in 1991. He went on to become the Founder and CEO of GreenMarketplace.com, an e-commerce site for socially and environmentally responsible products, services, and information. In 2002, Knauer sold GreenMarketplace.com to Gaiam.

Josh lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife, children and dog. When not starting up a new business, he can be found in his garden tending organic and heirloom vegetables or out hiking in the woods.

Duration : 1:7:59

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ABSTRACT

In 18 months full human genome sequences will be available under $100 – and in minutes. The $5,000 full human genome was announced to come in 9 months. Is “Big IT” ready for the avalanche of data, to be obtained and processed e.g. while the patient is still on the operating table, to be diagnosed, and how the genomics glitch, that caused a benign or malign tumor, could be compensated for?

Algorithmic approaches are needed to better understand genome regulation, even for the simple reason to deploy most effective data retrieval, data storage and computational means, via both parallel hardware and software, but more importantly for opening entirely new perspectives.

In the 100+ year old Genomics, for over half a Century had us to resign to the fatalistic gloom that we are stuck with any glitches in our inherited genome. Is it true that genomic glitches doom one to “incurable” hereditary diseases?

No longer. Genomics now considers the DNA-RNA-Protein chain not as a thermodynamically closed system, where entropy increases, but as an open system that can be interfered with. There is theoretically sound hope that you are not stuck with your genomic glitches.

After half a Century of sticking to two mistaken axioms of Genomics, the paradigm of recursive genome function must quickly make up for lost time for those (potentially) inflicted with formerly “incurable” diseases. “The Genome baby is left on the doorsteps of Information Technology”.

Doctors sent those inflicted with fleece for “debugging”. Debugging genome information (by Genome Computers) would be much harder without understanding the algorithms that our natural genome computing operates with.

Speaker: Dr. Andras Pellionisz
Ph.D. in Biology
Ph.D. in Computer Engineering
Director of Genome Informatics, Mitrionics, Inc., Los Gatos, California
European Union visiting Professor for Hungary (for “European Inaugural of IPGS”)
Founder of International PostGenetics Society (IPGS,PostModern era of Genetics “beyond Genes”)
Founder of FractoSoft (Software for PostGenetics, Silicon Valley, with Central European outsourcing)
Founder of Helixometry (IP portfolio holding, Silicon Valley)
Inventor and Founder of FractoGene (Fractal approach to DNA)
Chief Software Architect and Chief Intelligence Officer of several Silicon Valley Internet Companies in the dot.com boom
Founder of International Neural Networks Society (INNS)
Founding Editor of Neural Networks (publication organ of INNS)
Section Editor for Neural Networks of The Cerebellum (Springer, New York & Heidelberg)
Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, New York University Medical Center
Visiting Professor of Marburg University, Germany (Humboldt Prize for Senior Distinguished Amercian Scientists)
Visiting Professor of UMR/CNRS, College de France, Paris
Senior Research Council Associate of the National Academy of Science, USA, to NASA
PostDoctoral Fellow, University of Iowa
PostDoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
Tenured Senior Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Duration : 0:58:0

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ABSTRACT

The essence of system-level design is the need to concurrently consider information from multiple engineering domains across multiple subsystems to assess holistic system properties. The systems engineer is responsible for bringing together all facets of a system for evaluation of system-level requirements and to aid in understanding system impacts of local design decisions. System-level security, encompassing issues such as confidentiality of information, integrity and authenticity of information sources, and availability of critical
services, is one of many interacting system-level issues that must be addressed. To evaluate system-level security, we must treat security requirements as system-level properties, addressing their satisfaction
in the same manner as traditional system-level issues such as power consumption or safety. Specifically, we must provide support for representing system-level security requirements; composing and integrating information from heterogeneous models; and establishing dependencies between models to assess the security health of a complete system. This talk overviews work surrounding the the Rosetta system-level design language with emphasis on efforts to specify, synthesize and verify software defined radios.

