Past GBC/ACM Meetings for 2000-2001

Ontology-Based Computing

Note: Special Location: IBM Solution Partnership Center, Waltham MA

Computing with Life

Software Agent Technologies

Java and the Web: Servlets, JSP and XSL/XML

Teeko: Solving A Game

Introduction to VoiceXML

CMS Pipes

Risks in Anonymous Distributed Computing Systems

The Power and Potential of Data Mining

Legal Tools for Protecting Software

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See past GBC/ACM Meetings for the 1997-1998 season.
See past GBC/ACM Meetings for the 1996-1997 season.

Meeting Details

June, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

• The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), a standard language for expressing ontologies and ontology-based knowledge representations.
• Tools for ontology development, consistency checking and mediation between ontologies.
• Scalable, high-performance storage and indexing of ontology-based knowledge representations.
• Integration with other computer-based technologies such as programming languages, databases, CASE tools, Web servers, and so on.

Speaker Biography

Prof. Baclawski has participated in and directed many large research projects funded by government agencies including the NSF, DARPA and the NIH.  He is a cofounder of Jarg Corporation which builds Internet-based, high-performance knowledge management engines.  He is actively involved in the DARPA sponsored UML-Based Ontology Toolset (UBOT) project which is building tools that integrate the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with DAML.  Prof. Baclawski has published over 30 articles in major research journals.  He has also
published extensively in conference and workshop proceedings.  He holds two U.S. patents and has 6 pending patents.  Prof. Baclawski is a member of the ACM and the IEEE.  He has held many positions in both organizations, including President of
the Boston Chapter of the ACM.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

May, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

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Meeting Overview

But we can also consider another agenda -- that of replacing or augmenting the electronics/silicon substrate of modern computation with a living, biochemical substrate. Important engineering advantages include the (unique) capability of self-replication, a straightforward interface to the chemical world, and access to the most sophisticated nanostructural assembly system, the ribosome.

In the past several years, we have begun the long process of intentional engineering of behavior into simple living systems. In this talk, I will try to explain what we, and others, have accomplished to date, and to present a plan for further development of this technology.

In particular, I will summarize some preliminary results in

• embedding digital logic within living cells, using protein concentration as an intracellular signal
• signalling cell to cell as a mechanism for orchestrating more complex multicellular behavior
• identification of a very simple living system, and the prospects for intentional further reduction of its complexity. Think of this as the chassis, power supply, and manufacturing facility.

Speaker Biography

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

April, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

Speaker Biography

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

March, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

This talk describes an evolution in Java Web development from Java Servlets to Java Server Pages (JSP) to the use of Extensible
Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XML in the construction of web sites. The first part of the talk is dedicated to describing and contrasting the use of Java Servlets and JSP and showing how these technologies are used together in web applications.

The second part focuses on Cocoon, an Apache open source project (see http://xml.apache.org), and demonstrates how it uses XML and XSL to provide dynamic web content.  As a 100% pure Java publishing framework, Cocoon provides a JSP-like facility for implementing dynamic content generation using Java.  This makes XSL useful for not only publishing static HTML but in interactive web applications as well.  Cocoon also aims for a complete separation of document content, style and business logic through the use of XSL.  Since document content, style and logic are often created by different individuals or working groups, Cocoon allows the three layers to be independently designed, created and managed, reducing management overhead, increasing work reuse and reducing time to market. This separation also makes it much easier to develop sites that support different types of clients: both the browsers and cell phones today as well as the internet appliances/browsers of the future tomorrow.

Speaker Biography

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

February, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

Recently we have solved a pleasant little two-player board game called Teeko, which is much more complicated than tic-tac-toe but much less complicated than chess or checkers. These board games have the common characteristics that both players can see everything that happens and there is no element of chance. To solve such a game is to prove whether the game should be won by the first player, won by the second player, or drawn if each player plays perfectly, making one of the best moves available at each turn.

In this talk we will discuss games in general and especially two-player strategy games and various techniques for solving them. We will present the history and rules of Teeko (which was invented by a flamboyant character named John Scarne) and our methods for solving it, which involve a combination of symmetry arguments, a mathematically interesting encoding of game positions, and brute force calculation on a 300MHz UltraSPARC.

