What is ACM Computing Week 96? Why should you be in Philadelphia in February, 1996? In the broadest sense, ACM Computing Week 96 marks the beginning of a year long look at computing, past, present, and future -- a series of events culminating with the ACM 50th Anniversary Celebration in San Jose, California, March, 1997.
This February, we celebrate the birth of modern computing roughly 50 years ago, and the accomplishments of those whose unique visions shaped the present. ACM CW 96 is first and foremost a celebration of the people who contributed to the beginning of our field. We may be part of the only discipline whose earliest notables are still alive. CW 96 provides an opportunity to meet and interact with many of these early leaders in field and to learn more about their achievements. But it also encourages a look at toward the future and how we, as educators, professionals, and students, can work to ensure that the legacy of our earliest visionaries will lead to a robust future in which computing contributes significantly to improving the quality of life for all.
ACM Computing Week 96 is also four conferences:
This year, CSC features a full track on the History of Computing and another on Strategic Directions in Computing. In this latter track, we examine the interplay of entrepreneurially fired technological innovation, fundamental research in both academia and industry, and enabling public policy and support.
Computing Week 96 also features a number of special events, including the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, the ACM A. M. Turing Award Lecture, the ACM Awards Banquet, and a six-match chess competition between Gary Kasparov and the IBM's Deep Blue computing chess system.
As part of the beginning of the ACM 50th Anniversary Celebration, CW 96 features special events on the history of computing and on public awareness of computing. On February 14, 1996, coincident with the reenactment of the turning on of the ENIAC (which occurred February 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania), we will have a two-part Historical Retrospective on how computing has evolved as a technology and a profession and who the people were who made it happen. That evening, ACM will participate with the City of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Unisys in a reception and dinner honoring the earliest contributors to the computing field. Over the next two days, we have events intended to increase the awareness of the general public about the impact and contribution of computing technology to society: the Electronic Global Village (February 15), and the Electronic Education Event (February 16). All of these special events except the reception and dinner are free to attendees at the CW 96 conferences.
For students, ACM CW 96 offers all of the above, as well as the Contest and a research-oriented Poster Forum. Also planned are career-focused programs, including trips to local corporations the ACM Careers Workshops, and numerous opportunities to meet the luminaries of the field, past, present, and future.
I encourage you to read more about all of these events in this brochure. Then make a date to be in Philadelphia beginning February 14th, 1996. Join us in the celebration!!!
CSC'96 will provide an opportunity for all participants to help shape the technical and non-technical agendas for computing through two-way interaction with leaders in the field and modern technology.
In keeping with the start of the ACM 50th Anniversary Celebration, the theme of this conference encompasses a retrospective examination of the history of computing and an exploration into the future of computer science. Thus, special tracks are planned, including:
CSC'96 will also emphasize the interdisciplinary trend of science today, including computer science. This interdisciplinary approach requires the various and diverse areas of computing technology to share knowledge and the various computing communities to interact. The interaction of technical fields with the social implications of these fields is an important component of the CSC '96 Program.
These advances have been facilitated by a rich interplay of entrepreneurially fired technological innovation, deep fundamental research in both academia and industry, and enabling public policy and support. The New Strategic Directions Track at CSC 96 will explore both the successes and failures of this interplay over the last decades and -- more importantly -- their future directions.
Panels of experts will separately discuss future directions in technology, future directions in research, and the public policy issues that are on the front burner. A fourth panel will then summarize and synthesize the results of the three prior panels.
Considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, the A. M. Turing Award of the Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM), will be given to distinguished computer
scientist, Manuel Blum, of the University of California, Berkeley.
The award will be presented to Blum at a special awards ceremony
during the kick off of ACM's yearlong 50th anniversary celebration,
February 14-18, 1996 in Philadelphia.
Blum was honored with the Turing Award "in recognition of his
contributions to the foundation of computational complexity theory
and its applications to cryptography and program checking."
Starting from his early work on the inherent limitations of
computing devices, Blum's research has developed around a single
unifying theme: finding positive, practical consequences of living in
a world where all computational resources are bounded. Blum shows
that secure business transactions, pseudo-random number generation,
and program checking are all possible precisely because all
computational devices are resource bounded.
Blum is one of the founders of computational complexity theory, a
field that is central to theoretical computer science, and one which
deals with measuring the difficulty of performing computations. His
work on machine-independent complexity yields a theory of
computational cost that is relevant also to practical problems.
Cryptographic protocols which are used in the transmission of
sensitive information are secure because they can be shown to be
difficult to break. Thus, an intruder cannot determine the
information in a cryptographically encoded message without going
through an inordinately complex computation that would be
prohibitively costly and time consuming to perform. For computer
programs it is very difficult to develop perfectly error-free
programs. In this area Blum has shown how his techniques can be
applied to make programs more reliable, and to check their results.
Since this work is very fundamental one can expect that it will find
application to many other practical problems, as well.
