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Past GBC/ACM Meetings for 1999-2000
Arvind
Laboratory for Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thursday, June 15, 2000
John Bottoms
FirstStar Data
Thursday, May 18, 2000
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Sun Microsystems
Thursday, April 20, 2000
Eric Steven Raymond
Thursday, March 16, 2000
Prof. Victor Lesser
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Thursday, February 17, 2000
Robert A. Martin
The MITRE Corporation
Thursday, January 20, 2000
Donald E. Knuth
Stanford University
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
Lotfi A. Zadeh
University of California, Berkeley
Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Hanscom Conference Center, Bedford MA
Robert Herr, Open Finance Corporation
Thursday, October 21, 1999
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN), Cambridge MA
James D. Isaak, Senior Member IEEE
Thursday, September 23, 1999
6:15 pm coffee, 6:30 pm presentation.
Marcam, Needham MA
Joint Meeting with IEEE Computer Society
Return to GBC/ACM Home Page.
See past GBC/ACM Meetings
for the 1998-1999 season.
See past GBC/ACM Meetings
for the 1997-1998 season.
See past GBC/ACM Meetings
for the 1996-1997 season.
Meeting Details
June, 2000 Meeting
Subject
You Can Design Microprocessors Too: Invasion of the Hardware Domain by
Software People
Speaker
Arvind
Laboratory for Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date
Thursday, June 15, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:45 p.m.
Meeting at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
This meeting is free, open to the public, and no registration is required.
Meeting Overview
Neither general-purpose microprocessors nor digital signal processors meet
all the needs of communication networks, intelligent personal devices,
multimedia and other advanced applications. Time-to-market for many products
is limited by the cost and time to develop required ASIC's. I will
present some revolutionary technology for designing hardware and firmware
from high-level specifications. This new technology, which is based
on Term Rewriting Systems (TRS's), can dramatically reduce the time to
market in sectors where the standards are changing too quickly or where
functionality evolution is too rapid for traditional hardware design.
TRS descriptions are concise and amenable to both formal verification
and hardware synthesis. In this talk we will focus on synthesis and
show how a TRS description of a pipelined processor can be compiled into
synthesizable RTL. Synthesis from TRS's dramatically lowers the threshold
for new computer designers and vastly expands the exploration space for
experienced designers.
The work on synthesis has been done jointly with James Hoe.
For more on this work, see Arvind and Xiaowei Shen, "Using Term Rewriting
Systems to Design and Verify Processors", IEEE MICRO, May/June 1999). <http://www.csg.lcs.mit.edu/pubs/csgmemo.html>
Speaker Biography
Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His recent work centers
on high-level specification and synthesis of architectures and protocols
using Term Rewriting Systems (TRS's). Previously, he has contributed
to the development of dynamic dataflow architectures, the implicitly parallel
programming languages Id and pH, and compilation of these languages on
parallel machines. He serves on several editorial boards, including the
Journal
of Parallel and Distributed Computing and the Journal of Functional
Programming. In 1994, he became an IEEE Fellow and was awarded
the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award. In 1999 he was awarded
the Distinguished Alumnus award by the Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur,
Optional Post-Meeting Dinner
An optional pay-your-own dinner at Bertucci's, Alewife, follows the meeting.
May, 2000 Meeting
Subject
The Next Generation Internet: The Revolution at the Edge
Speaker
John Bottoms
FirstStar Data
Date
Thursday, May 18, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:45 p.m.
Meeting at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
This meeting is free, open to the public, and no registration is required.
Meeting Overview
The Internet was originally a research tool intended for a well-defined
academic community. It has grown to become a powerful communications
medium accessed by a worldwide citizenry. However, the Internet is
reaching an important transition point. While exciting new applications
in medicine, science, and many other disciplines are continually being
proposed, they remain out of reach. Unfortunately, the Internet as
it currently exists cannot scale to meet the number and nature of demands
already placed on it, much less a new generation of more complex interactions.
This talk will give an overview of the metamorphosis of the Internet
into a revenue-based network. We will take a look at the provisioning
process for transport and content networks that will accommodate video,
voice and data. Included will be a preview of candidate systems for controlling
the Next Generation Internet and some of the opportunities for new development
work in the future.
