People are and always will be the weakest link in security. Yet, it’s an often overlooked topic. This session discusses people skills, influence, and social engineering in security education. This session will educate attendees on human motivation and interaction, how security controls may be bypassed by a person’s intentional or unintentional acts, and methods for reducing the cyber risks associated with people. It concludes with online references that can be immediately used to inform on simple steps for cyber safety.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Ron Woerner, Director of Cybersecurity Studies, Bellevue University Ron Woerner is the Director of Cybersecurity Studies at Bellevue University. He has over 25 years of corporate and military experience in IT and Security and has worked for HDR, TD Ameritrade, ConAgra Foods, Mutual of Omaha, CSG Systems, and the State of Nebraska. Ron earned a B.S. from Michigan State University and a M.S. from Syracuse University. He was awarded the CISSP in 2001, the CISM in 2014, Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and Toastmasters Advanced Communicator and Leader designations.  He is the Air Force Association CyberPatriot 2013-2014 Mentor of the Year for his work with High School cybersecurity competitions. He loves to talk to others who are passionate about Security and Privacy.

Moderator: Karla Carter, Associate Professor, College of Science and Technology at Bellevue University; Vice Chair, ACM SIGCAS
Karla Carter, Vice Chair for ACM SIGCAS, is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Technology at Bellevue University, in Bellevue, Nebraska. Drawing on over 20 years of information technology experience, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Information Technology Ethics, Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Data, Social Engineering, E-Commerce, and Web Development, and has been awarded Bellevue University's Excellence in Online Teaching Award. Karla's research interests focus on the intersection of information technology and society, particularly in the areas of social media and privacy. She is curious, intense, and irreverent, and can be found on Twitter at @professorkarla

Data access is a fundamental component of almost all software applications. However, the data that any given application manipulates varies across a number of axes: volume, structure, growth over time, and modification rate are perhaps the most significant. When this is combined with application requirements driven by a varying set of demands related to features, time-to-market, scalability, and consistency, you end up with a dizzying array of possibilities for how to handle data access. There has been a great deal of excitement over the past few years regarding NoSQL databases, and as if often the case with software development, they have sometimes been portrayed as the silver bullet that solves the data access problem. Those of us who have been developing applications for any period of time know, however, that there is no silver bullet; only specific solutions to specific problems. This seminar will look at the issue of building a data access layer, and will focus on situations in which a more traditional SQL database makes a reasonable foundation for a data access layer. We will then go a step further and look at the use of Object Relational Managers (ORM) within the data access layer and provide some specific guidance with respect to making use of Microsoft's Entity Framework.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Terry Coatta, CTO, Marine Learning Systems; ACM Practitioners Board
Terry Coatta is currently CTO for Marine Learning Systems. Marine Learning Systems is an eLearning software and services provider to the maritime and resource industry. Prior to Marine Learning Systems,Terry was President of AssociCom, a Vancouver-based start-up that builds online communities for professional and trade associations. His expertise lies in the areas of software architecture and software development. As CTO for Vitrium Systems Inc., he led the development organization through the release of three new products, and the customer base expanded from under 10 to over 200. From 2001 to 2005, he was the VP of Development at Silicon Chalk Inc. where he led a team developing a unique real-time collaboration tool for use at universities and colleges. Terry was also a founding partner in Network Software Group Inc. (acquired by Open Text Corporation, 1996) and Director of Software Development at GPS Industries Inc. An active ACM volunteer, Terry serves on the ACM Practitioners Board and Queue Editorial Board, and chairs the Case Study Committee.

Moderator: Erik Meijer, Founder and CEO, Applied Duality; ACM Queue Editorial Board
Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. His research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell) compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces. In 2011 Erik was appointed part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. Since 2013 he is also Honorary Professor of Programming Language Design at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, associated with the Functional Programming Laboratory.

Currently Erik is CEO of Applied Duality Inc., which he founded in 2013. In the past, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University. Erik is the recipient of the Microsoft Outstanding Technical Leadership Award (2009) and the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award as a member of the C# team (2007). He is also a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.

This webinar will provide an overview of the hybrid mobile app ecosystem, and will then provide a technical deep dive into building apps with Apache Cordova and PhoneGap Enterprise. Participants will learn how to create a mobile application, how to use remote build systems to compile apps for popular mobile platforms, and how to test and distribute hybrid mobile applications. This session will provide participants with everything they need to know to get started in mobile app development using web technologies.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Andrew Savory, Mobile Services and Solutions Evangelist, Adobe

Andrew is Mobile Services and Solutions Evangelist for the Adobe Marketing Cloud and is responsible for guiding and evangelizing the vision of Adobe's mobile solutions. He provides a bridge between engineering and the wider world, ensuring everyone knows about the great new features and functionalities that are being built, and how best to use them, with a mobile focus.

Prior to Adobe, Andrew spent several years working in a mobile consortium building mobile platforms and was UK Managing Director of a systems integrator, where he pioneered mobile experiences and delivered a wide range of enterprise content management solutions. Andrew is passionate about open development, is active in a number of open source communities, and is also an Apache Software Foundation Member.

Moderator: Terry Linkletter, Senior Lecturer and Advisor, Central Washington University; ACM Professional Development Committee

Terry Linkletter, CCP, has worked as a software engineer since 1966, participating in a number of development paradigm shifts along the way.  He is a Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Certified PSP Developer, SEI-trained PSP Instructor and TSP coach, and has led continuous improvement teamwork for both productivity and quality at Microsoft.  He has managed software engineering, verification & validation, and quality assurance organizations at Fortune 500 firms and at several internet startups.  Some of his favorite projects include analysis, design, and construction of software for the acoustic pyrometer, improving the efficiency of chemical recycling; software and database design for the MIRA system, which helps Central American farmers and land planners select the right tree species and planting/management regimes; and helping optimize the accuracy and reliability of software that houses, distributes, and protects Microsoft product keys through team coaching in the Software Engineering Institute's Team Software Process.  He has taught computer science and information technology in six institutions of higher learning in North, Central, and South America, in both English and Spanish.  He is currently on the IT faculty at Central Washington University.

Terry’s degrees are: BS in Statistics from Stanford University, and MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

What drives inventions in computing? Necessity seems to play only a minor role. Anger at the way things are is much more powerful, because it leads to easier ways to work (the invention of new computer languages). A general dissatisfaction with the practical or theoretical structure of the world can open up whole new approaches to problems (complexity theory and cryptography). Finally, a genuine collaboration between people and machines can lead to an entirely new kind of engineering for devices that will travel to far-off planets or to hostile environments. The talk will discuss the work of several inventors in computing and engineering, their inventions, and how they came up with them and how they plan to come up with more in the future. The ensuing discussion will address the fundamental nature of invention in a world partly populated by intelligent machines.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A) Presenter: Dennis Shasha, Professor of Computer Science at the Courant  Institute of New York University; 2013 ACM Fellow

Presenter: Dennis Shasha, Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University; 2013 ACM Fellow

Dennis Shasha is a professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University where he works with biologists on pattern discovery for network inference; with computational chemists on algorithms for protein design; with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series; on clocked computation for DNA computing; and on computational reproducibility. Other areas of interest include database tuning as well as tree and graph matching. Because he likes to type, he has written six books of puzzles about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco, a biography about great computer scientists, and a book about the future of computing. He has also written five technical books about database tuning, biological pattern recognition, time series, DNA computing, resampling statistics, and causal inference in molecular networks. He has co-authored over seventy journal papers, seventy conference papers, and twenty patents. He has written the puzzle column for various publications including Scientific American.

