M. Stuart Lynn, Cornell University
Worldwide, about a third of books on the shelves of research libraries are becoming unusable, embrittled as a result of paper-manufacturing techniques employed since the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, about 80% of holdings will reach this state. This is a critical problem that imperils the preservation of our heritage. Although widely-used microfilm preservation techniques have many advantages, microfilms are inconvenient for those who wish to make use of the preserved materials. Photocopies on a cid-free paper may be easier to use but are no easier to access from a distance than the original book itself.
Cornell-in a collaborative study with the Xerox Corporation, also sponsored by the Commission for Preservation and Access and with additional support from Sun Microsystems Inc.-has established the use of digital techniques both for preserving embrittled materials and for enhancing access from a distance. Endangered books are scanned at high-resolution in a production setting. The digital images are used to produce preservation replacement editions and to create a digital library that can be reached by researchers and students across campus, national, and worldwide networks. Digital "books" can now be viewed at the desktop or printed locally on demand.
This presentation explores the progress and results of this project from a technological, economic, and cultural perspective. We will also explore the application of the document management technologies developed in the CLASS projects to otyher Cornell activities in electronic publishing and the electronic publishing and the electronic library, including the recently launched "Making of America" project.
M. Stuart Lynn is Vice President for Information Technologies at Cornell University. He was named to this position in March, 1988. He is reponsible for policy, strategic planning, coordination and development of information technologies across the university. Information technologies include academic and administrative computing and network applications, services, and technologies. Nationally, he is active in the movement towards electronic libraries and electronic publishing, where he now focuses most of his professional interests.
He hold B.A. and M.A.degrees in mathematics from Oxford University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Prior to Cornell, he served as President and Board Chairman of Capital Technologies Corporation, USA (1984-88). He directed the Office of Computing Affairs at the University of California from 1977-83 and served as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Previously, he headed Rice University's Institute for Computer Services and Applications (1971-77) and served as Professor of Mathematical Sciences. From 1965-71 he was Director of IBM's Houston Scientific Center.
Pegasus: Operating-System Support For Distributed
MultimediaSape J. Mullender, University of Twente, Netherlands
Multimedia applications place new demands upon processors, networks and operating systems. While some network designers, through ATM for example, have considered revolutionary approaches to supporting multimedia, the same cannot be said for operating systems designers. Most work is evolutionary in nature, attempting to identify additional features that can be added to existing systems to support multimedia. This presentation will desribe the Pegasus project¹s attempt to build an integrated hardware and operating system environment from the ground up specifically targeted towards multimedia.
Professor Sape J. Mullender is chairman of the systems programming and architecture department in the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he leads the Huygens research project on fault-tolerance, security, real time and multimedia in distributed systems.
He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and was a faculty member there until 1983. From 1984-1990, he was head of the distributed systems and computer networks research group at the Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is a principal designer of the Amoeba distributed operating system.
Sape Mullender is particularly interested in high-performance distributed
computing and the design of scalable fault-tolerant services. He is also
concerned about organization and protection in distributed systems that
can span a continent.
In 1986-87 he was a visiting scientist at DEC¹s System Research Center
in California, where he worked with Michael D. schroeder on fast RPC protocols
for the Firefly multiprocessor. He was a visiting research fellow at Cambridge
University in 1987-88, where foundations were laid for collaboration on
multimedia with the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.
He has published papers on file systems, high-performance RPC protocols, locating migratable objects in computer networks, and protection mechanisms, and has been involved in the organization of a series of advanced courses on distributed systems. He is vice-chairman and conference coordinator of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems.
PLENARY 3 Knowledgebases, Databases, and The Matrix
of Biological Knowledge
January 6 Harold Morowitz, George Mason University
1:00-1:50pm Haku Room
Progress in medical and biological research requires using models of systems that are too complex or too difficult to study directly. Until the 1980's a biological model meant a mouse or a bacterial cell or a simplified biochemical system in a test tube. The concept of the biomatrix, a system of biological databases and computational simulation methods, was developed during the deliberations of a National Research Council Committee, as a new kind of model in biomedical research. This is a radical extension of classical idea of modelling. The new modelling takes advantage of the availability of many diverse fragments of information from the many taxa and theoretical structures exhibiting analogous behavior to the system under study. Such a concept of modelling is critically dependent on maintaining very large scale databases that may be efficiently accessed. A related, but different, view of modelling emerges from the physical sciences. It is, in general, computationally intensive. It starts with entities, postulates, and interaction rules and moves computationally to the outputs. In the world of the complex, pruning algorithms are necessary in order to reduce the predictions of the model to a manageable space of possibilities. The database management of the biomatrix, the pruning algorithms of complex modelling, and the relation between them are a central theme of modern theoretical biology and are deeply important to scientific computation.
Harold Morowitz is Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy and Director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study of Cognition at George Mason University. He is the author of dozen of technical and popular science books. His most recent volume is entitled "The Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis."
DISTINGUISHED GUEST LECTURELecture: Computers and National Productivity
January 5 Ralph E. Gomory, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
6:00-7:00 Haku Room
Ralph E. Gomory was born in Brooklyn Heights, New York. He graduated from Williams College in 1950, studied at Cambridge University, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. He joined IBM's newly founded Research Division in 1959 as a research mathematician.
Gomory became director of research for IBM in 1970, with direct responsibility for IBM's Research Division comprising the research laboratories at Yorktown Heights, N.Y. (the Thomas J, Watson Research Center), San Jose, California (now the Almaden Research Center), and Zurich, Switzerland. His technical leadership has been recognized by the award of the medal of the Industrial Research Institute (IR) in 1985, and by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Engineering leadership Recognition Award in May 1988.
He was elected a vice president of IBM in 1973, named to the company's Corporate Management Board in 1983, and elected a senior vice president in 1985. In 1986 he was named to the new created position of senior vice President for Science and Technology, which combined responsibility for research with other technological functions. He retired from IBM in 1989 and became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the position which he now holds.
Gomory is the author of more than 70 papers. In the last few years, he
has written on the nature of development, research in industry, industrial
competitiveness, and on economic models involving economics of scale. 
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