Speaker Biography
John Bottoms is a co-founder and the Director of Engineering of FirstStar
Data in Concord, Massachusetts. He is responsible for the design
of gigabit routers for intelligent networks. He is best known as
the developer of the world's first SGML-based Web browser and server.
Formerly the President of Avalon Systems, Inc., John has been active in
the field of network communications for over 35 years. He has a B.S.
in Computer Systems Engineering from Purdue where he worked with P.J. Denning.
Optional Post-Meeting Dinner
An optional pay-your-own dinner at Bertucci's, Alewife, follows the meeting.
April, 2000 Meeting
Joint meeting with IEEE Computer Society.
Subject
Growing the Java Programming Language
Speaker
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Date
Thursday, April 20, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:30 p.m.
Meeting at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
This meeting is free, open to the public, and no registration is required.
Meeting Overview
Over the last quarter-century I have become convinced that trying to design
a complete and perfect programming language is now the worst thing you
can do. A programming language (including its associated libraries) must
grow over time as its user community and its development community grows.
This is a different situation from 25 years ago, when all such communities
were relatively small. The difference is a problem of scale. As a result,
programming language design now and in the future is necessarily as much
a matter of social engineering as technical engineering and must rely more
on a set of general principles than on a set of specific technical decisions.
We will explore the application of these general principles to Java as
a case study.
Speaker Biography
Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
He received his A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College (1975),
and his S.M. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence
from M.I.T. (1977 and 1980). He has also been an assistant professor of
computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University; a member of technical staff
at Tartan Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a senior scientist
at Thinking Machines Corporation. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1994.
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
An optional pay-your-own dinner at Bertucci's, Alewife, follows the meeting.
March, 2000 Meeting
Joint meeting with IEEE Computer Society.
Subject
The Open Source Movement
Speaker
Eric Steven Raymond
Date
Thursday, March 16, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:45 p.m.
Meeting at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
Meeting Overview
Eric Steven Raymond has become the spokesman over the course of the last
several years for the open-source software community. His much-discussed
paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," played a pivotal role in persuading
Netscape to make their browser software open-source.
The burgeoning open-source software movement is fueled by free source
code, and contributions from innumerable programmers around the world are
helping to keep this movement at the forefront of software industry consciousness.
In addition to Netscape opening its source, IBM decided to support the
popular open-source Apache web server, and several major database vendors
ported their products to the UNIX-like open-source operating system Linux.
Even Microsoft revealed a strong interest in open-source when two of its
internal strategy memoranda on open-source software were leaked to Mr.
Raymond.
Mr. Raymond added his own commentary to these memoranda, renamed them
"Halloween I" and "Halloween II" in commemoration of the date on which
he received the first one, and published them on the Internet. Both memoranda
were striking not just for the attention they brought to bear on the open-source
movement, but for their surprisingly upbeat analysis of the abilities of
the open-source movement to marshal programming resources and use them
to develop high-quality software.
In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" Mr. Raymond describes his own experiences
with using open-source methods to develop the "fetchmail" utility. He analyzes
how such open-source or "bazaar" development methods differ from those
of more traditional closed-source or "cathedral" software development efforts,
and concludes that open-source methods provide a powerful set of methods
for producing software that is both efficient and extremely reliable. Mr.
Raymond emphasizes in particular the powerful impact on software quality
of global peer review of source code, which he summarizes in the statement
that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." For more information,
please see Mr. Raymond's website at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr.
Optional Post-Meeting Dinner
An optional pay-your-own dinner at Bertucci's, Alewife, follows the meeting.
Additonal Information for This Meeting
This meeting is free, open to the public, and no registration is required.
For more information, contact Scott Curry at
scurry@object-components.com.
February, 2000 Meeting
Subject
A Next-Generation Resource-Bounded Information-Gathering Agent
Speaker
Professor Victor Lesser
Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory
Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Date
Thursday, February 17, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:30 p.m.
Meeting at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
Meeting Overview
The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource, but the
explosion of available information has made web search a time-consuming
and complex process. The large number of information sources and their
different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present
a complex information-gathering control problem. This talk describes the
rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next-generation information-gathering
system that has been constructed by the Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This system, called BIG,
integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence research under a single
umbrella: it plans to gather information to support a decision process,
reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches,
extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and
uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.