Moderator: Eric Simon, Chief Architect at SAP

Eric Simon is currently Chief Architect at SAP in the area of Information Management. Before that he was the engineering lead for data access and data federation products at SAP Business Objects. In 2001, he co-founded and became CEO of Medience, a French start-up developing data federation technology, later acquired by Business Objects in 2005. Previously, Eric was a tenure research scientist at INRIA (France), one of the largest European research center in Computer Science. His research interest covered different areas of databases including database system design, database languages, query optimization, and data integration methods and algorithms. Eric received a PhD in computer science from University of Paris VI in 1986.

What's does a mouse drag event have in common with an Array of numbers? The answer to this question may surprise you: they are both collections. This key insight holds the key to dramatically simplifying asynchronous programming in JavaScript. In this talk you will learn how you can use the familiar JavaScript Array methods to create surprisingly expressive asynchronous programs. Using just a few functions, you will learn how to do the following: Declaratively build complex events out of simple events (ex. drag n' drop) Coordinate and sequence multiple Ajax requests Reactively update UI's in response to data changes Eliminate memory leaks caused by neglecting to unsubscribe from events Gracefully propagate and handle asynchronous exception In this talk we'll be exploring the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library (https://rx.codeplex.com/), which allows us to treat events as collections. You'll learn about how Netflix uses Rx on the client and the server, allowing us to build end-to-end reactive systems. We'll also contrast Rx with Promises, another popular approach to building asynchronous programs in JavaScript.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Jafar Husain, Cross-UI Team Technical Lead, Netflix
Jafar Husain is Netflix's Cross-UI Team Technical Lead. He specializes in building application servers and user interfaces using functional reactive programming. He's also an active member of TC39, the standards body responsible for evolving the JavaScript language. 

A highly-rated speaker, he has delivered talks about reactive programming at HTML Dev Conf, QCon, Code Mesh, YOW! and has given multiple Channel 9 interviews on the subject. He has also authored interactive training software to help developers learn about functional reactive programming. @jhusain

Moderator: Erik Meijer, Founder and CEO, Applied Duality; ACM Queue Editorial Board
Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. His research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell) compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces. In 2011 Erik was appointed part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. Since 2013 he is also Honorary Professor of Programming Language Design at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, associated with the Functional Programming Laboratory.

Currently Erik is CEO of Applied Duality Inc., which he founded in 2013. In the past, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University. Erik is the receipient of the Microsoft Outstanding Technical Leadership Award (2009) and the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award as a member of the C# team (2007). He is also a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.

What’s the Big Deal with Big Data? And, more importantly, what is the business case for Big Data? In this session, we will focus on the fundamentals of Hadoop as it is the foundation for Big Data. We’ll talk the technology but also the business cases on what you can do and not do with Big Data.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Denny Lee, Senior Director, Data Platform, Concur Technologies
Denny Lee is a senior director and startup entrepreneur with a specialty in leading, architecting, implementing, and delivering solutions to solve complex data problems. As a passionate technologist, he has worked with numerous companies to solve their immense analytics problems both on-premises and in the cloud. Notable examples of Lee's work include HDInsight for Windows Azure (Hadoop as a Service for Microsoft's Multi-Tenant Cloud) and Yahoo!’s 24TB SQL Server Analysis Services cube (Campaign Display Web Analytics solution).

Moderator: Michael Zeller, CEO of Zementis; Board of Directors, Software San Diego; Secretary/Treasurer, Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD
Michael Zeller is the CEO of Zementis, a software company focused on the operational deployment of predictive analytics. Zementis was recognized by CIO Review as one of the "Top 20 most promising Big Data companies in 2013" and named "Cool Vendor in Data Science" by Gartner in 2014. Michael currently also serves on the Board of Directors of Software San Diego and as Secretary/Treasurer on the Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD, which is the premier international organization for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

In this emerging era of truly pervasive computing, cybersecurity is a hot public policy topic. Numerous policy proposals have been advanced to address emerging cyber threats directed at governments and private businesses and vulnerabilities affecting consumer data and individual privacy. These policy proposals have far-reaching implications for the economy, innovation, Internet governance, supply chains for information and communications technologies, and global security. Herb Lin of the National Research Council will discuss the findings of a recent National Research Council report on cybersecurity and the 6 key things to know about cybersecurity as it intersects with public policy. The report, At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues, identifies leading technical and nontechnical approaches to enhancing cybersecurity that are important for making informed public policy choices. It provides an overview of the cybersecurity policy agenda of the past two decades, the growing cybersecurity threat spectrum, and the anatomy of vulnerabilities and adversarial activities in cyberspace. It concludes that tradeoffs are inevitable and need to be accepted within political and policymaking processes.

How can we better understand and implement public policies to fight cybersecurity threats while preserving innovation, cutting-edge security research, civil liberties, and individual privacy? Join us for this overview and engaging discussion of important technical, legal, and policy issues.

Duration: 30 minutes, including 10 minutes of audience Q&A

Presenter: Herbert Lin, Chief Scientist, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, National Academies

Herbert Lin is Chief Scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, where he has been study director of major projects on public policy and information technology. His projects also have included a number of studies related to cybersecurity: At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues (2014); Proceedings of a Workshop on Deterring Cyberattacks: Informing Strategies and Developing Options (2010); Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities (2009); Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace (2007); Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (2007); Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges (1999); and Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society (1996). Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

Moderator: Jeremy Epstein, Lead Program Officer, National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program; ACM Senior Member; ACM U.S. Public Policy Council

Jeremy Epstein is Lead Program Officer for the National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, NSF's flagship cybersecurity research program. Jeremy is on loan from SRI International, where his research areas are voting system security and software assurance. He is the Chair of the Voting Committee within the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council (usacm.acm.org). He's also Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy magazine (www.computer.org/security), and founder of the Scholarships for Women Studying Information Security (www.swsis.org).