"Manuel Blum is a profound thinker," said ACM President Stuart
H. Zweben, chairman of the department of computer and information
science at Ohio State University, "his seminal work, insights and
approaches have brought about new avenues of research in the area of
computational complexity and established foundations for what people
can compute. Furthermore, his work has influenced other Turing Award
winners to a significant degree."
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is given annually for technical
achievements in the field of computing which are deemed by a jury of
leading professionals to be of lasting and significant importance to
the computing community. It is accompanied by a prize of $25,000
contributed by AT&T.
Dr. Blum is University of California at Berkeley's Arthur J.
Chick Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computing Sciences, a
Department in which he has served since 1968. Dr. Blum was born in
Caracas, Venezuela in 1938 and began his academic career at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D degrees. His mentors at MIT were Richard Schoenwald,
Warren S. McCulloch, Hartley Rogers Jr. and Marvin Minsky. Dr.
Blum is renowned for his work on computational complexity, automata
theory, inductive inference, cryptography and program
result-checking. During his career, Dr. Blum has received numerous
awards, published 47 technical papers and advised 26 Ph.D. students.
Track Chair:
Tim Bergin
Department of Computer Science
The American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, D.C. 20016-8116
Speakers:
Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University
Eric Bloch, Council of Competitiveness
Session will focus on the specific influences of early hardware architecture; specifically, how the EDSAC (Wilkes) and the IBM (Bloch) architectures influenced later computer developments.
Speakers:
Peter J. Denning,
George Mason University
Charles Bachman, Bachman Information Systems
Session will examine three elements of software evolution : programming languages (Sammet), operating systems (Denning), and data handling (Bachman); speakers will share their experiences in these areas.
Speakers: not available at this time
Session will examine the early history of Xerox's Pal Alto Research Center (PARC) and how the "six bigies" - the main technologies of today - were developed : "Mac"/workstation, overlapping window interface, Smalltalk, ethernet, laser printing, and "client-server" computing.
Papers:
"Early Machine Architectures, Programming, and Modern Computer Science:
History and Lessons of Technical Change," Mitchell Marcus,
University of Pennsylvania
"Eckert-Mauchly and the Defense Establishment," Pap Ndiaye, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (visiting scholar, Dept. of History and Sociology of Science, UPENN)
Organizer/Moderator: Alan Apt, Prentice Hall
Panelists:
Mike Clancy, Univ. of Calif. at Berkely
Owen Astrachan, Duke University
Joel Adams, Calvin College
Bill Topp, University of the Pacific
Sunday 10:30
Moderator :
George Kasper, Texas Tech University
Panelists :
Gordon B. Davis, University of Minnesota (MIS)
Doris Lidtke, Towson State University (CS)
Richard Mason, Southern Methodist University (MIS)
Issues :
Similarities between MIS and CS
Differences between MIS and CS
Co-existence over 25 years
Is MIS a subset of CS?
Moderators :
Michael Gargano (Pace University)
Frank Lo Sacco (Pace University)
Panelists :
Issues :
Politics and human relations
Management Philosophy and style
Control issues
Threats and conflicts
Technicians and common sense
User involvement and education
Organizer/Moderator: Tracy Camp, University of Alabama
Panelists: Dianne Martin, George Washington University
Denise Gurer, SRI International
Issues :
Past involvement of women in computer related positions
Statistics of today's reality
Subtle biases, do they exist? (stereotypes, expectations, standards, educational
software, classroom climate, etc.)
Would change make a difference? (equal access to computers, mentoring relationships, etc.)
Moderator :
John Lewis, Villanova University
Panelists :
Bill Loftus, WPL Labs (Ada)
Rajiv Tewari, Temple University (C++)
Issues :
Long-term effects of developing complex systems
Types of problems addressed by particular language
Maintenance
Efficiency
Overall impact
Organizer/Moderator: Munir Mandviwalla, Temple University
Panelists:
Summary: The number of conferences and workshops has increased significantly in the past decade. However, the resources needed to attend and organize these events have not kept up. Even though most of us prefer to meet people face-to-face it is time to examine the role of communication technology in the conference of the future. The panel will bring together experts from diverse areas to discuss the possibilities and tradeoffs.
Munir Mandviwalla and John Nosek,
Temple University
mandviwa@vm.temple.edu, nosek@cis.temple.edu
The practice of science and engineering in organizations increasingly demands the completion of complex tasks by distributed teams. In 1994, Temple University was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to create virtual laboratories (VLab) for student teams working on complex and distributed tasks. Fixed location, computer-based laboratories limit access and do not support ad-hoc team efforts. "VLab" will provide any-time, any-place support for complex, distributed collaborative work using leading edge technologies such as groupware running on wireless local area networks interconnected with wide area networks. We will demonstrate a "VLab" at the conference operating on notebook computers and a wireless LAN and WAN. The VLab will be used to demonstrate bulletin board, shared whiteboard, and decision support software such as Lotus Notes Intel ProShare, and GroupSystems.