Speaker Biography
Professor Victor Lesser is the Director, Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory
of the Computer Science Department in University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Victor Lesser
has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University
of Massachusetts on the Amherst campus since 1977. Prior to that, he was
a Research Computer Scientist at Carnegie-Mellon (1972-1977) where he was
the system architect for the Hearsay-II speech understanding system. His
major research focus is on the control and organization of complex AI systems.
He is considered a leading researcher in the areas of blackboard systems
for interpretation, distributed AI/multiagent systems, and real-time AI.
He has also made contributions in the areas of computer architecture, diagnostics,
plan recognition, and intelligent user interfaces. In addition to continuing
his major research focus on multi-agent systems, he has also worked recently
on an auditory scene analysis system for recognizing household sounds,
and the development of information-gathering and decision-making agents
for making software purchases on the Internet.
January, 2000 Meeting
Subject
The Aftermath of Year 2000
Speaker
Robert A. Martin
Year 2000 Focal Point
The MITRE Corporation
Date
Thursday, January 20, 2000
Time
Refreshments at 6:45 p.m.
Lecture at 7:00 p.m.
Location
Newman Auditorium
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN)
Cambridge, MA
Directions
Meeting Overview
Whether at the corporate, community, state, federal, or international level,
groups have created Y2K management centers to monitor and manage the transition
into the first days and weeks of the year 2000. This presentation will
include insights and observations from within some of these centers as
to what happened during the rollover and how we collectively handled it.
We will examine and discuss the problems, their root causes, and (with
the benefit of hindsight) what we should have done to avoid them. More
importantly, we will discuss what we can do to avoid similar types of infrastructure
problems in the future.
By looking at the Year 2000 activities as a whole, including both successes
and failures, we can better help prepare ourselves and our organizations
for survival in the ever-increasing world where everyone is interdependent
on other organizations or services that they do not control, and often,
do not even understand.
Robert and MITRE's Year 2000 team have been working on Year 2000 issues
for the past four years with MITRE's customers throughout the Department
of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration, including outreach efforts
with foreign Air Traffic Management Y2K efforts. They developed and maintain
MITRE's Year 2000 web site, where MITRE's Y2K experience, guidance, and
practical suggestions for dealing with the various stages of the Year 2000
problem can be found and used by anyone. The site is updated weekly and
has a wide audience here and abroad. The site has recently evolved to cover
Y2K issues with the World's Infrastructure, with guidance and help in understanding
the risks that Y2K poses to your local power, communications, town, and
transportation resources. MITRE's Y2K web site, which has over 400,000
visits per month, can be found at
http://www.mitre.org/research/y2k.
Speaker Biography
Robert Martin is the focal point for MITRE's Year 2000 activities and is
a Principal Engineer in MITRE's Information Technologies Directorate. Robert
is responsible for coordinating all of MITRE's Year 2000 activities and
support to MITRE's customers.
Sponsorship
This meeting is co-sponsored by the GBC/ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.
Further Information
Pre-meeting refreshments will be available at 6:45 p.m. An optional pay-your-own
dinner at Bertucci's, Alewife, follows the meeting. This meeting is free,
open to the public, and no registration is required. For more information,
contact Alan Brooks at 781-271-6497 (abrooks@mitre.org)
or Scott Curry at
scurry@object-components.com.
December, 1999 Meeting
Subject
MMIX: A RISC Computer for the New Millennium
Speaker
Donald E. Knuth
Stanford University
Date
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
Time
Refreshments at 6:30 p.m.
Lecture at 7:00 p.m.
Location
MIT room 10-250 (i.e. Bldg. 10, room 250).
Directions
to MIT by car and public transit.
Map
showing MIT campus. The red dot on the left is Bldg. 10; the red dot
on the right is the Kendall T station.
Meeting overview
In this talk, Prof. Knuth will describe MMIX, a 64-bit RISC computer that
will replace MIX as the environment for explaining machine-level details
in future editions of his The Art of Computer Programming. He will
explain the architecture and why he is excited about it.
