Special Speakers The Distinguished Lecture and the Plenary Session  are held in the Grand Ballroom (Monarchy).

DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES  
Wednesday, 5pm

The HICSS Distinguished Lecture Series (on Wednesday this year) always features truly outstanding leaders in computer science, information systems, and other computer-related fields. Our HICSS-36 Distinguished Lecturer will be David Farber, considered by many to be the  grandfather of the Internet. Currently Chief Technologist of the Federal Communications Commission,  Dr. Farber also is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Systems at the University of Pennsylvania.  He was responsible for the design of the DCS system, one of the first operational message-based fully distributed systems and is one of the authors of the SNOBOL programming language.  He was one of the principals in the creation and implementation of CSNet, NSFNet, NITNET II, and CREN, and was instrumental in the creation of the NSF/DARPA funded Gigabit Network Testbed Initiative and served as the Chairman of the Gigabit Testbed Coordinating Committee.  Dr. Farber has held  positions at Bell Labs, the Rand Corp, Xerox Data Systems, UC Irvine and the University of Delaware.  He is a member of the US Presidential Advisory Committee of Information Technology,  a Fellow of the IEEE, and he serves on the Board of Directors of both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Society.  Dr. Farber is a ten-year alumni of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the US National Research Council, and is a Fellow of the Japan Glocom Institute and of the Cyberlaw Institute.  He is founder and editor of the influential network newspaper, Interesting People.  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/  

"Intellectual Property Rights and National Security"

"They that can give up essential liberty 

to obtain a little temporary safety

 deserve neither liberty nor safety."

                                                                                                                          -Benjamin Franklin, 1759 

Protecting computers from unwanted intrusion or destruction was once the largely esoteric province of computer scientists, mid-level IT managers, and the occasional policy wonk. Now, suddenly, cybersecurity is on the lips of senior government officials, high-level corporate executives, and even casual computer users who hadn’t a clue what it was six months ago.

Cybersecurity encompasses most of the domain of computer communications technology and management. To protect a cyber infrastructure you must protect each building block. For example, it does little good to protect the computer system hardware and software if untrusted operators and programmers can make compromising changes. Every facet must be examined and protected. These include physical locations, computer hardware, networking, operating systems, applications, and management practices.

The Internet belongs to everybody and nobody, making it especially difficult to secure. Indeed, the embarrassing truth is that the buyers of computer systems have been unwilling to pay extra for security even for their own systems, and thus have dispensed with devices that foster trusted, secure environments.

Not all secure systems proposals are without controversy, most notably the trusted computer platform alliance (TCPA), an effort to create a foundation for a secure trusted hardware environment undertaken by 180 leading hardware and software vendors. The TCPA is an important first step, and much of its work comes from a simple observation that only a secure computer system can securely host software, that protects and controls the intellectual information that flows increasingly through computer systems.

Much of the controversy comes from some TCPA vendors’ support for digital rights management systems governing the use of digital media such as books, software, movies, and music, and for the reciprocal support that large media trade groups have given the TCPA. Many believe that a such systems will severely impact traditional fair uses of copyrighted information, and that they would spell the death of open software and be used to protect and limit the use of certain commercial software products.

So the hazy debate forming about this area ends up sounding like a choice between no secure computer systems and the potential damage to our established copyright mechanisms and freedom of speech. What we need is a discussion within the  community of how to have both.

PLENARY SESSION 
Tuesday, 1pm

   
Our plenary Speaker for HICSS-36 is Andries van Dam.  Dr. van Dam was the first chairman of the Computer Science Department at Brown University, and is currently Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown.  He has also just become Brown's first Vice President for Research.  He was Director of the NSF/ARPA Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization, 1996-1998.

Dr. van Dam's research has concerned computer graphics, text processing and hypermedia systems, and he is the co-author of several well-known textbooks in computer graphics. He has worked for over thirty years on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations for use in teaching and research. http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/avd/

  “BEYOND TODAY’S WEB-BASED EDUCATIONAL CONTENT”

Much of today’s web-based educational content is based on re-purposed materials (“putting your course notes online”) and traditional instructional models of lectures augmented by sections and laboratory sessions.  Educational content is also typically designed to run on lowest common denominator computer platforms to encourage the widest possible adoption.   At the same time, the bloom is a bit off the rose with respect to over-hyped online Universities replacing traditional universities, based on web-based content and both synchronous and asynchronous (distance) learning. Nonetheless, there is still an enormous and largely unrealized opportunity to rethink both content and delivery mechanisms that will take proper advantage of the new capabilities made available by modern, high-performance platforms in a variety of form factors and by high-bandwidth communications networks. In this talk, I will weave together several related themes that attempt to look a bit further out than what is being delivered today.  Among these will be:

*  an Immersive Virtual Reality research project with the University of North Carolina’s Graphics Group to build an immersive electronic book for teaching surgery,
*  a development strategy for next-generation electronic books that is based  largely on families of “clip models,”  interactive simulation-based learning  objects that can serve as playgrounds or virtual laboratories. For any given domain topic, a  single clip model doesn’t suffice; instead we need a family of related ones to address the changing needs of learners of different ages, interests, backgrounds, and learning styles.  A key question is how one can assemble collections of related clip models so that they inter-operate, even though they may function at different levels of abstraction and fidelity.
*  a proposal for a funding organization, tentatively called the Learning Federation, to support the long-term basic research in learning science and technology necessary to fuel genuinely compelling and effective next-generation educational content, such as the projects mentioned above.