Borko Furht, Professor
Director of Multimedia Laboratory
Florida Atlantic University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
borko@sirius.cse.fau.edu
Dragutin Petkovic
Manager of Advanced Algorithms, Architectures and
Applications
IBM Almaden Research Center
DESCRIPTION: This Workshop is intended for academics, practitioners, scientists, and engineers who are involved or would like to get involved in multimedia system research, design, and applications. It can also be beneficial to anyone who wants to get familiar with the latest applications of multimedia. Specific topics covered by the Workshop will include video-on-demand systems and information superhighways, videoconferencing and multimedia message systems, video retrieval and media management systems and applications, and multimedia collaborative systems. Potential speakers include:
1. Borko Furht, Florida Atlantic University
,Boca Raton, Florida
2. Dragutin Petkovic, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose,
California
3. Arding Hsu, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey
4. Sid Ahuja, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey
FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP: The Workshop will last a half-day consisting of four half-hour presentations and a panel discussion. The panel discussion at the end of the Workshop will be on "Future Trends in Multimedia".
Chair of Session:
Professor Tony Marsland
Department of Computing Science
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
tony@cs.ualberta.ca
Organized by the ACM Computer Chess Committee:
Professor Monty Newborn (Chair)
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
newborn@cs.mcgill.ca
Format: Presentation of three papers each for about 20-25 minutes followed by questions and discussion. A call for papers would be made in the Journal of the International Computer Chess Association.
Intended audience: An attempt will be made to have the presented papers of interest to both the chess community and the computer community, although we will seek papers of excellence on the subject of computer chess. Taking place later in the day will be the fifth of the six games of the ACM Chess Challenge between Garry Kasparov, the World Chess Champion and IBM's Deep Blue, generally regarded as the world best chess program.
ORGANIZER:
Janice Cuny
University of Oregon
cuny@cs.uoregon.edu
This is the sixth in a series of workshops on academic careers for women in computer science. The workshop is primarily intended for women who are beginning academic careers -- either in the final stages of finishing a Ph.D. or newly hired as faculty. Participants will meet with women who are already established in their fields. The established professionals will share their own experiences, providing practical information, advice, and support to their younger colleagues. The workshop will impart basic information new faculty members need for success, including:
1. TENURE: What's needed and what's not needed. Writing a good tenure dossier. Choosing references. Typical successful cases. Common pitfalls and mistakes.
2. TEACHING: How to be a good teacher. Common mistakes of new teachers. What you should be teaching. Dealing with problem students. Special problems facing women faculty.
3. BUILDING A RESEARCH CAREER: Going beyond your thesis. Advising graduate students. Journal versus conference publications. What referees look for. What to do when a paper is rejected. Collaborating and networking.
4. GETTING FUNDING: Strategies for obtaining funding from the federal government and industry. The structure of a good proposal. Contacting grant officers. Resources at the university.
5. TIME MANAGEMENT: How to get this all done. How much time to spend on teaching, service, and research. Life outside of work.
6. THE PROSPECTIVE FROM THE SMALLER SCHOOLS: How requirements and expectations differ across a range of academic institutions.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZER:
Alan T. Sherman
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Univ. of Maryland - Baltimore County
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~sherman/
sherman@cs.umbc.edu
(410) 455-2666
SPEAKER 1:
afael Hirschfeld
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI)
http://www.cwi.nl/~ray/
ray@cwi.nl
Electronic Money in the Real World
At the other end of the spectrum from theoretical advances in digital money, electronic purse systems for consumer payments are fast becoming a reality, although smart card technology is not yet adequate to support the most sophisticated cryptographic protocols. This talk outlines recent developments in electronic purse systems, and presents some details of how a particular system currently under trial handles such matters as currency exchange, very small value payments, key management, scalability and interoperability, and tradeoffs between cryptographic security, physical security (tamper resistance), and efficiency.
SPEAKER 2:
Dr. Clifford Neuman
University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute
http://www.isi.edu/people/bcn
bcn@ISI.EDU
Protecting business transactions on open networks
This talk will discuss the application of cryptography to the protection of business transactions on the Internet. Emphasis will be placed on electronic payment systems, but other aspects of electronic commerce and security will also be described.
CSC Conference Chair
Robert Beck - Villanova University
CSC Program Chair
Mary Lou Soffa - University of Pittsburgh
Chair, History Program Track
Tim Bergin - The American University
Chair, New Strategic Directions in Computing Program Track
William Wulf - University of Virginia (Public Policy Issues)
CSC Technical Papers Chair
Richard Brice - MCC
CSC Panels/Debates Chair
Bonnie Melhart - Texas Christian University
CSC Tutorials Chair
Mary Beth Rosson - VPI
CSC Workshops Chair
Errol Lloyd - University of Delaware
Chair, Student Poster Forum
Susan Gallagher - University of Texas at Austin
Demonstrations Chair
Don Bailes - East Tennessee State University
Proceedings Chair
Deborah Whitfield - Slippery Rock University
CSC '96
11/8/95