MMIX operates primarily on 64-bit words. It has 256 general-purpose
64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point
numbers. Most instructions have the 4-byte form "OP X Y Z", where each
of OP, X, Y, and Z is a single 8-bit byte. If OP is an ADD instruction,
for example, the meaning is "X=Y+Z"; i.e., "Set register X to the contents
of register Y plus the contents of register Z." The 256 possible OP codes
fall into a dozen or so categories.
The designers of important real-world processor chips (e.g., MIPS and
ALPHA) helped Don with the design of MMIX. So while being forward-looking,
MMIX is also realistic.
Don has provided a lot of information about MMIX on the web. The main
MMIX page is
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html
and the MMIX opcode chart is at
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmop.html.
Here are some compressed PostScript files with more information about
MMIX:
Speaker Biography
Donald Knuth is one of the most distinguished computer scientists of our
time. He is the recipient of many awards including the first ACM Grace
Murray Hopper Award (1971), the ACM Turing Award (1974), the ACM Software
Systems Award (1986), the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (1995), and the Kyoto
Prize (1996). He is a graduate of Milwaukee Lutheran High School, Case
Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology. In
addition, he has received more than 20 honorary doctorates. He has been
a professor of computer science at Stanford since 1968 and Emeritus Professor
of the Art of Computer Programming since 1993. Currently he is visiting
the MIT AI Lab, where he has been delivering a set of lectures on "God
and Computers" and the 3:16 project.
Don is probably best known for his books, especially the multi-volume
opus The Art of Computer Programming. He developed a new paradigm
for typesetting that is embodied in TeX and METAFONT, and has expounded
the concept of literate programming and developed tools such as CWEB to
support it. He is the author of at least 159 refereed publications and
at least another 173 non-refereed ones. Further information can be found
on his web page at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/.
Sponsorship
This meeting is co-sponsored by the GBC/ACM and MIT Information Systems.
November, 1999 Meeting
Subject
From Computing with Numbers to Computing with Words -- From Manipulation
of Measurements to Manipulation of Perceptions
Speaker
Lotfi A. Zadeh
University of California, Berkeley
Date
Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Time
5:30 p.m.
Location
Hanscom Conference Center Theater (formerly the Phillips Lab Auditorium)
in Bldg. 1106 next to Lincoln Laboratory, Bedford, MA. See below
for directions.
Meeting Overview
We are very fortunate to have the originator of the Field of Fuzzy Logic
(for which he received the IEEE Medal of Honor, its highest award) give
us a lecture on the latest developments in this field.
Computing, in its usual use, is centered on manipulation of numbers
and symbols. In contrast, computing with words, or CW for short, is a methodology
in which the objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from
a natural language, e.g., small, large, far, heavy, not very likely, the
price of gas is low and declining, Berkeley is near San Francisco, it is
very unlikely that there will be a significant increase in the price of
oil in the near future, etc.
It may be argued that underlying the underachievements and failures
is the unavailability of a methodology for reasoning and computing with
perceptions rather than measurements. An outline of such a methodology
-- referred to as a computational theory of perceptions (CTP) -- is presented
in this paper.
Speaker Biography
Lotfi A. Zadeh is a Professor in the Graduate School and Director, Berkeley
Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC), Computer Science Division and the
Electronics Research Laboratory, Department of EECS, University of California,
Berkeley.
Sponsorship
This talk is cohosted by the IEEE Computer Society and the Aerospace and
Electronics Systems Society and is cosponsored by the GBC/ACM as well as
the following local IEEE chapters: Control Systems, Communications, Information
Theory, Robotics and Automation, Signal Processing, Antennas and Propagation,
Components, Packaging & Manufacturing Technology , Education, Electron
Devices, Engineering Management, Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and Instrumentation
& Measurement Societies.
Directions to Hanscom Conference Center
The November 23 meeting only will be held at the Hanscom Conference Center
Theater (formerly the Phillips Lab Auditorium) in Bldg. 1106 next to Lincoln
Laboratory.