Speaker Biography

He is author or co-author of five books: Common Lisp: The Language (Digital Press); C: A Reference Manual (Prentice-Hall); The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper&Row), which has been revised as The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric Raymond with introduction and illustrations by Guy Steele (MIT Press); The High Performance Fortran Handbook (MIT Press); and The Java Language Specification (Addison-Wesley).

He has published more than two dozen papers on the subject of the Lisp language and Lisp implementation, including a series with Gerald Jay Sussman that defined the Scheme dialect of Lisp. One of these, "Multiprocessing Compactifying Garbage Collection," won first place in the ACM 1975 George E. Forsythe Student Paper Competition. Other papers published in CACM are "Design of a LISP-Based Microprocessor" with Gerald Jay Sussman (November 1980) and "Data Parallel Algorithms" with W. Daniel Hillis (December 1986). He has also published papers on other subjects, including compilers, parallel processing, and constraint languages. One song he composed has been published in CACM ("The Telnet Song", April 1984).

The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the 1988 Grace Murray Hopper Award and named him an ACM Fellow in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1990. He led the team that received a 1990 Gordon Bell Prize honorable mention for achieving the fastest speed to that date for a production application: 14.182 Gigaflops. He was also awarded the 1996 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.

He has served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran) and is currently chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). He was also a member of the IEEE committee that produced the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language, IEEE Std 1178-1990. He represents Sun Microsystems in the High Performance Fortran Forum, which produced the High Performance Fortran specification in May, 1993.

He has served on Ph.D. thesis committees for eight students. He has served as program chair for the 1984 ACM Lisp Conference and for the 15th ACM POPL conference (1988) and 23rd ACM POPL conference (1996); he also served on program committees for 30 other conferences. He served a five-year term on the ACM Turing Award committee, chairing it in 1990. He served a five-year term on the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award committee, chairing it in 1992.

He has had chess problems published in Chess Life and Review and is a Life Member of the United States Chess Federation. He has sung in the bass section of the MIT Choral Society (John Oliver, conductor) and the Masterworks Chorale (Allen Lannom, conductor) as well as in choruses with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at Great Woods (Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor) and with the Boston Concert Opera (David Stockton, conductor). He has played the role of Lun Tha in The King and I and the title role in Li'l Abner. He designed the original EMACS command set and was the first person to port TeX.

At Sun Microsystems he is responsible for research in language design and implementation strategies, and architectural and software support, and for the specification of the Java programming language.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

January, 2001 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

Speaker Biography

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

December, 2000 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

VM/ESA is a modern time-sharing system which runs on IBM's System/390 servers. The operating system is capable of running thousands of virtual machines, each of which is a complete and logically independent emulation of a System/390 server. Thus, each user running under VM/ESA has at his or her disposal a fully functional "virtual" System/390.

VM predates Unix. VM was born in the mid 1960s at IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center and has made a number of contributions to the computing industry. Originally, VM didn't have any pipes-like feature.

People noticed that Unix pipes were very useful and convenient. An effort was started to add a similar feature to VM. The VM Pipes implementor decided to create a more general pipeline facility that supports pipe stages which can have multiple input connections and multiple output connections. For example, a stage named "LOOKUP" first reads master records from its secondary input and then reads detail records from its primary input writing paired master and detail records to its primary output and (optionally) writing detail records for which there was no master record to its secondary output. After it is finished processing all the detail records it can (optionally) write unmatched master records to its tertiary output.

CMS Pipelines (CMS Pipes for short) is one of the most exciting developments in VM. It allows the programmer to build powerful (and sophisticated) "plumbing" out of interconnecting pipelines. CMS Pipelines have been used to implement webservers, SMTP servers, and a
host of applications for parsing and processing the contents of files.

Simple CMS Pipelines can be typed into a CMS command line. However, they are usually entered in a REXX EXEC (the CMS counterpart to a Unix shell script). There is a syntax for commands in a REXX EXEC. CMS Pipelines have their own syntax (similar to the syntax of Unix pipes, but a little more complicated because it has to allow for the interconnections of multiple pipelines). Many CMS Pipelines stages accept control arguments which control details of that stage's behavior. The "SPECS" stage controls the way groups of one or more input records are transformed into one or more output records. The control arguments to the SPECS stage are sufficiently general and complex so that they could be described as a separate language embedded within the CMS Pipelines language. The SPECS stage has a facility for storing data and doing computations across multiple groups of records. This facility is called the "407 emulation" feature, in a joking reference to the old IBM 407 Accounting Machine (because its capabilities are somewhat similar to those of the IBM 407). The "407 emulation" mode is controlled by a programming language embedded within the SPECS language, embedded within the CMS Pipelines language, which is usually embedded within in the REXX language.

