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Brewster Kahle
Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive.
Title: Universal Access to All Knowledge
The goal of universal access to our cultural heritage is within our
grasp. With current digital technology we can build comprehensive
collections, and with digital networks we can make these available to
students and scholars all over the world. A current challenge is
establishing the roles, rights, and responsibilities of our libraries
and archives in providing public access to this information. Another
current issue will be whether the services will be primarily
commercial therefore making the next generation library system a
proprietary rather than public one. With these roles defined, our
institutions will help fulfill this epic opportunity of our digital
age.
Bio:
Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and co-founder of the Internet
Archive, has been working to provide universal access to all human
knowledge for more than fifteen years.
Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for
information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle invented
the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information
Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic
publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996,
Kahle founded the Internet Archive, the largest publicly accessible,
privately funded digital archive in the world. At the same time, he
co-founded Alexa Internet in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com
in 1999. Alexa's services are bundled into more than 80% of Web
browsers.
Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with
Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis. In 1983, Kahle helped start
Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as
lead engineer for six years. He is profiled in Digerati: Encounters
with the Cyber Elite (HardWired, 1996). He was selected as a member of
the Upside 100 in 1997, Micro Times 100 in 1996 and 1997, and Computer
Week 100 in 1995. He received the Paul Evan Peters Award from the
Coalition for Networked Information and the IP3 Award from Public
Knowledge in 2004.
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Bernardo Huberman
Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Information Dynamics
Lab at Hewlett Packard Laboratories
Title: Harvesting Implicit Knowlege
The dynamics of information within social networks is relevant to
issues of innovation, productivity and sorting out useful ideas from
the general chatter of a community. How information spreads and
aggregates determines the speed with which individuals and
organizations can act and plan their future activities. This talk will
describe new mechanisms for automatically identifying communities of
practice within large social networks and for elucidating the spread
of information within those communities. In addition, I will describe
a novel methodology for information aggregation that leads to accurate
predictions of uncertain events in the real world.
Bio:
Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the
Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. He received
his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is also
a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at
Stanford University.
In the field of information sciences, he predicted the existence of
phase transitions in artificial intelligence and large scale
distributed systems, and developed an economics approach to the
solution of hard computational problems. Dr. Huberman is one of the
creators of the field of ecology of computation, and editor of a book
on the subject. He published the book: "The Laws of the Web: Patterns
in the Ecology of Information", with MIT Press in 2001.
Currently, his work centers on the design of novel mechanisms for
discovering and aggregating information in distributed systems as well
as understanding the dynamics of information in large networks.
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David Axmark
Co-Founder of MySQL
Title: Innovation by user feedback: MySQL and the Web
MySQL got started when the founders needed a database for their web
pages. The first announce emails (over 10 years ago) went to webserver
mailing lists and created a demand for web related features. These
features are not "major" but still adds up to a easier to use/develop
for database.
This talk will cover some of those features and how they came about
based on ideas and input from people who used MySQL for web stuff all
around the world. And also how MySQL has continued to develop and
build a large web user base containing well known names like Yahoo,
Google, Amazon and Rakuten (well known if you are from Japan).
We will go through some of the many new features in the latest MySQL
release (5.0) like Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Precision Math,
Information schema (Data Dictionary), Cursors and extended
international character set (UNICODE) support. Of course a short
mention of what is being worked on for the next release (5.1).
Bio: David is one of the Founders of both the MySQL Project and the
company behind it (MySQL AB). David has been working with MySQL since
well before it had a name.
Before MySQL took over all time David worked as a consultant for over
15 years. The things he did included a state of the art market
research system (CommonLISP+CLOS+MySQL's ISAM) and an advanced
business graphics package (in 32k RAM). He has written many lines of
code in 6502 and Z80 assembler, BASIC, C, CommonLisp, (Bourne)-Shell
and Perl. His involvement with MySQL started with the idea to upgrade
an internal terminal based db tool (UNIREG) to a OpenSource SQL server
(first used to drive our web site). For MySQL David has worked with
strategy, commercial and business aspects, hiring and early on also
real work on web site, installation, documentation and talking about
it all (conferences all over the world, tutorials, customer
presentations, interviews etc). Personally hobbies include mountain
hiking, digital photography, disc-golf (the REAL golf!) and
ultimate. David lives in Uppsala, Sweden with his Malaysian wife, 2
year old daughter, plants, and of course a number of computers.
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