From Massachusetts Route 128 (Interstate 95) take Route 4 and 225 exit
to Bedford. At first light (about 200 yards from route 128) make a left
turn onto Hartwell Avenue (you must actually make a right turn to make
a left turn at the light). Go straight to Hanscom Base Gate 4 entrance
(about 1.0 mile from turn). Proceed to first light after gate (about 0.4
miles). Go left at light onto Grenier Street. Proceed up the hill to a
stop sign (there is a poer plant on the left). Make a left here and then
take your first right. The parking lot will be on your right. Go down steps
from parking lot to Hanscom Conference Center Auditorium in bldg. 1106,
the center wing of the E-shaped building in front of you.
For further information, contact either Marcia Nizzari at 617-856-1804
or Dr. Eli Brookner at 978-440-4007.
October, 1999 Meeting
Subject
Message Oriented Middleware
Speaker
Robert Herr
Open Finance Corporation
Date
Thursday, October 21, 1999
Time
Meeting starts at 6:30 pm with informal discussion and light refreshments.
Presentation begins at 7:00 pm.
Location
GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN), Fawcett Street, Cambridge
See below for directions.
Meeting Overview
This talk concerns the use of messaging middleware in financial and related
application areas. It will give a description of messaging oriented middleware
within the context of general middleware solutions, and application integration
strategies. This talk will focus on the specific delivery technologies
available, how to select basic middleware strategies, and offer itemized
opinions on the current state of messaging middleware. Given that the primary
focus of middleware deployment is application integration we will detail
some specific examples to complement the technology discussions and present
the advancing art of data description with respect to encoded messaging
schemes, the use of XML and similar definition languages, the growth of
industry protocols to support E-commerce and the use of messaging in Web
based applications, both as a supporting technology for traditional servers
and as a mechanism to use in creating true electronic communities.
Speaker Biography
Robert Herr is a Middleware and Financial Protocol Architect. He has been
the primary architect in the effort to deploy middleware and Web technologies
in multiple Financial Services environments. Although he served as the
technology leader for a number of middleware products spanning a CORBA
predecessor to the Open Source reference in XML based streamed messaged
delivery Robert has maintained focused on the practice of application integration
in financial services. Through an affiliation with numerous universities
and industry groups he has established a reputation for thoroughly understanding
the business practices involved in the principle areas of Financial Front
Office scenarios including FX, Fixed Income and Equity operations. His
most notable industry achievements include the development of Financial
Protocols including supplements to FIX, integration of NASDAQ, contingency
and convertible orders and electronic FX Dealing.
Additional Materials
Download slides and related files. Uncompress
this ZIP format file into a separate directory.
September, 1999 Meeting
Subject
Web Page Engineering
Speaker
James D. Isaak
Senior Member IEEE
Date
Thursday, September 23, 1999
Time
Meeting starts at 6:15 PM with coffee. Presentation begins at 6:30 PM.
Location
Marcam Corporation, 95 Wells Avenue, Newton
See below for directions.
Meeting Overview
Creating web sites is easy; kids can do it. Web sites can be flashy and
fun. However, a poorly engineered web site can be expensive to maintain,
difficult to navigate, and even a legal liability. As with so many aspects
of engineering, "do it right the first time, or do it over (and over and
over)."
Building on the work of the Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering
Task Force, and drawing on the experience and insight of a wide range of
real-world web site developers and web-masters, the IEEE CS Internet Best
Practices working group has documented the best practices for web page
engineering (IEEE Standard 2001-1999) and is currently revising this work
to accommodate both rapid changes in the technology and better understanding
of what techniques exist.
This talk will provide an overview of recommended web page engineering
practices that aid in the creation of web sites that are productive and
maintainable. Topics include:
-
Design and Life cycle Considerations
-
Audience and objectives
-
Client & Server technology
-
HTML, CSS, XML - Versions and Variations
-
Legal Implications (Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright, Trademarks,
Proprietary Information)
-
Accessibility -- for disabled persons, privacy
-
Server, HTTP - performance, metrics, robot exclusion, ease of use
-
Metadata -- Dublin Core, PICS, Robots, Keywords, bandwidth impact
-
Dates - Year 2000, Maintenance
-
International considerations -- language, practical considerations, and
legal awareness
If experience with the POSIX standards is any indication (after introduction
of the IEEE POSIX standards a decade ago, the market for UNIX systems expanded
by about $80 billion), wide-spread use of the documented best practices
for web page engineering should contribute greatly to the value and utility
of the web, especially given the broader application and longer period
of impact that this work will have.