Speaker: Perry Alexander
Dr. Perry Alexander is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Director of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center’s Computer Systems Design Laboratory at The University of Kansas. His research interests include system-level modeling, security and assurance, design
languages, heterogeneous specification, language semantics, and embedded systems. He received the BSEE and BSCS in 1986, the MSEE in 1988, and the PhD in 1992 all from The University of Kansas. From September 1992 through July 1999 he was a faculty member and director of The Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Laboratory in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science department at The University of Cincinnati. He is the chief architect of the Rosetta system specification language and author of System-Level Design using Rosetta published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2006. Dr. Alexander has published over 90 refereed research papers and has presented numerous invited presentations. He has won 15 teaching awards, was named a Kemper Teaching Fellow and won the ASEE Midwest Region Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003. He is a Senior Member of ACM, Sigma Xi, and a Senior Member of IEEE where he served as Chair of the
Engineering of Computer-Based Systems Engineering Technical Committee and currently serves as Chair of the DASC P1699 Rosetta Working Group.

Duration : 0:39:14

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ABSTRACT

Internet searching and advertising increasingly plays a role in consumer decisions and purchases, yet pertinent information for making value-judgments is currently awkward to ferret out and certainly not universally accessible or useful. There is rarely a feedback loop aligning vendor or manufacturer’s environmental, social or governance policies with a shopper’s values, so shoppers, over time, rarely cause industries to change their behavior.

There needs to be a way for shoppers to aim their purchasing power at achieving social values of highest regional priority. There needs to be a way to accumulate and redeem "social values rewards". What’s missing is timely and impactful analysis of a candidate purchases’ impact on the Shopper’s family, region and planet (expressed according to their values), so that the purchaser can more easily make informed purchasing decisions.

With some modifications to Google ads and Google product search, Google could solidify the feedback loop and help consumers, by their actions, build a greener and better world.

Speaker: Bruce Cahan
Bruce B. Cahan, President Urban Logic, Inc. (a nonprofit organization)
Email: bcahan@urbanlogic.org

Bruce Cahan is an Ashoka Fellow, a social entrepreneur, a non-residential fellow of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, a lawyer, and a banker.

In 1989, a steam pipe exploded outside his apartment building, spraying the neighborhood with 220 pounds of asbestos wrapping in an 18-story geyser of steam for several hours. After that, Bruce foresaw New York City’s need for geospatial preparedness, and founded Urban Logic, a New York nonprofit, to make America’s cities safer and sustainable. Bruce convinced New York to fund and build a multi-agency GIS basemap.
As a bond lawyer, he found $20+ million in the City’s capital budget to pay for its GIS utility.
NYC’s basemap was completed just 6 months before the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, and aided in coordinated response and recovery. In the months after September 11th, Bruce joined others at the City’s Command Center to organize and staff its Emergency Mapping and Data Center. His team supplied the Mayor’s Office, Fire, Police, EMS, military, public health, environment, news and other groups with up-to-date maps of rapidly changing conditions at Ground Zero and throughout Manhattan. Bruce was the catalyst for deploying OpenGIS’
SensorWeb project to monitor environmental conditions citywide, and other innovations.

Taking 9/11’s lessons, Bruce designed the federal OMB’s I-Team Initiative to strategically plan and implement spatial readiness across 49 states. Bruce’s knowledge of finance, law and organizational barriers to spatial awareness and urban innovation comes from researching and writing major studies for the federal government, including . Financing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (FGDC 2000) . Aligning Investments in Environmental Monitoring and Management Information Systems (EPA 2002) . The Value Proposition for GeoSpatial One Stop (OMB 2004) . A Regional Portfolio Investor’s Toolkit (USGS 2006)

In 2005, Bruce moved to Silicon Valley to organize two market-driven mechanisms that support urban sustainability. The first he calls the Means MeterTM, a tool for socially-purposeful consumers to buy products that reflect their values. The second is a bank that amplifies the sustainable impacts of Means MeterTM consumers and their vendors. The bank will reward choices that grow Sustainable ResiliencyTM. Bruce’s bank would serve consumers, businesses, NGOs and governments. The bank would offer credit, insurance, investment and merchant banking services, and scale pricing and interest rates based on each customer’s impact on Sustainable ResiliencyTM.

