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Name: Kenneth Birman
Affiliation: Cornell University
Area: Distributed Systems
Why: Ken Birman is one of the most recognized researchers in distributed systems. His ISIS group communcation system inspired the development of many other group communication systems. His recent work on probabilistic multicast has again started a new research direction proposing new mechanisms to reliably communicate among thousands of peers. On top of this, he is a very good speaker.
Host: Bettina Kemme
Name: Sandy Pentland
Affiliation: MIT
Area: Robotics, Human Machine Interaction, Wearable Computing
Why: Alex "Sandy" Pentland heads the Media Lab's Human Design research group. His work encompasses areas such as wearable computing, communications technology for developing countries, human-machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, and machine perception. He is a co-founder of the Media Laboratory's Digital Nations consortium, the Media Lab Asia in India, the LINCOS project in Costa Rica, and of the Center for Future Health. He has served as the academic head of the Media Laboratory, and is currently the Lab's Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.
Sandy Pentland is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world. He is a founder of the IEEE Computer Society's Wearable Information Devices division, and has won numerous awards in the arts, engineering, and sciences. Newsweek magazine named him one of 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century.
Host: Greg Dudek
Name: Gregor Kiczales
Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Area: Aspect-oriented programming
Why: Gregor is a respected member of the object-oriented community for his work on meta programming. He is one of the founders of aspect-oriented programming, and the father of AspectJ, an aspect-oriented extension of the Java programming language. AspectJ is the most sophisticated aspect-oriented development environment available these days. He is a very good speaker.
Host: Jörg Kienzle
Name: Haesun Park
Affiliation: University of Minnesota
Area: Scientific Computing, Numerical Algorithms, Intelligent Data Analysis, Pattern Discovery, Protein Structure Prediction, Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Visualization of Scientific Data.
Host: Xiaowen Chang
Name: Ian Foster
Affiliation: University of Chicago
Area: Grid and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Middleware Architectures
Why: Ian Foster and Carl Kesselmann proposed the concept of Grid computing which went on to create tremendous excitement in academia and industry. He is one of the leaders of the Grid forum initiative to standardize the next generation fabric for distributed computing. He continues to be a very active researcher in this area and leads the Globus project. The Globus toolit is used several commercial Grids from IBM, Butterfly.Net, and others. He should be able to deliver a talk with broad appeal and deep insights.
Host: Muthucumaru Maheswaran
Name: Faith Fitch
Affiliation: University of Toronto
Area: Complexity Theory
Why: Faith Fitch particularly enjoys working on proving lower bounds on the complexity of concrete problems in the areas of data structures, parallel computation, and distributed computation, with the goal of understanding how parameters of various models of computation affect their computational power.
Host: Denis Therien
Name: Frank Pfenning
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Area: Programming Languages
Why: Frank Pfenning is an internationally recognized leader in programming languages, logic and type theory. His work encompasses type systems for functional programming languages and the development of a meta-language which supports specification, implementation, and formal reasoning about programming languages and logics.
He is currently a professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and serves as the Graduate Student Director for the School of Computer Science. He is the current President of CADE and is the editor of the Journal of Automated Reasoning, Journal of Symbolic Computation, and Journal of Functional and Logic Programming.
Host: Brigitte Pientka
Name: Kai Hwang
Affiliation: University of Southern California
Area: Grid Computing, Security, Trust
Why: Kai Hwang is a well respected researcher in the area of parallel and distributed computing. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He has worked in variety of topics in computer architecture, parallel processing, Internet and wireless security, and distributed computing. He is an IEEE fellow. Presently, he is leading an NSF-sponsored ITR project at USC.
Host: Muthucumaru Maheswaran
Name: Doug Tygar
Affiliation: Berkeley
Area: Security, Privacy, Electronic Commerce
Why: Doug Tygars current research includes strong privacy protections, security issues in sensor webs, and digital rights management. He designed cryptographic postage standards for the US Postal Service and has helped build a number of security and electronic commerce systems including: Strongbox, Dyad, Netbill, and Micro-Tesla. He serves as chair of the Defense Department's ISAT Study Group on Security with Privacy, and was a founding board member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce. He is an awesome speaker.
Host: Jörg Kienzle
Name: Karan Singh
Affiliation: University of Toronto
Area: Graphics
Why: Karan is a well-known graphics researcher with industry experience as well. His research focuses on character modeling and animation, and curve and surface design. Most recently, he has been working on character animation that uses machine learning. He was a technical lead on "Ryan", an animated short that won a prize at this year's Cannes film festival and will also be shown at the SIGGRAPH electronic theater.
Host: Allison Klein
Name: Alan Frieze
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Area: Applications of Probabilistic Combinatorics in Theoretical Computer Science
Why: Alan Frieze won the 1991 Fulkerson prize (with M. Dyer and R. Kannan) for his work on approximating volumes using Rapidly Mixing Markov Chains. His work on random walks would be of interest to a diverse cross section of the school.
Host: Bruce Reed
Name: Allan Tannenbaum
Affiliation: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech
Area: Computer vision, Image Processing, Biomedical Imaging
Why: Allen, a one-time visiting professor at McGill, is known for his fundamental contributions to algebraic geometry, control theory, computer vision and biomedical imaging. He is one of the few people who can cover both theory and practice. He actually enjoys writing C code! A terrific speaker. Very entertaining, great sense of humour and very deep.
Host: Kaleem Siddiqi
Name: Michael Saks
Affiliation: Rutgers University
Area: Graph Theory
Why: Mike Saks is a widely recognized researcher, He enjoys solving hard problems in theory of computing, extremal set theory and graph theory. He won the 2004 Goedel Prize (with Fotios Zaharoglou, Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit) for his work on (impossibility of) distributed agreement protocols. He is an awesome speaker and very approachable person.
Host: Denis Therien
Name: Michael Kearns
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Area: Artificial intelligence
Why: Michael was the head of the AI group at AT&T research for about 10 years. He has been one of the founders of computational learning theory, and has done very exciting work in reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems and more recently, on game theory and on modelling social networks. He is an excellent speaker.
Host: Doina Precup
Name: Ed Clarke
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Area: Software engineering / Verification of software and hardware
Host: ???
Name: Stefan Brands
Affiliation: Founder of Credentica, Adjunct Professor of McGill University
Area: Secure Processing of Private Information
Host: Claude Crepeau
Name: Umesh Vazirani
Affiliation: Berkeley
Area: Quantum Computing / Complexity Theory
Host: ???
Name: Jeannette Wing
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Area: Formal Software Engineering
Host: ???
Name: Carsten Schuermann
Affiliation: Yale University
Area: Programming Languages, Logical frameworks
Host: ???
Name: Peter Selinger
Affiliation: University of Ottawa
Area: Mathematical Logic, Category Theory, Programming Languages for Quantum Computing
Host: ???
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