As big data and business analytics become the norm, companies with existing data warehouse architectures are worrying how these new approaches relate to traditional BI and what must be done to implement new analytic systems. Unfortunately, much current advice focuses on what’s new rather than what to do to get from current systems to fully integrated big data and analytics and reap the clear benefits. What is needed is a new information architecture that combines the best of current data warehousing approaches and facilitates integration of what is new. This webinar is based on Barry Devlin's new book Business unIntelligence - Insight and Innovation Beyond Analytics and Big Data and will cover:

• Business drivers and results of the emerging biz-tech ecosystem
• Modern conceptual and logical architectures for information, process and people
• Positioning of all forms of business analytics and big data

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Barry Devlin, Founder and Principal, 9sight Consulting
Dr. Barry Devlin is among the foremost authorities on business insight and one of the founders of data warehousing, having published the first architectural paper on the topic in 1988. With over 30 years of IT experience, including 20 years with IBM as a Distinguished Engineer, he is a widely respected analyst, consultant, lecturer and author of the seminal book, Data Warehouse—from Architecture to Implementation, and numerous white papers, blogs and more. His new book Business unIntelligence—Insight and Innovation Beyond Analytics and Big Data was published in 2013. Barry is founder and principal of 9sight Consulting. He specializes in the human, organizational and IT implications of deep business insight solutions in all technology environments. Barry is based in Cape Town, South Africa and operates worldwide.

Moderator: Peter Aiken, Founding Director, Data Blueprint; Associate Professor of Information Systems, Virginia Commonwealth University; ACM SIGMIS
Peter Aiken is widely acclaimed as one of the top ten data management authorities worldwide. As a practicing data consultant, author and researcher, he has been actively performing in and studying data management for more than 30 years. Throughout his career, he has held leadership positions and consulted with more than 50 organizations in 20 countries across numerous industries, including defense, banking, healthcare, telecommunications and manufacturing. He is a highly sought-after keynote speaker and author of multiple publications, including his latest book, The Case for the Chief Data Officer: Recasting the C-Suite to Leverage Your Most Valuable Asset. In addition to being Data Blueprint’s Founding Director, Peter is also Associate Professor of Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University and past President of the International Data Management Association (DAMA).

This webinar is a free-wheeling discussion of what we might have learned from almost 30 years of the ACM Risks Forum. No talk-specific slides; after initial remarks from the speaker, the topics are influenced somewhat interactively by questions and comments by the audience, as interpreted by our moderator, Will Tracz. Many regular RISKS readers joined us for our live webinar. Various background information is available online, in case you have not been a long-time RISKS reader:

• The ACM Risks Forum: http://www.risks.org (with a nice searchable reader interface (courtesy of Lindsay Marshall at Newcastle)
• The CACM Inside RISKS series (232 articles thus far): http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/insiderisks.html
• The Illustrative Risks annotated index to early the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes and RISKS issues: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/illustrative.pdf (http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/illustrative.html for browsing).
• Peter's website: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann. (Testimonies for the U.S. Senate and House and California state Senate and Legislature, papers, bibliography, further background, etc. See also the Illustrative Risks annotated index of earlier risks incidents.)
• Peter's full bio: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/short.bio

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Peter Neumann, Principal Scientist, SRI; ACM Fellow
Peter G. Neumann has been in SRI's Computer Science Lab since September 1971, where he is a Senior Principal Scientist. He is concerned with computer systems and networks, trustworthiness/dependability, high assurance, security, reliability, survivability, safety, and many risks-related issues such as election-system integrity, crypto applications and policies, health care, social implications, and human needs, especially those including privacy. Peter is currently PI on two DARPA projects: clean-slate trustworthy hosts for the CRASH program with new hardware and new software, and clean-slate networking for the Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds program. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, has been reponsible for CACM's Inside Risks columns since 1990, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and has chaired the National Committee for Voting Integrity (http://www.votingintegrity.org). Peter created ACM SIGSOFT's Software Engineering Notes in 1976, was its editor for 19 years, and still contributes the RISKS section. He was also on the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy and has participated in four studies for the National Academies of Science. His 1995 book, Computer-Related Risks, is still timely.

Peter is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and SRI. He received the National Computer System Security Award in 2002, the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005, and the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award in 2013. In 2012, he was elected to the newly created National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame as one of the first set of inductees. Peter is a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office Executive Council on Information Management and Technology, the California Office of Privacy Protection advisory council, and co-founded People For Internet Responsibility (http://www.PFIR.org). He has taught at Darmstadt, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.

Moderator: Will Tracz, Lockheed Martin Fellow Emeritus; Chair, ACM SIGSOFT
When he retired in 2012, Will Tracz was a principal software engineer/application architect for the Global Combat Support System – Air Force program. He is currently the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) and a member of the ACM Professional Development Committee. He was the editor of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1994-2012), 2002 chairman of the International Conference on Software Engineering, and 2012 chairman of the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

In 2011, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free. Together, these three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. Since the beginning of 2012, Andrew and his partners transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company whose mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone by allowing the best universities to offer courses to everyone around the world, for free. This platform's classes provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and a rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. Currently, the platform has 100 university and other partners, and over 5 million students enrolled in its more than 500 courses. These courses span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more.

In this talk, Andrew will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, and why he believes this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: Andrew Ng, Co-Founder, Coursera; Director, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab
Andrew Ng is a co-founder of Coursera and a Computer Science faculty member at Stanford. In 2011 he led the development of Stanford University's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera, with his partners. Their goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education, for free. Today their platform partners with top universities to offer high-quality, free online courses. With over 100 partners, over 500 courses, and 5 million students, theirs is the largest MOOC platform in the world. Ng's recent awards include being named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world; to the CNN 10: Thinkers list; Fortune 40 under 40; and being named by Business Insider as one of the top 10 professors across Stanford University. Outside of online education, Ng's research work is in machine learning; he is also the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Moderator: Marti Hearst, Professor, UC Berkeley; ACM Fellow
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and improving MOOCs. She wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces. Hearst was named a Fellow of the ACM in 2013 and has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, two Google Research Awards, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principal investigator for more than $3M in research grants.

Hearst has served on the Advisory Council of NSF's CISE Directorate and is currently on the Web Board for CACM, member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, and on the Edge.org panel of experts. She is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and was formerly on the boards of ACM Transactions on the Web, Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and IEEE Intelligent Systems. Prof. Hearst received B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

To celebrate Ruby's 21st birthday (February 24), this webinar will introduce Ruby newcomers to the basics of the object-oriented, general-purpose language from Japan. Participants will get a flavor of the language, and will come away with enough of a grounding to give them a head start if they go on to pursue the study of Ruby.

Topics will include:

    -Ruby's object model
    -Message sending/method calls
    -Classes and modules
    -Variable syntax and usage
    -Code blocks
    -Strings and symbols
    -Arrays and hashes
    -Standard library highlights

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter: David A. Black, Lead Developer, Cyrus Innovation
Longtime Ruby developer, trainer, author, speaker, and community event organizer David A. Black is a Lead Developer at the New York-based consultancy Cyrus Innovation, which he joined in 2009. David speaks and keynotes frequently at technical conferences and user groups. His book The Well-Grounded Rubyist (Manning Publications, 2009; second edition forthcoming) is among the most highly regarded books on Ruby. David was one of the founders, and for many years a director, of Ruby Central, Inc., the parent organization of the official international Ruby and Ruby on Rails conferences. He is also a professionally trained cellist, and holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. David is a member of the ACM Professional Development Committee.

