Larry Prusak, Executive Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management, is a Managing Principal with IBM Global Services, consulting Group, in Boston. He has extensive consulting experience, within the U.S. and internationally, in helping firms leverage and optimize their information and knowledge resources.
A respected authority in his field, Larry has lectured and been published widely. His book, Managing Information Strategically (John Wiley & Sons, 1994), co-authored with James McGee, is a basic text on the role of information in gaining competitive advantage. His articles include "Myth of Information Overload" (International Journal of Information Management, 1995), "Information Politics" (Sloan Management Review, Fall 1993), "Blow up the Corporate library" (International Journal of Information Management, 1993), "Knowledge and Risk Management" (California Management Review, Spring 1996), and "Eleven Sins of knowledge Management" (California Management Review, Spring 1998). He has recently co-authored two books with Tom Davenport: Information Ecology (Oxford University Press, 1997), and Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) and has edited the anthology Knowledge in Organizations (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997). He is currently writing a book on social capital to be published by Harvard Business School Press in 1999. Larry is frequently quoted on organizational knowledge issues by such business periodicals as Fortune, Business Week, CIO, and many others.
Prior to joining IBM, Larry was a Principal in Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation, specializing in issues of corporate knowledge management. While there, he was responsible for helping to build a consulting practice centered on firms managing their knowledge resources. Larry's professional background also includes work as a researcher and librarian at Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and as a teacher of social and economic history at several universities.
In 1991, Larry won the SLA Professional Award for Contributions to the Field of Information Science. In 1990, he won the H. W. Wilson Award for the year's best article on information science. He holds a B. A. in history from Long Island University, an M.A. in economic and social history from New York University (where he completed all the examinations and course work toward a Ph.D.), and M.S. in information science from Simmons College. He has guest lectured at Harvard, the University of California, and New York University, and is visiting faculty member of the Graduate School of Library and Information science at Simmons College.
Personal computers have come to the home, and the Internet has proliferated. With TV changing to digital and merging with PC's, our living rooms are becoming networked. The digital cellular technology has made it possible for people to use computers when they are moving. These technologies have unquestionably made it easier to use computers and enabled ubiquitous computing.
In this talk, Dr. Tokoro addresses the importance of interactive and responsive interfaces to make computers more intimate to users in their daily life. In order to practice this situation, we must investigate the ways people communicate and understand, in terms of both behavioral and neurological studies. The development of new interaction devices should be done in parallel with such studies. He presents a few research activities being carried out in his laboratories, and concludes the speech with his vision to the 21 st Century.
As Corporate Senior Vice President of Sony Corporation, and President, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Mario Tokoro is responsible in the R & D of Information and Network Technologies. Before he moved to Sony in 1997, he was Professor of Computer Science at Keio University for over 20 years.
His research activities range widely from computer architectures, operating systems, programming languages, computer networks, and agent systems. His achievements include Acknowledging Ethernet, Concurrent Smalltalk, Aperios OS (formerly called Muse and Apertos), and Media Cruising (formerly called AMInet). Since its establishment in 1988, he has been the Director of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., conducting novel, fundamental, and applicable research toward Open Systems.