Date: Friday 6 June 2008, 3:00-4:00pm
Location: The University of Sydney, School of IT Building, Lecture Theatre (Room 123), Level 1
Speaker: Professor H. J. Siegel, Colorado State University, USA
Title: Making Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems Robust
Abstract:
In heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing environments, different kinds of machines are interconnected to execute tasks. Computational requirements, such as types of instructions and memory space, may vary among tasks. Also, the execution time of a given task may vary from one machine to another. An important research problem is how to assign tasks to machines to maximize some given performance measure. However, resource assignment decisions and associated performance prediction are often based on estimated values of task and system parameters. The actual values of these parameters, and actual performance, may differ from the estimates. To address this problem,
we present two models of robustness for resource assignments. One model is based on having deterministic estimates of these system parameters, and the other assumes that stochastic information is available about the values of these parameters. We demonstrate how these models can be used to evaluate the robustness of resource assignments and to design assignment techniques that are robust.
Biography:
H. J. Siegel is the George T. Abell Endowed Chair Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU), where he is also a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the university-wide Information Science and Technology Center (ISTeC). From 1976 to 2001, he was a Professor at Purdue University. He received two B.S. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the M.A., M.S.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM. Prof. Siegel has co-authored over 350 published technical papers in the areas of parallel and distributed computing and communications. He was a Coeditor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and was on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Computers.
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Date: 4pm Wednesday 21 May
Location: Sydney Uni, Lecture Theatre, Room 123, SIT Building
Speaker: Dr Richard A. Jefferson, Founder & CEO, CAMBIA
Title: The Initiative for Open Innovation: Creating a worldwide patent informatics cyberinfrastruture to increase transparency, efficiency and equity in science-enabled innovation
Abstract:
Perhaps the greatest revolution to impact human society has been the development of the scientific method. Using science as a tool for innovation has created unprecedented opportunities for creating social and economic value. But with over half the world's population living on less than a few dollars a day, food crises pushing ever more people into poverty, water, soil and other natural resources being squandered and a planet in meltdown, we urgently need to up our game. We must make great progress and we must make it soon; and science must be a critical part of the toolkit.
Increasingly, the intellectual property system that had originally been created to foster such progress is becoming, in the words of the President of the European Patent Organization "dysfunctional": complex, opaque, fragmented and gamed for private benefit at the expense of public good. This has resulted in extraordinary inefficiencies in using science as a tool for innovation. These inefficiencies result in only the highest margins or largest markets garnering sufficient investment and attention.
The free and open source software movement constitutes another major revolution in innovation systems. The notion of coupling "permission to use" software with the "obligation to respect others' use" of the software, enforced through the intellectual property device of copyright license, has fostered an explosion in capabilities of both the software and the community that uses it. It has been nothing less than galvanizing of an industry and a sector. But this revolution is fragile: vulnerable to the new use of patents over software and algorithms.
I'll describe how using advanced informatics, creating open cyberinfrastructures and leveraging worldwide commitment to solving these problems can open new vistas for innovation transparency, efficiency and equity. We have developed a foundational platform for such transparency called the Patent Lens, as part of a larger Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI).
The Patent Lens is the world's largest and most sophisticated open access, independent resource for full text patent searching and analysis. We aspire to co-develop, in an open source environment, a platform for navigation and decision-support that mines and links worldwide full text of patents with business, scientific and technical information. The platform is sector and jurisdiction agnostic. The tools as they evolve will comprise sophisticated modeling and visualization technologies to allow international and national patent policy and practice to be built on a strong evidence base which is currently totally lacking.
Biography:
Richard A. Jefferson, PhD is the founder and CEO of CAMBIA (www.cambia.org), the BiOS Initiative and the Patent Lens. He is a prominent molecular biologist, and is responsible for creating and distributing some of the world's most widely cited and licensed biotechnologies. CAMBIA, an international non-profit institute based in Australia since 1992, is dedicated to development of resources, policies, tools and enabling technologies to promote equitable science-enabled innovation worldwide.
The CAMBIA BiOS Initiative (www.bios.net) - the biological open source movement – has achieved great traction internationally as an integrated response to technology complexity, patent thickets and innovation system inefficiencies.
As part of this work, CAMBIA created the Patent Lens, (www.patentlens.net), an independent, open access, public-good global cyberinfrastructure for increasing patent transparency. The Patent Lens is one of the most popular and most effective tools for searching and understanding worldwide patents. The Lens has many unique features, including analyis of DNA and protein sequence disclosed in patents. The CAMBIA Patent Lens was the first open web facility to allow full text searching of Australian patents, has been endorsed in cover editorials by The Plant Cell, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, and other leading scientific journals, and is the default patent tool for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the World Health Organization (WHO) and most North American and European universities and public agencies.
Richard's expertise as an inventor and disseminator of molecular enabling technologies and in IP and innovation systems strategy are widely recognised. Richard was a former senior staff member of the United Nations, and has worked and taught extensively in the developing world, supporting the Rockefeller Foundation's rice biotechnology network for over ten years. He has been profiled in media including The Economist, Newsweek, New York Times, Wall St Journal, Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology and Red Herring. CAMBIA's work has recently featured and endorsed in cover editorials in most major life sciences journals. In 2003 he was named by Scientific American to the List of the World's 50 most influential technologists, cited as the World Research Leader for Economic Development. Richard is an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation, for which is a regular panelist at the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum.