Moderator: Erik Meijer, Founder and CEO, Applied Duality; ACM Queue Editorial Board
Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. His research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell) compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces. In 2011 Erik was appointed part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. Since 2013 he is also Honorary Professor of Programming Language Design at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, associated with the Functional Programming Laboratory.

Currently Erik is CEO of Applied Duality Inc., which he founded in 2013. In the past, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University. Erik is the receipient of the Microsoft Outstanding Technical Leadership Award (2009) and the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award as a member of the C# team (2007). He is also a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The past decade has seen a shift from serial to parallel computing. No longer the exotic domain of supercomputing, parallel hardware is ubiquitous and software must follow: a serial, sequential program will use less than 1% of a modern PC's computational horsepower and less than 4% of a high-end smartphone. GPUs have proven themselves as world-class, massively parallel accelerators, from supercomputers to gaming consoles to smartphones, and CUDA is the platform best designed to access this power.   

In this webinar, we'll cover the many different ways of accelerating your code on GPUs; from GPU-accelerated libraries, to directive-based programming using OpenACC directives, and finally to writing CUDA directly in languages such as C/C++, Fortran, or Python. In addition to covering the current state of massively parallel programming with GPUs, we will briefly touch on future challenges and potential research projects. Finally, you will be provided with a number of resources to try CUDA yourself and where to go to learn more.

Presenter: Mark Ebersole, CUDA Educator/Developer, NVIDIA
As GPU Programming Educator at NVIDIA, Mark Ebersole teaches developers the benefits of GPU computing using the CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, and the benefits of GPU computing. With more than 10 years of experience as a systems programmer, Mark has spent much of his time at NVIDIA as a GPU systems diagnostics programmer in which he developed a tool to test, debug, validate, and verify GPUs from pre-emulation through bringup and into production. Before joining NVIDIA, he worked at IBM developing Linux drivers for the IBM iSeries server. Mark holds a B.S. degree in math and computer science from St. Cloud State University.
 
Moderator: Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth, University of Maryland, College Park; SIGHPC
Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth is a Professor of the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Hollingsworth's research seeks to develop a unified framework to understand the performance of large systems and focuses in several areas. First, he developed a new approach, called dynamic instrumentation, to permit the efficient measurement of large parallel applications. Second, he has developed an auto-tuning framework called Active Harmony that can be used to tune kernels, libraries, or full applications. Third, he is investigating the interactions between different layers of software and hardware to understand how they influence performance. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Parallel Computing, was general chair of the SC12 conference, and is Vice Chair of ACM SIGHPC.

January 23, 2014: "Computing Professionalism: Do Good and Avoid Evil...and Why It Is Complicated to Do that in Computing" with Don Gotterbarn. Director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute and Chair of the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics. Moderated by Don's longtime collaborator Keith W. Miller, University of Missouri -- St. Louis.

Most computing professionals want to avoid evil and to do the right thing. But that isn't always easy. Sometimes doing the right thing exacts a difficult price from the individual professional. Other times, it is difficult to know exactly what the right thing is.

In this presentation, we will try to help with both problems. Difficulties with these two problems contribute to failed systems, derailed projects, and significant negative impacts on society. We will introduce ways to migrate these risks based on current research in computing, ethics, and psychology.

We will put this into a larger perspective by discussing the international efforts to professionalize computing. These efforts are a mixed blessing, but they point to the importance of professional ethics in computing.

Duration: 60 minutes

Presenter: Don Gotterbarn, Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute; ACM Committee on Professional Ethics
Don Gotterbarn, working as an academic and software systems developer, has been active over several decades promoting responsible computing practices. As a consultant he worked on systems including ones for the U.S. Navy, the Saudi Arabian Navy, vote counting machines, and missile defence. Don is the Director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute and a visiting professor at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in England. He has taught at institutions like the University of Southern California, at government agencies such as the NSA, and was a visiting scientist Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute.

Don chairs the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics, and was instrumental in the development of IEEE/ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice. With support from the NSF, he and colleagues developed a CASE tool for discovering and anticipating the ethical impacts of a software development effort. His contribution to computing ethics is recognised by various professional bodies (e.g. ACM Outstanding Contribution award 2005; and Joseph Weizenbaum award 2010 from the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology).

Moderator: Keith W. Miller, University of Missouri -- St. Louis
Keith W. Miller is the Orthwein Endowed Professor for Lifelong Learning in the Sciences in the College of Education at the University of Missouri -- St. Louis. His Ph.D. is in computer science, and his research interests include computer ethics, software testing, and online learning. Google Scholar lists 3350 citations to Dr. Miller's published work.

Don's Post-Webinar Q&A (answered offline)

Dec. 17, 2013: The Incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM): Principles and Practices for Successful Systems and Software with ACM Fellow Dr. Barry Boehm, TRW Professor in the USC Computer Sciences and Industrial and Systems Engineering Departments. Moderated by Dr. Boehm's former doctoral student LiGuo Huang, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Southern Methodist University.

The Incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM) extends the scope of the original spiral model for software development to cover the definition, development, and evolution of cyber-physical-human systems. It has been successfully applied to systems ranging from small e-services applications to complex cyber-physical-human systems of systems. It is not a one-size-fits-all process model, but uses four essential principles to determine whether, where, and when to use candidate common-case process elements (reuse-based, prototype-based, agile, architected agile, plan-driven, product-line, systems of systems, legacy-based, etc.).

The four essential principles are (1) Stakeholder value-based system evolution; (2) Incremental commitment and accountability; (3) Concurrent multi-discipline engineering; and (4) Evidence and risk-based decisions.  This presentation covers the four essential principles and their rationale; spiral, phased, concurrency, and process-element-decision process views; associated tools such as an Electronic Process Guide and the Winbook stakeholder win-win requirements negotiation system; and examples of successful ICSM use and pitfalls to avoid. (Based on a book co-authored by Barry Boehm, Jo Ann Lane, Supannika Koolmanojwong, and Richard Turner.)

Duration: 60 minutes

Presenter: Barry Boehm, University of Southern California
Dr. Barry Boehm is the TRW Professor in the USC Computer Sciences and Industrial and Systems Engineering Departments. He is also the Chief Scientist of the DoD-Stevens-USC Systems Engineering Research Center, and the founding Director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering. He was director of DARPA-ISTO 1989-92, at TRW 1973-89, at Rand Corporation 1959-73, and at General Dynamics 1955-59. His contributions include the COCOMO family of cost models and the Spiral family of process models. He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), and systems engineering (INCOSE), and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Moderator: LiGuo Huang, Southern Methodist University
Dr. LiGuo Huang is an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at the Southern Methodist University (SMU). She received both her Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. from the Computer Science Department and Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE) at the University of Southern California (USC). After her Ph.D., she joined SMU CSE as the Assistant Professor in 2007. Her current research centers around mining systems and software engineering repository, software process modeling, simulation and improvement, software quality and information dependability assurance, value-based software engineering, and empirical software engineering. Her research is supported by NSF, the U.S. Department of Defense, NSA, and industry. She had been intensively involved in initiating the research on stakeholder/value-based integration of systems and software engineering and published in ICSE, ASE, IEEE Computer and IEEE Software. She has been the reviewer for TSE, TR, JSS, JSEP, IST, IJSI and the program committee member for a number of international software engineering conferences and workshops. She served as the Program Committee Chair of ICSSP 2012, CSEE&T 2012, and the Asian Chair of CSEE&T 2011. She is the member of CSEE&T Steering Committee and the Program Committee Chair of ICSSP 2014.

