Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort & Spa

on the Big Island of Hawai'i

January 3-6, 2007


 

    DISTINGUISHED LECTURER
 Hal Abelson, Professor

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 

"Universities, the Internet, and the Information Commons"

 

 

Universities have a mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. In addressing that mission, we should take care to preserve and strengthen the information commons, that shared wellspring of ideas and innovation from which all may freely draw and upon which all may freely build.

 

Today the information commons, and the university community that rely upon it, are confronting stresses from within and from outside the university ­– stresses such as squabbles over who owns academic work, technologies for restricting the dissemination of knowledge, the impact of increasingly stringent and far-reaching intellectual property laws, and economic forces that threaten to subject the academic record to private monopoly control.

 

This talk describes two efforts to promote open sharing: OpenCourseWare, which publishes the materials of leading universities for free use worldwide; and DSpace, an inter-operable family of institutional publication repositories.  We discuss how these fit into a larger picture of universities and open sharing, along with Creative Commons, a project to create technical and legal tools to preserve the Internet as a force for worldwide sharing.

 

Hal Abelson  is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  He is winner of several teaching awards, including the IEEE's Booth Education Award, and is cited for his contributions to the teaching of undergraduate computer science.  Abelson is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation and a founding director of Creative Commons and Public Knowledge.  He is also co-chair of MIT's Council on Educational Technology, and serves as a consultant to Hewlett-Packard Packard Laboratories.

 

Abelson's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses on "amorphous computing," an effort to create programming technologies that can harness the power of the new computing substrates emerging from advances in microfabrication and molecular biology.  He is also engaged in the interaction of law, policy, and technology as they relate to societal tensions sparked by the growth of the Internet, and he is active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help bolster our intellectual commons.

 

Please visit http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/


 The Distinguished Lecture is scheduled for
Friday
January  5, 2007
5pm, Monarchy Ballroom


 The Plenary is scheduled for
Thursday
January 4, 2007
12:45pm, Monarchy Ballroom


 

   
   PLENARY SPEAKER
    Gilman Louie
    Partner, Alsop Louie Partners

 

    "The Venture Capital Approach To Finding and Driving Innovation"

 

US Venture Capital funds will raise between $25 billion and $30 billion this year to invest in            companies.  Venture capital has been responsible for funding many of the key technologies and companies that have had dramatic impact on this country and the world. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems, Fed Ex, Starbucks, Genentech, Apple, DEC, Compaq, Intel Cisco, eBay and Yahoo! are just some of the examples of venture backed success stories. How is it that venture capitalists are consistently able to identify future trends and build successful organizations? How does a venture capitalist determine what ideas and people to bet on? How do they view and manage risk and what strategies do they employ to maximize the value of their investments? We will explore these questions as well as how established organizations can use VC like approaches to reinvent themselves and maintain competitive advantages especially in managing their R&D investments.

 

G ilman Louie is a partner of Alsop Louie Partners, a venture capital fund focused on helping entrepreneurs start companies. He is the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. Previously Gilman built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Gilman founded and ran a company called Spectrum Holobyte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer of Hasbro Interactive and general manager of the Games.com group before founding In-Q-Tel.

 

Gilman has served on a number of boards of directors, including Wizards of the Coast, Total Entertainment Network, Direct Language, FASA Interactive, and most recently the National Venture Capital Association. He serves as a member of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. He is on the board of the non-profit venture fund, NewSchools.org. In 2006, Gilman was presented with the Directors Award by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Porter Goss, for his service in creating In-Q-Tel and providing service to the intelligence community. Gilman completed the Advanced Management program/International Seniors Management Program at Harvard Business School and received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from San Francisco State University.

 


 

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