Evening Seminars

The Secret Lives of Links

Peter Mager — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:21:14 +0000

When:

Thursday, January 19, 2012 - 7:00pm

Room:

Constant Contact

Lecturer(s):

Jared M. Spool

IEEE Computer Society, GBC/ACM and BostonCHI

7:00 PM, Thursday, January 19, 2012
Constant Contact, Reservoir Place, Waltham, MA
[Admission is free, but you must register at http://ieeemeetsjaredspool.eventbrite.com]
The Secret Lives of Links
Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site.

Genome Engineering and the Construction of New Genetic Codes

Peter Mager — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:35:59 +0000

When:

Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Room:

auditorium

Lecturer(s):

Peter Carr

Our capacity to engineer genetic material is moving beyond the level of single genes to the scale of genomes. Still, our ability to paint effectively on a canvas as large as a genome is minute, dwarfed by our growing ability to synthesize DNA, which is in turn dwarfed by our ability to sequence. Current attempts to engineer at this scale are first and foremost an exploration of to what extent living systems can be re-designed and modified.

Synthetic biology: from parts to modules to therapeutic systems

Peter Mager — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:07:20 +0000

When:

Thursday, October 27, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building 32 (Stata Center)

Room:

32-G449 Kiva/Patel *** NEW LOCATION ***

Lecturer(s):

Ron Weiss

IEEE Computer and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Societies, MIT biological engineering and biomedical engineering student group (BE-BMES), and GBC/ACM

Ron Weiss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from MIT in 2001 and held a faculty appointment at Princeton University between 2001 and 2009. His research focuses primarily on synthetic biology, where he programs cell behavior by constructing and modeling biochemical and cellular computing systems.

Building the Internet of Things: Rapid Prototyping Using PSoC Technology

Peter Mager — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:46:15 +0000

When:

Sunday, September 25, 2011 - 9:00am

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-345

Lecturer(s):

Ted Kochanski, President and Chief Scientist, Vital Electronics Institute, Inc. Patrick Kane, Director, Cypress University Alliance

GBC/ACM and IEEE Computer and Electron Devices Societies Hands-On Workshop
9:00 AM, Sunday, 25 September 2011, 09:00am - 04:00pm

Thaddeus (Ted) P. Kochanski, SB, Ph.D. , (Ted), an Affiliate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, is an experimental physicist, systems engineering consultant and entrepreneur, with a passion for informal education, walking, and history. He has contributed to wired and wireless sensor networks, soft x-ray, VUV, IR and cosmic-ray muon imaging, Giga-scale IC's, radar propagation, Ground Penetration Radar, data acquisition, signal processing and interactive multimedia.

Genetic evidence for interbreeding between archaic and modern humans

Peter Mager — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:37:25 +0000

When:

Thursday, September 15, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Room:

Auditorium

Lecturer(s):

David Reich

It has recently become possible to sequence the DNA of ancient humans, and to compare the sequence to DNA from present-day humans to learn how they are related. Here I report the results of two such studies. In the first study, we showed that Neandertals contributed about 2.5% of the genetic material of all non-Africans today. In the second study, we showed that Denisovans contributed about 5% of the genetic material of New Guineans today.

David Reich is a geneticist and professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute. He has a doctorate in Statistical Genetics from Oxford University and worked at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research from 1999-2003. While at Harvard he received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award in the Biomedical Sciences (2003-2009), the Genzyme Outstanding Achievement in Biomedical Research Award (2007) and an Excellence in Teaching Award for his course in Human Genetics (2009).

Rethinking user research for the social web

GBCACM Administrator — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:55:21 +0000

When:

Thursday, June 16, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Dana Chisnell

While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using the same user research and usability testing methods and techniques we were using in 1994. We know that conducting usability tests can tell us where people get frustrated. What will testing reveal about frustrations with interactions people have with other people online? When interaction is protean, how do you derive a task scenario? What are the success criteria? When you have large-scale social, individual workarounds turn into functionality and social norms. Etiquette evolves organically.

Dana Chisnell has helped thousands of people learn how to make better design decisions by giving them the skills they need to gain knowledge about users. She has observed hundreds of study participants for dozens of clients to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots, helping these organizations perform usability tests and user research to inform design decisions for products and services. These days, her pet topics are election design, usable security, and researching social interactions mediated by technology.

From Introducing Computer Law in 1960 to the Modern Law of the Mind

GBCACM Administrator — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:50:04 +0000

When:

Thursday, May 19, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-345

Lecturer(s):

Roy Freed

A futile effort to escape the burdens of searching massive files of evidence without machine help sensitized Freed's natural engineering aptitude, in 1960, to unveil computer law to anticipate the diverse legal ramifications of just emerging computers. After retiring from that law practice in 1986, Freed's user-knowledge of computers revealed them as rough models of the functioning mind to derive an overall perception of it that is especially instructive to non-scientists.

Roy graduated from Yale Law School in 1940, during the Great Depression. Most of first half of his law practice was in anti-trust litigation for the Department of Justice and, then, for private litigants. That sadly entailed organizing masses of evidentiary documents without machine help. Upon escaping that by introducing computer law, he became inside counsel for Computer Control Co., in Framingham, largely by having met Ben Kessel, its president, at the First (and last) Annual Conference on Law and Electronics at Lake Arrowhead, CA in October 1960, sponsored by UCLA.

Network Science: From the Web to the Cell

GBCACM Administrator — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:20:55 +0000

When:

Thursday, April 28, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building NE30 (Broad Institute)

Room:

Broad Institute Auditorium

Lecturer(s):

Albert-László Barabási

Highly interconnected networks with amazingly complex structure describe systems as diverse as the World Wide Web, our cells, social systems and the economy. In the past decade we learned that most of these networks are the result of self-organizing processes governed by simple but generic laws, resulting in architectural features that makes them much more similar to each other than one would have expected by chance. I will discuss the recurring patterns of our interconnected world and its implications to network robustness and spreading processes.

Albert-László Barabási is the former Emil T. Hofmann professor at the University of Notre Dame and current Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) and an associate member of the Center of Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University.

Making Synthetic Biologists - iGEM the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition

Peter Mager — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:52:16 +0000

When:

Thursday, March 31, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Lecturer(s):

Randy Rettberg

IEEE Computer and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Societies, MIT biological engineering and biomedical engineering student group (BE-BMES), and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, March 31, 2011
Broad Institute Auditorium (MIT building NE-30)

Making Synthetic Biologists - iGEM the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition
Randy Rettberg, MIT

Can simple biological systems be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells? OR, is biology so complicated that every
case is unique? The minicomputer revolution thrived on

The Secrets of Building and Participating in Global Communities

Peter Mager — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:25:52 +0000

When:

Thursday, March 17, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Dries Buytaert

IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, March 17, 2011
IBM Innovation Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA

The Secrets of Building and Participating in Global Communities
Dries Buytaert

Attendance at this event is free, but because of limited seating
capacity, registration is required at
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1379501125.

We all know many successful communities, but how are active communities
built? In this session, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert will share his
secrets for building a thriving global community with more than 500,000