October 19, 2001, a beautiful fall day, started with a bustle of activity in the EE/CS Building as those involved with the approximately 50 exhibits showcasing industrial technology, department research, and education programs set up their booths, and participants registered and got coffee and refreshments.
H. Ted Davis, Dean, Institute of Technology, Chris Mazier, Vice President for Research, and Pen-Chung Yew, Head, Computer Science and Engineering opened the forum and welcomed the participants. During the following two hours the 230 participants visited the research and industrial exhibits and networked with each other. The number of exhibits prepared by CS&E researchers, around 30, as well as the variety and results described and demonstrated were impressive.
University President Mark G. Yudof spoke at the luncheon. Ted Johnson, Vice President, Business Tools Division, at Microsoft, and the previous winner of the Alumni Award was on hand to present this year's award to Professor Arvind, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. The day before Johnson and his wife Linda had presented the University with a major gift (see article on page 3). Arvind in his acceptance speech, "Confessions of an Academic Entrepreneur" described his experience starting a new company and contrasted the experience with a career in academia. (See page 2 for more on Arvind.)
The afternoon too was filled with activities, starting with two panel discussions moderated by Professor Mats Heimdahl. The first session, "Medical Technology Software: When Life Depends on Your Programs" featured as panelists Anne Mickelson, Senior Usability Engineer, Minnetronix, Inc. and Greg Linden from the Cardiac Rhythm Management Division of Medtronic. The panelists discussed how the medical technology field poses some unique challenges to human machine interface design as well as the use of the Internet for patient monitoring. The discussion that followed touched many areas including the privacy of patient information and whether the physician or the patient "owns" patient data. This discussion led naturally to the second panel of the day, "Privacy, Is There Any Hope".
The panelists for this second discussion were Laura Gurak, Director of the U of M Center for Internet Studies, and Professor of CS&E Jaideep Srivastava, freshly returned from a stint working in the real world. Gurak presented the problems and the issues while Srivastava gave some examples in which people were willing to give up some privacy for perceived benefits. Too many issues were raised to be settled in the lively ensuing discussion.
The official program ended with the keynote address presented by Dr. William Pulleyblank, Director, Deep Computing Institute, IBM. The address on "Computation, Biology, and Algorithms" described how many developments in information technology are motivated by problems in computational biology. Pulleyblank discussed the computational challenges presented by some of these problems and described the features of Blue Gene, the proposed petaflop supercomputer that IBM is developing. One goal of Blue Gene is advancing the state of the art in biomolecular simulation, particularly in the notoriously hard problem of computing the folding of proteins in 3D.
The day ended with more opportunities for networking at a reception in the McNamara Alumni Center.
-Bobbie Othmer