Bruce graduated from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Temple Law School. Bruce practiced law for 10 years with Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York, where he specialized in structuring and negotiating complex corporate, bond, creditor’s rights and real estate finance and ot…

Duration : 0:50:6

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ABSTRACT

TITLE: Google’s Spatial Tools in the Marine Environment – Decision Support
Presented by: Kurt Schwehr

ABSTRACT: Google Maps and Google Earth have put much of the functionality of Geographic Information Systems in the hands of the end users. Maritime users are just beginning to understand the power of map
mashups that bring together diverse datasets to help mariners and those who manage the waterways to better understand the uses, risks, and impacts of vessel traffic on our nation’s waterways. I will present a number of data types ranging from raster images of ocean flow modeling, to vessel traffic over time captured by the marine Automatic Identification System, to real time right whale notices for
vessels approaching Boston Harbor.

Duration : 0:23:15

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ABSTRACT

Google’s own Dylan Casey will be speaking about his experience riding the TdF with the Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Team.

Check out http://www.dylancasey.com/ for more info about Dylan.

Speaker: Dylan Casey
Dylan Casey maybe best known for his prowess on the road these days, but he’s also quite accomplished on the track. In 1998, Casey became just the third U.S. cyclist in history to win national championships in both disciplines, winning the time trial event in the National Road Championships and the pursuit event at the National Track Championships.

In 2000, Casey became an Olympian when he competed in the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. The year before he won a gold medal in individual pursuit at the 1999 Pan Am Games.

Casey has stage wins from the 1997 Tour of Ohio and 89er Stage Race and the 1998 Tour of Tucson, which he also won overall. In 1999, Casey came in third overall at the Tour of Holland, sixth at the First Union Invitational and competed at the Tour of Spain. Stage wins in 2000 included one each at the Redlands Classic, the Tour of Luxembourg, and the Four Days of Dunkerque.

Born in raised in California, Casey graduated from Las Lamas High School in Walnut Creek, CA in 1989. He then went on graduate from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.S. in communications information systems in 1994.

Duration : 1:2:4

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ABSTRACT

For more info, see http://literacybridge.org/

Knowledge is power; but most knowledge is tied up in text. So how do the 774 million illiterate adults in the world access knowledge crucial to preventing disease, creating economic opportunity, and defending their political and human rights?

Cliff spent six weeks in a remote region of Ghana to understand rural poverty and sustainable development. He saw many impressive local organizations sharing valuable information for development; but he also experienced the inefficiency of delivering all this information in person.

In response to this problem, Literacy Bridge was founded to empower children and adults with tools for scalable knowledge sharing and literacy learning. The Talking Book Project is Literacy Bridge’s major program, developing new and affordable digital audio technology to provide vital, locally generated information and literacy training to people with limited access to either. Imagine a $5 iPod used to play locally generated podcasts, plus a decentralized, digital content distribution system that reaches villages without electricity but also enables global content sharing. Aside from the innovative use of technology, partnerships with local businesses, civic organizations, and government agencies play a pivotal role in the Talking Book Project.

During this talk, Cliff will share his observations from Ghana and discuss Literacy Bridge’s Talking Book Project.

Speaker: Cliff Schmidt
Executive Director of Literacy Bridge

Duration : 1:3:15

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ABSTRACT

Team Cornell was one of six teams to complete the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, completing over 55 miles of autonomous driving in an urban environment in approximately seven hours, including competition stops. The competition included many urban driving scenarios such as staying in a lane, merging into traffic, passing, intersections, parking, and even robot-robot interaction. Team Cornell designed and built a vehicle around technological innovations in vehicle automation, a real time UDP based data distribution system, tightly coupled pose estimation, scene estimation including localization within an urban environment and tracking all obstacles with a fusion of laser, radar and vision sensors, and hierarchical intelligent planning. Team Cornell’s vehicle was designed to drive “human-like” with smooth, intelligent behaviors, even in the presence of a vast array of uncertainties. The systematic approach taken by Team Cornell led to an innovative, robust solution to the complex problem proposed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. This seminar will present the key technologies, semi-final and final results, and plans for future research.

