Evening Seminars

Interpreting the non-coding human genome using chromatin and regulator dynamics in multiple cell types

Peter Mager — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:02:48 +0000

When:

Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Lecturer(s):

Manolis Kellis, MIT

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

Challenges & opportunities in applying computational & synthetic biology to preventing disease & creating new materials

Peter Mager — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:33:11 +0000

When:

Thursday, September 16, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Lecturer(s):

George Church

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

George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, an associate member of the Broad Institute, and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics. He graduated from Duke University with degrees in Chemistry and Zoology, co-authoring research on 3D-software & RNA structure with Sung-Hou Kim. His PhD from Harvard (with Wally Gilbert) included the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984. He helped initiate the Human Genome Project while working Biogen Inc.

Real-Time Architectures

Peter Mager — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:44:31 +0000

When:

Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Bruce Douglass, IBM

Architecture captures the broad-stroke strategic design decisions of a particular system. The Harmony process identifies 5 important architectural views: subsystem and component architecture, concurrency architecture, distribution architecture, safety and reliability architecture, and deployment architecture. These 5 views of architecture are then realized in the incremental development cycle via the application of architectural design patterns to form a comprehensive, robust and coherent architecture.

Bruce Powel Douglass, who has a doctorate in neurocybernetics, has over 30 years experience designing safety-critical real-time applications in a variety of hard real-time environments.

Communicating Science Visually

Peter Mager — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:38:38 +0000

When:

Thursday, May 13, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Room:

Auditorium

Lecturer(s):

Bang Wong

Images play a critical role in the advancement of science. Throughout history, there has been a rich tradition of capturing the natural world through drawings to document and understand biology. Illustrations continue to be the mainstay of science communication. Visual representation of information is an important instrument of science. With the massive amounts of data researchers are able to generate today, they rely on visualization for analysis and to gain insights into the domain under study.

Bang Wong is the Creative Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His work focuses on communicating science visually in the areas of scientific graphics, data visualization, and art and design. He received a Masters degree in Immunology and a Masters degree in Medical and Scientific Illustrations both from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. http://www.bangwong.com

The Next Net: Reality Mining for Honest Signals

Peter Mager — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:33:37 +0000

When:

Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E14 (Media Lab)

Room:

633

Lecturer(s):

Prof. Alex `Sandy' Pentland, MIT

We have invented the technology of reality mining, which uses sensor data to extract subtle patterns that predict future human behavior. These predictive patterns begin with "honest signals," human behaviors that evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, and which are major factors in human decision making in everything from job interviews to first dates. Management insights based on Honest Signals were Named a "Breakthrough Idea of 2009" by Harvard Business Review.

Professor Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Sandy's focus is the development of human-centered technology and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world. He directs MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, helping companies become more productive and creative through organizational engineering, and the Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, which helps translate cutting-edge technology into real-world impact around the world.

Special Relativity and the Problem of Database Scalability

Peter Mager — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:39:46 +0000

When:

Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

315

Lecturer(s):

Jim Starkey, NimbusDB, Inc.

Conventional wisdom says that relational or even transactional databases can’t scale. Like most conventional wisdom, this opinion is based on an unstated assumption, specifically, that database consistency depends on transaction serializeability. Serializeability is a property of databases implying that transactions leave the database in the same state whether they run concurrently or serially in some order. Serializeability is analogous to the Newtonian assumption of a universal reference frame that each transaction moves the database from one fixed state to another.

Jim Starkey’s career spans database history from the Datacomputer on the fledgling ARPAnet to his most recent startup, NimbusDB, Inc. Innovations include the date data type to the blob to multi-version concurrency control. At DEC, Starkey created the Datatrieve family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface, Rdb/ELN and designed the software architect for DEC’s database machine.

A Common Class of Business-Oriented Database Applications or: How I Hope to Achieve what Microsoft Access Didn't

Peter Mager — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:38:24 +0000

When:

Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

315

Lecturer(s):

Eirik Bakke, M.I.T. CSAIL and EECS

Joint meeting with IEEE Computer Society and DAMA

Before fleeing to the US, Eirik evaded military service by spending a year as an end-user of an amazingly obscure (and aquatically themed) database system made specifically for the administration of public Norwegian schools of music, theatre, and visual arts. Now safe in the hands of his advisors Prof. David Karger and Prof. Rob Miller, Eirik is at MIT CSAIL working towards his Master's Degree and, eventually/hopefully, his PhD.

Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon

Peter Mager — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:00:29 +0000

When:

Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn't flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets -- secrets that every designer should know about. If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it's filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Task-specific Search

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:27:44 +0000

When:

Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Michael Stonebraker, MIT and Goby, Inc.

Historically, search engines have focused on searching the entire web for objects of interest using a single “one-size-fits-all” keyword query system supported by word-oriented indexing. In a task-specific search application such as real estate values (Zillow.com), airline tickets (Kayak, et. al..) and comparison shopping, such general purpose information retrieval (IR) techniques can be drastically improved. One can leverage any or all of the following to generate a vastly improved search experience.

a task-specific user-interface for queries

Mike Stonebraker is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T. and CTO of 3 companies that are commercializing new database related technologies that he initiated. He is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in database technology and is noted for his insight in operating systems and expert systems. Mike received a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University and Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan.

The Power of Abstraction

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:20:24 +0000

When:

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building 6 (Eastman Laboratories)

Room:

6-120

Lecturer(s):

Barbara Liskov, MIT

Abstraction is at the center of much work in Computer Science. It encompasses finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation. Furthermore abstraction is an important way to make progress within computer science: once the right abstraction has been defined, it allows previously unresolved problems to be ignored from then on and provides a building block for future work. This talk will discuss abstraction mechanisms, their support in programming languages, and their use in designing and implementing programs.

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor and head of the Programming Methodology Group at MIT. Liskov's research interests lie in programming methodology, programming languages and systems, and distributed computing.