Speaker Biography
James D. Isaak ( http://Jim.Isaak.com),
a Senior Member of the IEEE, was most recently the Director of Information
Infrastructure Standards at Digital Equipment Corp. He is currently a member
of the Computer Society's Board of Governors and was Vice President of
the Standards Activities Board in 1998. Recently, Isaak initiated the IEEE
SCC33, a standards coordinating committee for information infrastructure,
and is active on the ANSI Information Infrastructure Standards Panel (IISP).
From 1984 though 1994, he led the Posix standards effort as the work expanded
to 30 projects and 500-plus volunteers. He is a member of the associated
ISO/IEC SC22 committee, IEEE Standards Board, the Cross Industry Working
Team (XIWT), the World Wide Web Consortium, the IEEE USAB Committee on
Communications and Information Policy, and UniForum. He has authored numerous
articles on open systems and one on the Information Highway (Computer,
Oct. 1978). He is also coauthor of the recently published Open Systems
Handbook (IEEE Standards Press). Isaak recently organized the South Central
New Hampshire Future Business Development Group to support individuals
starting their own businesses.
This meeting is sponsored by the GBC/ACM and the IEEE Computer Society's
Distinguished Visitor Program.
Meeting begins at 6:30 pm. Coffee at 6:15 pm. An optional, pay-your-own
dinner follows. For more information: Marcia Nizzari, 617-856-1804 (marcia.nizzari@tfn.com).
Directions to MARCAM
Take Route 128 to the Highland Avenue, Needham, exit (the Muzi Ford exit).
Turn left at the first light onto Hunting Road. Turn left at the first
light onto Kendrick Street. Cross over 128, turn right at the first light
onto Wells Avenue. Go about 0.2 miles to Marcam Corporation on the right
side of the road at 95 Wells Avenue. Enter the building at 85 Wells Avenue,
in the middle of the back of the building, as this is the closest entrance
to the auditorium.
Additional Information on Meetings
Unless noted otherwise, all GBC/ACM meetings are held in the Newman Auditorium
at GTE Internetworking (formerly Bolt Beranek and Newman), 70 Fawcett Street,
Cambridge, MA.
The meeting is free and open to the public. No reservations are required.
Everyone is invited for light refreshments and informal discussion from
6:30 to 7:00 PM. The formal part of the meeting will start at 7:00 PM.
Directions to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)
Recorded directions: (617) 873-4567
Driving
From Route 128, Lexington: Take Route 2 inbound. The four-lane highway
narrows to two lanes near Route 16. At the traffic light bear right onto
Alewife Brook Parkway. Proceed past shopping centers to the Fresh Pond
Rotary. Take the first right onto Concord Avenue. Fawcett Street is one
block down Concord Avenue, on the right.
From the Mass. Pike: Take the Pike inbound to the Cambridge/Allston
exit. Exit onto the Cambridge offramp and take Cambridge Street. Turn left
onto either Storrow or Memorial Drive. (Storrow Drive is on the Boston
side of the Charles River and Memorial Drive is on the Cambridge side.)
Follow the Storrow and Memorial Drive directions below.
From Storrow and Memorial Drives: Take Storrow or Memorial Drive west;
follow signs to Routes 2, 3, 16. Remain on Route 2. The road will become
narrow and winding. This is the Fresh Pond Parkway. You will pass several
car dealerships and Fresh Pond Seafood on your right. At the first rotary,
take the third right onto Concord Avenue. You will then come to a second
rotary (the Fresh pond Rotary). Continue straight through this rotary (stay
on Concord Avenue). Fawcett Street is one block down Concord Avenue, on
the right.
Once on Fawcett Street, 70 Fawcett Street (the BBN building containing
Newman Auditorium) is on the right side of Fawcett Street, about 1/2 block
from Concord Avenue. Park in the lot on the right side of the street; the
lot is immediately before, and adjacent to, the 70 Fawcett Street building.
If full, park in the lot across Fawcett Street.
Via Public Transit
Take the T to Harvard Square. From Harvard Square take the Concord Ave./Belmont
Center bus. Get off at Fawcett Street.