This talk will explore some of the interesting functionality that has been incorporated into CMS Pipes and ways in which it surpasses the Unix
pipes implementation which was its original inspiration.

Speaker Biography

Rocklyn was born and raised in New York City. He was first introduced to computers in junior high school and continued working on them through his years at the Bronx High School of Science in New York.

Rocklyn graduated from MIT in 1983 with a S.B. in Physics and continued working there for Information Processing Services, which was later
reorganized as Information Systems. Rocklyn has worked on IBM's VM/ESA operating system (and its predecessors) for over 18 years. He wrote the accounting system currently in use on MIT's central S/390 processors, as well as a number of other local system tools. Although he currently spends most of his time on non-VM projects, he continues to follow with great interest new developments in VM and in System 390 technology. His latest area of interest with respect to mainframe technology is in running Linux under VM/ESA on IBM S/390 processors.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

Slides

November, 2000 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

Mike will describe the structure of anonymous distributed systems, then identify potential risks and where they occur within the structure. He will then examine which risks can be addressed through existing techniques and technologies, and which require further study.

This talk is adapted from a presentation Mike made at the International Network Conference 2000, in Plymouth, England. It was co-authored by David Finkel and Craig Wills, also of WPI.

Speaker Biography

Mike is currently a Professor of Practice in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. Before that, he spent two years as a Senior Software Engineer at Lucent Technologies. His interests include software engineering, networking, and the social implications of computing. Mike is also the Webmaster for GBC/ACM.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

Slides

October, 2000 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

Current trends in data mining include mining unstructured data such as text, voice, and video, mining data in distributed and heterogeneous databases, and mining the web data to help electronic commerce sites. While data mining has seen numerous benefits, it can also cause serious security problems. Because of these data mining tools, users now have ways of extracting unauthorized information from making all kinds of correlations. Therefore, security and privacy aspects of data mining are now being given some consideration.

This presentation will provide an introduction to some of the concepts the speaker will present in more detail in the IEEE Boston Section data mining course beginning on 6 November 2000.

Speaker Biography

For more information, contact Alan Brooks at (781) 271-6497 (abrooks tre.org) or Scott Curry at scurry@object-components.com.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

September, 2000 Meeting

Subject

Speaker

Date

Time

Location

Meeting Overview

He will also talk about contractual methods of protecting software, such as license
agreements, confidentiality agreements, non-disclosure agreements, and trade secrets.

Finally, he will describe how you can enforce the rights you have obtained by using the above tools.

Speaker Biography

After law school, he worked on class actions and other sophisticated litigation in New York City for several years before returning to Boston in 1974, where he continued to concentrate in trial practice, representing individuals and businesses in a wide variety of litigation matters, including contract, intellectual property, real estate, personal injury and criminal defense. He was also a Special Assistant Attorney General between 1975 and 1980. He has been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the U.S. Tax Court, and state and federal trial and appellate courts in Massachusetts, New York, California and Michigan.

Mr. Stolzberg is a member of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America; the Boston Bar Association, where he was chair of the Aviation Litigation Committee; and the Massachusetts Bar Association. He teaches in the trial practice course at Harvard Law School and has published several articles in local and national legal journals.

Optional Post-Meeting Dinner

Additional Information on Meetings

The meeting is free and open to the public. No reservations are required. The formal part of the meeting will start at 7:00 PM.

MIT is at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, just on the north side of Memorial Drive (on the north shore of the Charles River), in Cambridge, MA. One way to find room 4-231, which is on the second floor of building 4, is to enter the main complex of MIT buildings by coming in the main entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, then walk straight through "the infinite corridor" until you reach building 4.

Directions to MIT by car and public transit.

Map showing MIT campus. The red building just left of center is Bldg. 4; the red dot on the right is the Kendall T station.