Rick Rashid
Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation
Member of US National Academy of Engineering
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As senior vice president, Richard (Rick) F. Rashid oversees worldwide operations for Microsoft Research, an organization encompassing more than 850 researchers across six labs worldwide. Under Rashid’s leadership, Microsoft Research conducts both basic and applied research across disciplines that include algorithms and theory; human-computer interaction; machine learning; multimedia and graphics; search; security; social computing; and systems, architecture, mobility and networking. His team collaborates with the world’s foremost researchers in academia, industry and government on initiatives to advance the state-of-the-art of computing and to help ensure the future of Microsoft’s products.
After joining Microsoft in September 1991, Rashid served as director and vice president of the Microsoft Research division and was promoted to his current role in 2000. In his earlier roles, Rashid led research efforts on operating systems, networking and multiprocessors, and authored patents in such areas as data compression, networking and operating systems. He managed projects that catalyzed the development of Microsoft’s interactive TV system and also directed Microsoft’s first e-commerce group. Rashid was the driving force behind the creation of the team that later developed into Microsoft’s Digital Media Division.
Before joining Microsoft, Rashid was professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). As a faculty member, he directed the design and implementation of several influential network operating systems and published extensively about computer vision, operating systems, network protocols and communications security. During his tenure, Rashid developed the Mach multiprocessor operating system, which has been influential in the design of modern operating systems and remains at the core of several commercial systems.
Rashid’s research interests have focused on artificial intelligence, operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. He has participated in the design and implementation of the University of Rochester’s Rochester Intelligent Gateway operating system, the Rochester Virtual Terminal Management System, the CMU Distributed Sensor Network Testbed, and CMU’s SPICE distributed personal computing environment. He also co-developed of one of the earliest networked computer games, «Alto Trek,» during the mid-1970s.
Rashid was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2003 and presented with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Emanuel R. Piore Award and the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. He was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008. In addition, Rashid is a member of the National Science Foundation Computer Directorate Advisory Committee and a past member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency UNIX Steering Committee and the Computer Science Network Executive Committee. He is also a former chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery Software System Awards Committee.
Rashid received master of science (1977) and doctoral (1980) degrees in computer science from the University of Rochester. He graduated with honors in mathematics and comparative literature from Stanford University in 1974.
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Since its founding in 1991, Microsoft Research has been dedicated to expanding the state of the art in computer science, rapidly transfer technologies into Microsoft products, and ensure that Microsoft products have a future.
Microsoft Research has also played an important role in connecting the company with developments and trends in academia and industry. In the era of three screens and the cloud, more opportunities emerge in connecting people, connecting sensors, and connecting data together in a heterogeneous network of users, servers and devices to provide new user services and experiences. I will illustrate using a select set of projects from Microsoft Research, many of the projects are carried out in collaboration with academic partners worldwide.
Takeo Kanade
U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon Universitye
Member of US National Academy of Engineering
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Takeo Kanade is the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the director of Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the director of Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo, which he founded in 2001. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, where he was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001.
Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics and sensors. He has written more than 300 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.
Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow of the IEEE; a Fellow of the ACM, a Founding Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The awards he has received include the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, Okawa Award, C&C Award, Joseph Engelberger Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and IEEE PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award.
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Computer vision motion analysis has great opportunities to help with the rapid advancement of biological discovery and its transition into new clinical therapies. Tissue Engineering involves implanting scaffolds (biodegradable exracellular matrices) and seeding and culturing cells with hormones to induce growth of tissue for restoration. By analyzing a sequence of time-lapse images from phase-contrast or differential interference contrast microscopes that can capture living cells, we could precisely and individually track a large number of cells, while they undergo migration (translocation), mitosis (division), and apoptosis (death). The result is a complete cell lineage (mother-daughter relations) of the whole cell population. Such a capability of high-throughput spatio-temporal analysis of cell behaviors allows for “engineering individual cells” – directing the migration and proliferation of tissue cells in real time.
Based on the work in collaboration with biomedical engineer, this talk will present the challenges, results, and excitement of the new interdisciplinary research area of computer science and biology.
Daniel A. Reed
Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corporation
Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE and the AAAS
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Daniel A. Reed is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for the Extreme Computing Group, responsible for R&D on parallel and extreme scale computing, including cloud infrastructure. Previously, he was the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Chancellor’s Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation for UNC Chapel Hill. Dr. Reed has served as a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and as a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). He recently chaired a review of the U.S. networking and IT research portfolio and completed two terms as chair of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA).
He was previously Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has also been Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC, where he also led National Computational Science Alliance. He was also one of the principal investigators and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid. He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University and is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.
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Computing continues to transform how we work and live, how we socialize and play, and how we innovate and conduct research. To see the depth of this transformation, one need only consider the effects of the web and social networks, digital media, broadband networking, smart phones, multiplayer games, electronic commerce and computational science. In today’s global village, time and space rarely limit interaction. What will the future bring, in a world where ubiquitous mobile sensors, diverse computing devices, and scalable cloud infrastructure and services enable natural interaction and further blur the boundaries between the cyber and physical worlds,? This talk examines the technical challenges and opportunities beneath such a vision of natural interaction and experiential computing.
Alan Kay
President of Viewpoints Research Institute
2003 Turing Award and 2004 Kyoto Prize recipient
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Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers,” the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing,” and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.”
Kay has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Arts, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Computer History Museum. Other honors include: J-D Warnier Prix d’Informatique, ACM Systems Software Award5, NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Funai Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, and the CRN Hall of Fame.
Kay has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning and advanced systems research.
At Viewpoints Research Institute he and his colleagues continue to explore advanced systems and programming design by aiming for a “Moore’s Law” advance in software creation of many orders of magnitude. Kay and Viewpoints are also deeply involved in the One Laptop Per Child initiative that seeks to create a Dynabook-like “$100 laptop” for every child in the world (especially in the 3rd world).
Outside of computing, Kay entered show business in the 50s as a professional jazz guitarist. Much of his subsequent work combined music and theatrical production. Today he is an avid amateur classical pipe organist and has just taken up jazz guitar again after more than 40 years.
Kay has a BA in Mathematics and Biology with minor concentrations in English and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, 1966. MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science (1968 and 1969, both with distinction) from the University of Utah, and Honorary Doctorates from the Kungl Tekniska Hoegskolan in Stockholm, Sweden, Columbia College in Chicago, Georgia Tech, the University of Pisa in Italy and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
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Part of the aesthetics of mathematics is to not only find interesting “relationships between relationships” but also to be able to express them as clearly, simply and understandably as possible. The expressions that Maxwell used for his theory of electromagnetic radiation would not fit on a T-shirt, but the eventual use of vectors and new operators (div, curl, etc.) allowed a beautiful more understandable expression of the ideas. Similarly, the expression of Fortran was large and ad hoc, Algol less so, but it was McCarthy’s expression of Lisp in itself that revealed extremely important and beautiful things about a very powerful programming language (and it did fit on a T-shirt!). This led to more compact and powerful ways to think about programming languages, including expressions which include how the relationships could be made to run on a computer.
For some years we have speculated about “how many T-shirts would personal computing require if its parts were redesigned into ‘active mathematics’ ?” Three years ago we started to pursue this question, and are about half way along mathematizing personal computing “from the end-user down to the metal (and a little below)” via creating runable mathematical schemes that are as clear as possible, and in terms of what used to be called “problem oriented languages” using runable metaprogramming.
This is an essay in inventing both “bricks and architecture”. It has great general interest if what needs to be expressed is reduced by 2, 3 or even 4 orders of magnitude. A number of examples of the work in progress will be shown in this short talk.