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Emerging Technologies Seminar (ETS): Fall 2005
Throughout the academic year a series of twelve 90-minute seminars offers insights on emerging technologies and
their implications for business. Each lecture and Q&A session is led by a faculty member or industry expert who
specializes in a different area. Required for first-year EMTM students, the seminar series is open to all EMTM
students.
This Fall, seminars focused on IT. For more about recent topics in other areas, see last year's ETS
Year in Review
in the Spring 2005 issue of InSITE.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
> Technologies for Optimistic Replication
(Benjamin Pierce, Penn Engineering)
Saturday, October 1, 2005
> Text Mining for Fun and Profit
(Lyle Ungar, Penn Engineering)
Friday, October 14, 2005
> Effective IT Governance
(John Carrow, Unisys Corporation)
Saturday, October 29, 2005
> Whose Reality is This?: Computer Graphics, Virtual People, and You
(Norman Badler, Penn Engineering)
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Technologies for Optimistic Replication
Benjamin Pierce
Professor of Computer and Information Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania
Traditionally, electronic data has been held in centralized repositories like single-server file systems and
single-host databases or it has been pessimistically replicated, with small numbers of copies held on distributed
but tightly coupled hosts. Recently, however, the enormous volume of replicated data, the growing number of
intermittently connected devices, and the success of decentralized or peer-to-peer data-sharing technologies have
led to increased interest in optimistic replication strategies. These strategies are attractive in a growing range
of settings where weaker consistency guarantees can be accepted in return for higher availability and the ability
to update data while disconnected. Pierce's talk surveys both fundamental technologies and industrial applications
in this area, concentrating on distributed file systems and XML replication technologies.
Benjamin Pierce joined the CIS Department at Penn in 1998. Previously, he was on the faculty at Indiana University,
and has held research fellowships at Cambridge University and INRIA-Roquencourt. He received his PhD in Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research centers on programming languages, static type systems,
concurrent and distributed programming, and synchronization technologies. His books include the widely used graduate
text Types and Programming Languages. He is also the lead designer of the popular Unison file synchronizer.
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Saturday, October 1, 2005
Text Mining for Fun and Profit
Lyle Ungar
Professor of Computer and Information Science; Associate Director, Penn Center for BioInformatics
School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania
Companies are increasingly turning to information retrieval and information extraction tools for tasks ranging from
business intelligence to fraud detection to warranty claim analysis. This talk describes some of the text-mining
techniques, tools, and applications in practice today. Along the way, Ungar explains why text mining is sometimes
quite easy and why, at other times, it can be a particularly difficult process.
Lyle Ungar is Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science, Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering, and Associate Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied
Science at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Director of EMTM, he is currently Associate Director of the Penn
Center for BioInformatics. He also holds secondary appointments in Chemical Engineering and Computational Genomics
and the Operations and Information Management Department of the Wharton School. Dr. Ungar received his BS from Stanford
and his PhD from MIT. His research interests include machine learning and data mining for applications ranging from
bioinformatics to e-commerce. Dr. Ungar has also worked extensively in electronic commerce, including auction
mechanism design.
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Friday, October 14, 2005
Effective IT Governance
John Carrow
CIO and Vice-President, Information Technology
Unisys Corporation
IT governance is the process of making investments in technology in an orderly and purposeful fashion. That means that
people with oversight and experience have to determine if major IT investments truly support company objectives over
the longer term. Good governance helps us execute, as a unified enterprise, in both top line growth, as well as in our
ongoing efforts at cost reduction. In this seminar Carrow explores businesses' increasing need for effective governance
of their IT investments and how they can compete, win, and delight new customers while managing resources and risks.
John Carrow is a true hybrid business and technology leader with both government and business domain knowledge and
background tested in the U.S. Army and General Electric. He was the first cabinet-level CIO of the City of Philadelphia
and now serves as CIO and Vice President of Information Technology for the multibillion-dollar IT Services giant Unisys
Corporation.
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Saturday, October 29, 2005
Whose Reality is This?: Computer Graphics, Virtual People, and You
Norman Badler
Associate Dean; Professor of Computer and Information Science; Director, Center for Human Modeling and Simulation
School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania
Although computer graphics have been around for about 50 years, they have consistently forced a radical re-imagining
of computers and their capabilities. In the 1990s we transitioned to the PC and the emergence of highly capable
graphics boards and game platforms. The changed economics of computer processor speed and memory in this decade
makes computer graphics the user interface of choice for many applications — indeed, graphics are essentially
the sole driver of PC performance enhancements. Today, digital photography and video, games, and movie special
effects are fueling another revolution in user expectations, capabilities, and applications. This talk will
discuss the state of the art developments in the particular area of graphical virtual humans and offer a variety
of observations and studies on their utility and future uses.
Norman Badler is Associate Dean of Penn's School of Engineering, Professor of Computer and Information Science,
and Director of the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation. Active in computer graphics since 1968 and author
of more than 200 technical papers on the subject, Badler is currently focusing on human figure modeling, manipulation,
and animation control in real-time 3-D graphics. He received his BA in Mathematics from the University of California
at Santa Barbara, and his MS in Mathematics and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
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