Nov. 20, 2013: "Big Data Without Big Database—Extreme In-Memory Caching for Better Performance" with Kate Matsudaira, founder and CEO of popforms and Terry Coatta, CTO of Marine Learning Systems and member of the ACM Practitioners Board ACM Practitioner Board.

These days it is not uncommon to have 100s of gigabytes of data that must be sliced and diced, then delivered fast and rendered quickly. Typically solutions involve lots of caching and expensive hardware with lots of memory. And, while those solutions certainly can work, they aren't always cost-effective, or feasible in certain environments (like in the cloud). This talk seeks to cover some strategies for caching large data sets without tons of expensive hardware, but through software and data design. It's common wisdom that serving your data from memory dramatically improves application performance and is a key to scaling. However, caching large datasets brings its own challenges: distribution, consistency, dealing with memory limits, and optimizing data loading just to name a few. This talk will go through some of the challenges, and solutions, to achieve fast data queries in the cloud. The audience will come away armed with a number of practical techniques for organizing and building caches for non-transactional datasets that can be applied to scale existing systems, or design new systems.

Duration: 60 minutes

Presenter: Kate Matsudaira, Founder & CEO, popforms Kate Matsudaira specializes in creating and operating large-scale web applications. Her focus has primarily rested on SaaS applications and big data. She has extensive experience building and managing high-performance teams, and considers herself a fan of agile development practices and the lean startup movement. Kate is currently founding her own startup, popforms, but has held roles as developer, project manager, product manager, and people manager at companies including Amazon and Microsoft. The last seven years she has been a VP of Engineering/CTO for companies like Moz, Decide (acquired by eBay), and prior to that Delve Networks (acquired by Limelight). She is also one of the curators of the Technology and Leadership Newsletter (TLN). You can follow Kate's blog to see her writings on tech and leadership.

Moderator: Terry Coatta, Marine Learning Systems; ACM Practitioners Board
Terry Coatta is currently CTO for Marine Learning Systems. Marine Learning Systems is an eLearning software and services provider to the maritime and resource industry. Prior to Marine Learning Systems,Terry was President of AssociCom, a Vancouver-based start-up that builds online communities for professional and trade associations. His expertise lies in the areas of software architecture and software development. As CTO for Vitrium Systems Inc., he led the development organization through the release of three new products, and the customer base expanded from under 10 to over 200. From 2001 to 2005, he was the VP of Development at Silicon Chalk Inc. where he led a team developing a unique real-time collaboration tool for use at universities and colleges. Terry was also a founding partner in Network Software Group Inc. (acquired by Open Text Corporation, 1996) and Director of Software Development at GPS Industries Inc. An active ACM volunteer, Terry serves on the ACM Practitioners Board and Queue Editorial Board, and chairs the Case Study Committee.

Tuesday, Oct 29, 2013: "3D on the Web — Introduction to WebGL." Presented by Alain Chesnais, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at TrendSpottr and Past President of ACM. Moderated by Eugene Fiume, Professor and Past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

WebGL has been introduced in HTML5 as an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 in JavaScript. It extends the 2D canvas primitive to incorporate real-time 3D support without requiring any plugins. In this webinar we will look at the history of WebGL, introduce the viewer to the core concepts of the API, and present several demonstrations to illustrate what you can do with it. We will also address issues related to current deployments and limitations.

Duration: 60 minutes

Presenter: Alain Chesnais, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, TrendSpottr;
Past President of ACM
Alain Chesnais recently founded TrendSpottr, which develops web services to identify
real-time trends in social media communities such as Twitter and Facebook. Formerly, he was the CTO of SceneCaster.com and Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront, managing the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package.

Alain is also Past President of ACM, having served the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010. Prior to his election as ACM president, he was Vice President from July 2008--June 2010 as well as Secretary/Treasurer from July 2006--June 2008. He also served as President of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002--June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000--June 2002. As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 25 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.

Moderator: Eugene Fiume, University of Toronto; SIGGRAPH
Eugene Fiume is Professor and Past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Dynamic Graphics Project and is director of the Masters of Science in Applied Computing programme. He is Principal Investigator of a $6M CFI/ORF project on the construction of a digital media and systems lab. Previously, Eugene was Director of Research and Usability Engineering at Alias|wavefront and now works with several companies in an advisory capacity on both technological and business issues. He also works with venture capital companies on due diligence and strategy.

Eugene's research interests include computer animation, modelling natural phenomena, and illumination, with strong interests in internet-based imaging, image repositories, software systems and parallel algorithms. He has written two books and co-authored over 120 papers on these topics. Eugene has won two teaching awards, as well as Innovation Awards from ITRC for research in computer graphics, Burroughs-Wellcome for biomedical research, and an NSERC Synergy Award for innovation and industrial collaboration in visual modelling. He was the papers chair for SIGGRAPH 2001, past chair of the SIGGRAPH Awards Committee (2003-2008) and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Awards Committee (2011), general co-chair of Symposium for Computer Animation 2008 and Pacific Graphics International 2011. His industrial interests include technology transfer in the information technology area, internet-based applications, digital media, wireless and multimedia systems, web-based services, large-scale computation, and the interaction of information technology and business.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013: "The Security Impact of IPv6." Presented by Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research of the SANS Technology Institute. Moderated by Thomas A. Limoncelli of Stack Exchange and the ACM Case Study Committee.

When IPv4 was designed more than 30 years ago, nobody anticipated the huge success of the protocol as a global business network. As a result, IPv6 was created to address many of the shortcomings of IPv4 and to properly integrate many of the patches applied to the original standard. However, uptake of IPv6 has been slow, and many networks tend to ignore it in favor of the better understood and "good enough" older protocol. Ignoring IPv6 does present some particular security risks. Modern operating systems are shipped today with IPv6 enabled, and limited ability to turn it off. Ignoring IPv6 can put networks at risks and networks will not be able to take advantage of some of the security features provided by IPv6.