Speaker: Dan Huttenlocher
Dan Huttenlocher is the John P. and Rilla Neafsey Professor of Computing, Information Science and Business at Cornell University, where he holds a joint appointment in the Computer Science Department and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. His research interests are in computer vision, social and information networks, collaboration tools, geometric algorithms and financial trading systems. He has been recognized for his research and teaching contributions on several occasions, including being named an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, New York State Professor of the Year and a Fellow of the ACM. In addition to academic posts he has been chief technical officer of Intelligent Markets, a provider of advanced trading systems on Wall Street, and spent more than ten years at Xerox PARC directing work that led to the ISO JBIG2 image-compression standard.

Speaker: Mark Campbell
Mark Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. His research interests are in the areas of autonomous systems, probabilistic models of human decision making, nonlinear estimation theory, cooperative vehicle control and estimation, and sensor fusion. He has been recognized from NASA for his modeling and control work on the Middeck Active Control Experiment, flown on STS-67 in 1995. He received best paper awards from the AIAA and Frontiers in Education conference, and teaching awards Cornell, University of Washington, and the ASEE. He was also an Australian Research Council International Fellowship in 2006 while on sabbatical at the University of Sydney. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, an Associate Director of the AACC board, and member of the AIAA GNC Technical Committee, and is active in both IEEE and ASEE.

Duration : 1:6:12

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ABSTRACT

Severe flood disasters may frequently occur in near future because global warming will change the flood risk. To prepare the disaster, we propose global flood simulation software which simulates flood flow in
short time on an earth viewer (i.e., global geographical information system). User can edit a flood scenario such as the location of levee failure by clicking on the earth viewer, then the software simulate the
flood flow based on fluid dynamics. The simulation and GIS communicate each other using our technology, the flood information are visualized on the viewer even during the simulation. I will make a presentation about
the technology and show how to work our flood simulation software.

Speaker: Satoshi Yamaguchi
I specialize in the geophysics, hydrodynamics and software development such as geographical information system (GIS). I conduct a research on flood disaster and develop flood simulation software on our original GIS for a number of years in Hitachi Central Research Laboratory. I studied physical oceanography in Tohoku University and received masters degree.

Duration : 0:26:12

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ABSTRACT

Presented by

Andrew B. Whinston

Center for Research in Electronic Commerce

Mccombs School of Business

The University of Texas at Austin

Based on a joint research with Jianqing Chen and De Liu

Abstract:

Internet-based advertising continues to increase in importance. Internet advertising providers such as Google and Yahoo! allocate their advertising resources using a novel form of share auctions in which the highest advertiser gets the largest share, the second highest advertiser gets the second largest share, and so on. A share structure problem arises in such a setting regarding how much resources to set aside for the highest advertiser, for the second highest advertiser, etc. We address this problem under a general specification and derive implications on how the optimal share structure should change with advertisers’ price elasticity of demand for exposure, their valuation distribution, total resources, and minimum bids.

Full Synopsis here:
http://docs.google.com/a/google.com/Doc?id=cdvbh2g5_1621cg97gcct

Speaker: Dr. Andrew B. Whinston
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Whinston

Andrew B. Whinston is an American economist and computer scientist. He is the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration, Professor of Information Systems, Computer Science and Economics, and Director of the Center for Research in E-Commerce (CREC) in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Whinston is also a fellow of the IC2 Institute, Austin.

At the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in December 2005, Prof. Whinston was awarded “The LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems” by the Association for Information Systems (AIS).

Andrew Whinston has been a major contributor to the field since information systems began as an academic discipline. His research record is exemplary, his publications are many, his doctoral graduates are found throughout the field in all parts of the world, and his innovative research has enlightened critical developments in the field.

Duration : 1:6:7

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