What Attendees Can Expect to Learn About:

•     What are the critical features provided by IPv6?
•     IPv6 addresses and how they can be used to solve current network design issues
•     Uncontrolled IPv6 use and how it will put an organization's information at risk
•     IPv6 tunneling mechanism and transition mechanisms an attacker may use to breach networks or exfiltrate information

Duration: 60 minutes

Presenter: Dr. Johannes B. Ullrich, SANS Technology Institute
Dr. Johannes Ullrich is the Dean of Research and a faculty member of the SANS Technology Institute. In November of 2000, Johannes started the DShield.org project, which he later integrated into the Internet Storm Center. His work with the Internet Storm Center has been widely recognized. In 2004, Network World named him one of the 50 most powerful people in the networking industry. Secure Computing Magazine named him in 2005 one of the Top 5 influential IT security thinkers. His research interests include IPv6, Network Traffic Analysis, and Secure Software Development. Johannes is regularly invited to speak at conferences and has been interviewed by major publications, radio, as well as TV stations. He is a member of the SANS Technology Institute's Faculty and Administration as well as the Curriculum and Long Range Planning Committee. As chief research officer for the SANS Institute, Johannes is currently responsible for the GIAC Gold program. Prior to working for SANS, Johannes worked as a lead support engineer for a web development company and as a research physicist. Johannes holds a Ph.D. in physics from SUNY Albany and is located in Jacksonville, Florida. He also maintains a daily security news summary podcast and enjoys blogging about application security.

Moderator: Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange; ACM Case Study Committee
Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His best known books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). In 2005 he received the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award. He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of ServerFault.com and StackOverflow.com. Previously he's worked at small and large companies including Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, and AT&T. http://EverythingSysadmin.com is his blog.

August 2013: "Never-Ending Learning to Read the Web." Presented by Tom M. Mitchell, Founder and Chair of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department; moderated by Yolanda Gil, Chair of ACM SIGART.

One of the great technical challenges in big data is to construct computer systems that learn continuously over years, from a continuing stream of diverse data, improving their competence at a variety of tasks, and becoming better learners over time.

This webinar describes Carnegie Mellon University's research to build a Never-Ending Language Learner (NELL) that runs 24 hours per day, forever, learning to read the web. Each day NELL extracts (reads) more facts from the web, and integrates these into its growing knowledge base of beliefs. Each day NELL also learns to read better than yesterday, enabling it to go back to the text it read yesterday, and extract more facts, more accurately, today.

NELL has been running 24 hours/day for over three years now. The result so far is a collection of 50 million interconnected beliefs (e.g., servedWith(coffee, applePie), isA(applePie, bakedGood)), that NELL is considering at different levels of confidence, along with hundreds of thousands of learned phrasings, morphological features, and web page structures that NELL has learned to use to extract beliefs from the web. Track NELL's progress at http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu. 

Presenter: Tom M. Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Tom M. Mitchell founded and chairs the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the E. Fredkin University Professor. His research uses machine learning to develop computers that are learning to read the web, and uses brain imaging to study how the human brain understands what it reads. Mitchell is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He believes the field of machine learning will be the fastest growing branch of computer science during the 21st century. Mitchell's web page is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom.

Moderator: Yolanda Gil, University of Southern California; SIGART
Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies and Associate Division Director at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in the Computer Science Department. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in CS from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gil leads a group that conducts research on various aspects of Interactive Knowledge Capture. Her research interests include intelligent user interfaces, knowledge-rich problem solving, and the semantic web. An area of recent interest is collaborative large-scale data analysis through semantic workflows. She recently led the W3C Provenance Group that charted a community standardization effort in this area. Dr. Gil has served in the Advisory Committee of the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She is Chair of ACM SIGART, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. She was elected Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2012.

Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Bill Gropp (questions answered offline).

July 17, 2013: "Changing How Programmers Think about Parallel Programming." Presented by William Gropp, Director of the Parallel Computing Institute at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign; moderated by John West, Director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

This webinar will provide an introduction to parallel execution models, focusing on how programmers think about writing programs.

Does the way that programmers or algorithm developers think about the way a parallel computer works influence the approaches that they take? Can the choice of programming approach lead to inefficient solutions? Do we need new ways to program parallel systems? This session will explore common approaches for developing parallel programs and how they can limit scalability and reliability--whether the programs are for single chip parallelism or the world's largest parallel computers. The importance of an execution model and its relationship to programming models and programming systems will be covered, and why we need to consider new execution models for the parallel systems of the future. 

What Attendees Can Expect to Learn About:

•    What an execution model is
•    The difference between an execution model, programming model, and programming system
•    How an execution model influences how a programmer thinks about implementing parallelism
•    Common parallel programming approaches and how they can lead to poor scalability 

Presenter: William Gropp, University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign; SIGHPCWilliam Gropp is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science, Deputy Director for Research for the Institute of Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, and Director of the Parallel Computing Institute at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.  He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982.  He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department of Yale University from 1982-1990 and a member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory from 1990-2007.  His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Moderator: John West, DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program; SIGHPCJohn West is Director of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a DoD-wide program that provides high performance computing expertise, computing, storage, and communications resources for the Department. He has held a number of positions in private industry and the federal government, including a tour as Director of the Scientific Computing Research Center at the Army Engineer Research and Development Center, and 5 years as director of the ERDC DoD Supercomputing Resource Center.  Today he serves in a variety of community roles, including co-chair of the High End Computing working group for NITRD, associate editor of IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering, and officer in the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC). He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University, and has written extensively on high performance computing, technology, and leadership.

Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Adam Lally (questions answered offline).

June 13, 2013: "IBM Watson: Beyond Jeopardy," presented by Adam Lally, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center; moderated by Will Tracz, Lockheed Martin, Chair of SIGSOFT. Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Adam Lally (questions answered offline).

 In 2011, IBM introduced Watson, a computer system capable of quickly and precisely answering natural language questions with accurate confidence estimation. Watson was victorious against the world's best Jeopardy! players in a formal contest that was aired on national television. Watson's public performance heralds a future where we can efficiently tap into the wealth of knowledge buried in text and other unstructured data sources. IBM is now exploring new applications of the Watson technology including clinical decision support in healthcare.

What You'll Learn About:

  *  Architecture of the Watson Question Answering System
  *  Using the Apache UIMA framework for building natural language processing systems
  *  New challenges for Watson in the healthcare domain, and how IBM is addressing them

Presenter: Adam Lally, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Adam Lally is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Watson Technologies department at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. Adam is an experienced systems architect and software developer. As an original member of the DeepQA project, he helped develop the Watson system architecture that gave the machine its speed. He also worked on the natural language processing algorithms that enable Watson to understand questions and categories and gather and assess evidence in natural language. Before working on Watson he was the lead software engineer for the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) project, an open source platform for creating, integrating, and deploying unstructured information management solutions.
 
Moderator: Will Tracz, Lockheed Martin; Chair of ACM SIGSOFT

Dr. Will Tracz is a Lockheed Martin Fellow Emeritus. When he retired in 2012, he was a principal software engineer/application architect for the Global Combat Support System - AF program. He also has served as Tech Volume Lead on several Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), infrastructure modernization, virtualization, and ITIL-oriented new business proposals.
 
Dr. Tracz is currently the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), chair of the Binghamton Section of IEEE, and a member of the ACM Professional Development Committee. He was the editor of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1994-2012), 2002 chairman of the International Conference on Software Engineering, and 2012 chairman of the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering. He is the author of over 100 technical reports and books on software engineering, software architectures, and software reuse.

Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Dave Patterson (questions answered offline). More on Dave's Par Lab End of Project Celebration.

May 8, 2013: "Engineering Software as a Service," presented by David Patterson, University of California, Berkeley and former President of ACM; moderated by Armando Fox, University of California, Berkeley. Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Dave Patterson (questions answered offline). More on Dave's Par Lab End of Project Celebration.

Software as a Service (SaaS) and Agile software development started simultaneously but independently. SaaS deploys software at one site made available over the Internet. Agile relies on incrementally developed prototypes and continuous customer feedback. Since Agile embraces change, it is an excellent match to SaaS's rapid evolution. Thus, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google...rely on Agile.
 
What You'll Learn About:

  *  The synergy between SaaS, Agile, and modern frameworks like Ruby on Rails and modern tools like Cucumber, RSpec, and Pivotal Track.
  *  Eliciting SaaS requirements from customers via User Stories.
  *  Following Behavior-Driven Design to convert SaaS User Stories into acceptance tests using Cucumber.
  *  Following Test-Driven Design to transform SaaS acceptance tests into unit tests using RSpec.
  *  Projecting SaaS app costs and schedule via Velocity using Pivotal Tracker.
  *  Organizing SaaS programming teams by following Scrum principles.

This talk is based on Massive Open Online Courses from UC Berkeley, offered in partnership with EdX (CS169.1x and CS169.2x), and a related textbook.
 
Presenter: David Patterson, University of California, Berkeley; Former President, ACM
David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and is currently Director of the Parallel Computing Lab. In the past, he served as Chair of Berkeley's CS Division, Chair of the CRA, and President of the ACM. His best-known research projects are Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) and Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). This research led to 6 books and 35 honors, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame as well as being named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum, ACM, IEEE, and both AAAS organizations. As a Californian, he does sports for fun: weekly soccer games, annual charity bike rides and sprint triathlons, and even an occasional weight-lifting contest.
 
Moderator: Armando Fox, University of California, Berkeley
Armando Fox is Professor in Residence at UC Berkeley and a researcher in the Berkeley ParLab (Parallel Computing Lab) working on high-productivity parallel programming.  During his previous time at Stanford, he received teaching and mentoring awards from the Associated Students of Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. He was named one of the "Scientific American 50" in 2003 and is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Gilbreth Lectureship of the National Academy of Engineering. In previous lives he helped design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founded a successful startup to commercialize his UC Berkeley dissertation research on mobile computing. He received his other degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and the University of Illinois and is an ACM Distinguished Member.

April 23, 2013: "Internet's Future Social Implications: Upheaval or "Trek's" Promise?," presented by Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and ACM President; moderated by Stuart Feldman, VP of Engineering at Google and former ACM President.

The Internet has matured over its 30-year operational life but it is still evolving. We will discuss the current and anticipated technical evolution of the system, the power of mobile technology to leverage the computing power of the Internet and World Wide Web, the introduction of the Internet of Things, and the implications these have for safety, authentication, and control. We will also look at what the future holds in terms of an interplanetary extension. Many see the Internet as a threat because of its open character. Will the Internet stay open and accessible, or will authoritarian governments inflict access and content controls to suppress freedom of expression?
 
A similar tussle is appearing with regard to intellectual property. Purists believe all material is copyright on creation and should be protected, while realists feel this choice should be up to the creators of the material (e.g., Creative Commons). Meanwhile, some of the older business models are struggling to adapt to the digital world's economics.
 
Presenter: Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google; President, ACM

Vinton G. Cerf identifies new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for Google. Known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the CNRI, and DARPA. Vint served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. He served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995; is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEC, the Computer History Museum, BCS, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists; and a member of the NAE. He recently completed his term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the NIST. Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations for his work on the Internet, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, U.S. National Medal of Technology, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, and 21 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of the year's "25 Most Intriguing People."
 
Moderator: Stuart Feldman, Vice President—Engineering, Google; Former President, ACM

Stuart Feldman is responsible for the health and productivity of Google's engineering offices in the eastern parts of the Americas, Asia, and Australia. He also has executive responsibility for a number of Google products. Before Google, he was a researcher at Bell Labs (and author of Make), a research manager at Bellcore, and a Vice President at IBM Research. Feldman did his academic work in astrophysics and mathematics and earned his AB at Princeton and his Ph.D. at MIT. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Mathematics by the University of Waterloo in 2010. He is former President of ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE, of the ACM, and of the AAAS.

Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Joseph A. Konstan (questions answered offline).

September 20, 2012: "Recommender Systems: The Power of Personalization," presented by Joseph A. Konstan, University of Minnesota, SIGCHI; moderated by Gary M. Olson, University of California, Irvine, SIGCHI. Bonus: Extended, post-event Q&A with Joseph A. Konstan (questions answered offline).

Personalization is the key to helping guide users through the morass of available choices to the products and information they seek. Industry leaders such as Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and E-Bay have long used recommender systems to improve their offerings and better serve their customers. But recommender systems aren't limited to big technology firms—they've been widely used by small information providers, retailers, and service firms.

This webinar provides an introduction to recommender systems, describing the different types of recommendation technologies available and how they are used in different applications today.

What You'll Learn About:

* What are recommender systems and how are they used today?
* The different types of recommender systems: -- content-based vs. collaborative recommendation -- ephemeral vs. persistent personalization
* User profiles, site logs, and the information used in recommendation
* An introduction to the basic technology of recommendation
* Pointers to resources for further learning

Presenter:

Joseph A. Konstan, University of Minnesota; SIGCHI

Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has been working in the field of recommender systems since 1995. He's published more than fifty research articles on the topic, holds five patents related to recommender systems, and co-authored the book Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering, one of the first books on the application of recommender systems to commercial systems. Konstan chaired the first ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, and has been active in ACM, including serving as President of ACM SIGCHI from 2003-2006; he is now starting his third term on the ACM Council. He co-founded Net Perceptions, Inc. in 1996. The company commercialized recommendation engines and had a variety of online and bricks-and-mortar companies among its customers, including Amazon.com. He is a Fellow of the ACM, has been elected to the SIGCHI Academy, and was part of the team that won the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award for the GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems.

Moderator

Gary M. Olson, University of California, Irvine; SIGCHI

Gary M. Olson is Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He joined the Department of Informatics at the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences in July of 2008. Previously he was Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Information and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. For more than two decades Olson has conducted research in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Of late the focus of his work has been on how to support small groups of people working on difficult intellectual tasks, particularly when the members of the group are geographically distributed. Most recently, this research includes an on-line survey called the Collaboration Success Wizard which provides feedback to participants in such projects to help them achieve success in their collaborations. He has published more than a hundred and twenty articles and chapters, and has edited four books, most recently Scientific Research on the Internet published in 2008 by MIT Press. In 2003 he was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and in 2006 shared the SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award with Judy Olson. He is also a Fellow of the ACM, the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Psychological Association (APA).

June 28, 2012: "2012 - Big Data: End of the World or End of BI?" presented by Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting; moderated by Ankur Teredesai, University of Washington-Tacoma, SIGKDD.

According to some, the world will end at the Winter Solstice this year. If not, it's certainly time to take a closer look at Business Intelligence (BI) and ask: "After 20 years, is it still fit for purpose? Can it deliver the type of support needed for decision-making in the next decade?" We are witnessing the birth of a new "biz-tech ecosystem," where business and technology have become symbiotic and collaborative behavior is the norm. In this environment, decision-making is very different from what is supported by today's BI.

This webinar explores the emerging ecosystem and poses some interesting challenges for BI vendors and implementers in 2013... Assuming we're all still here...

What you'll learn about:

* The meaning and emergence of the biz-tech ecosystem
* The re-convergence of operational and informational systems
* Data, information and knowledge -- reopening Pandora's Box
* Millennials and team decision making -- the whys and wherefores
* Architectural models for 2013 and beyond

Presenter:
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting; Member of ACM Business Intelligence/Data Management Tech Pack Committee

Barry Devlin is among the foremost authorities on business insight and one of the founders of data warehousing, having published the first architectural paper on the topic in 1988. With over 30 years of IT experience, including 20 years with IBM as a Distinguished Engineer, he is a widely respected analyst, consultant, lecturer, author of the seminal book Data Warehouse—from Architecture to Implementation and numerous White Papers, and an editor of the ACM Business Intelligence & Data Management Tech Pack. Barry is founder and principal of 9sight Consulting. He specializes in the human, organizational, and IT implications of deep business insight solutions that combine operational, informational, and collaborative environments. A regular contributor to BeyeNETWORK, Focus, SmartDataCollective, and TDWI, Barry is based in Cape Town, South Africa and operates worldwide.


Moderator:
Ankur Teredesai, University of Washington Tacoma; SIGKDD

Ankur M. Teredesai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Systems at the Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma. His research interests include Data Science for the Web. Ankur has worked on a variety of Big Data problems for internet monetization and advertising, trust-enhanced social recommendation systems, handwritten zip-code recognition, novelty detection in video data streams, and stream data management. His work has appeared in numerous publications, as well as international conferences and research panels. Ankur is currently the Information Officer for ACM SIGKDD (ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), a worldwide organization of data science and big data professionals from both academia and industry. Ankur has been a technical advisor for several large data warehouse and data analytics groups at Microsoft, Apollo Data Technologies (now MethodCare), and Davai.com. He currently serves as a data science advisor for a prominent advertising big data startup nPario.com.

April 23, 2013: "Internet's Future Social Implications: Upheaval or "Trek's" Promise?," presented by Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and ACM President; moderated by Stuart Feldman, VP of Engineering at Google and former ACM President.

The Internet has matured over its 30-year operational life but it is still evolving. We will discuss the current and anticipated technical evolution of the system, the power of mobile technology to leverage the computing power of the Internet and World Wide Web, the introduction of the Internet of Things, and the implications these have for safety, authentication, and control. We will also look at what the future holds in terms of an interplanetary extension. Many see the Internet as a threat because of its open character. Will the Internet stay open and accessible, or will authoritarian governments inflict access and content controls to suppress freedom of expression?

A similar tussle is appearing with regard to intellectual property. Purists believe all material is copyright on creation and should be protected, while realists feel this choice should be up to the creators of the material (e.g., Creative Commons). Meanwhile, some of the older business models are struggling to adapt to the digital world's economics.

Presenter: Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google; President, ACM

Vinton G. Cerf identifies new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for Google. Known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the CNRI, and DARPA. Vint served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. He served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995; is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEC, the Computer History Museum, BCS, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists; and a member of the NAE. He recently completed his term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the NIST. Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations for his work on the Internet, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, U.S. National Medal of Technology, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, and 21 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of the year's "25 Most Intriguing People."

Moderator: Stuart Feldman, Vice President—Engineering, Google; Former President, ACM

Stuart Feldman is responsible for the health and productivity of Google's engineering offices in the eastern parts of the Americas, Asia, and Australia. He also has executive responsibility for a number of Google products. Before Google, he was a researcher at Bell Labs (and author of Make), a research manager at Bellcore, and a Vice President at IBM Research. Feldman did his academic work in astrophysics and mathematics and earned his AB at Princeton and his Ph.D. at MIT. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Mathematics by the University of Waterloo in 2010. He is former President of ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE, of the ACM, and of the AAAS.

Jan. 26, 2012: "The Cloud in Your Hands: Marriage of Cloud Computing with Smart Devices," presented by Arjmand Samuel and Danny Dalal, Microsoft Research; moderated by David B. Johnson, SIGMOBILE.

Innovations in wireless networking technology are driving our increasingly connected world, with mobile devices gaining acceptance for both professional and private use. In the future, a vast majority of devices will rely on cloud services to enhance end user experiences—with services being a natural extension of such devices.

Designed for IT managers and developers, this session will provide an introduction to the exciting new world of cloud-enabled mobile computing. A few complex user scenarios possible with this new paradigm will be discussed, along with a hands on tutorial for developing such mobile applications on Microsoft's Windows Phone platform.

Presenters:
Arjmand Samuel, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research

Arjmand Samuel is a Senior Research Program Manager at Microsoft Research Connections. He is responsible for building academic research partnerships related to Mobile Computing and Software Engineering. Arjmand has a Ph.D. in Information Security and Privacy from Purdue University. He has published in a variety of publications on topics of privacy and security in the healthcare domain and social media. He has published several patents and contributed to books on access control models. Arjmand's recent research interests are in the areas of cloud-enhanced mobile computing. He is spearheading the academic outreach component of Project Hawaii, a cloud-enabled mobile development platform for the Windows Phone.

Danny Dalal, Senior Development Lead, Microsoft Research

Danny Dalal received his degree in Math and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. His career started at Oracle systems working on Video On Demand in the mid-90s and continued at Microsoft, where his work in declarative multimedia formed the spiritual foundation for what later became WPF and Silverlight. During his career at Microsoft, Danny contributed to Visual Studio, BizTalk, and Windows Fabric. Danny currently manages engineering teams in Microsoft Research working on various open source projects intended to accelerate research and innovation in various domains such as Computational Biology, Big History education, Machine Translation, Earth Visualization, and Cloud-enabled Mobile Computing.

Moderator:
David B. Johnson, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University

David B. Johnson is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, as well as Past Chair of ACM SIGMOBILE. He founded and is leading the Monarch (MObile Networking ARCHitectures) research group at Rice (previously at Carnegie Mellon). David was one of the main designers of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Mobile IP protocol for IPv4, is the primary designer of Mobile IP for IPv6, and his group's Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) for wireless ad hoc networks has been published by the IETF. He has edited six different journals, served on the Technical Program Committee for more than 40 international conferences and workshops, and chaired several major conferences, including MASS, COMSNETS, MobiCom, and MobiHoc.