Monday, March 11 - 9:00 am
Dr. Richard
L. Ballard
Chief Scientist
Knowledge Foundations, Inc.
Once
& Future Knowledge
Dr.
Ballard looks back at the past 20 years of knowledge science and
engineering achievement to sketch an outline of Knowledge Industry
Formation and Emergence over the next 20 years. He employs a succession
of nationally important space, military, and high level government
decision tools and knowledge bases from this past to define the
barriers to knowledge tool and product development. He highlights
the approaches that overcome these barriers and promise revolutionary
products and services the public has yet to understand or even
to imagine. He sees these next few years as the birth of an industry.
He sketches major markets, then the production processes and economics
that will shape its early evolution. Ballard opens the door to
a compelling new vision of knowledge based computing and a revolutionary
world where knowledge is gained, but never lost.
Biography:
Dr. Ballard is the founder and creator of KFI’s technology. His
background includes hands-on executive management of numerous
start-up companies including Co-Director and Founder of Apple
Foundations for Steve Jobs and Mike Markula, and Founder/Chairman
of the TALMIS Division of International Data Corporation for Patrick
McGovern. Dr. Ballard has received 128 software citations, developed
21 Educational Software Workshops and 3 Management Software Workshops,
and has been published in 35 publications and technical reports.
As a University of California professor and researcher, he has
developed and taught numerous classes over 15 years. Dr. Ballard
will manage all R&D; functions as well as supporting with sales
activities.
Monday,
March 11 - 9:45 am
Dr. Claude Vogel
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Semio Corporation
Fasten
Your Taxonomies; Hold on for the Classification Revolution
Biography:
Dr. Claude Vogel, the founder and Chief Technology Officer of
Semio Corporation, is a foremost authority in Cognitive Anthropology.
He earned Ph.D. degrees in Social Anthropology (1976) and Cultural
Anthropology (1992) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales (EHESS), Paris. He is the former Director of the Computational
Semiotics Laboratory at the University Leonard de Vinci in Paris,
and an Associate Professor of Computational Semiotics at the University
of Montréal. Dr. Vogel engages in ongoing research -- and has
published more than 70 pieces, including nine books -- on the
subjects of software engineering, cognitive design, social organizations,
and semiotics.
Wednesday,
March 13 - 2:00 pm
John Sowa
Chief Scientist
Genumerix, Inc.
Negotiation
Instead of Legislation
For
years, the Holy Grail of IT has been a magical solution to the
problem of making incompatible systems interoperable. The most
common approach is to legislate some new kind of language, framework,
schema vocabulary, terminology, nomenclature, ontology, or metadata.
Whatever it is called, the legislators promise that it will somehow
convert the knowledge cacophony of the World Wide Web into a knowledge
symphony.
Yet for any
given task, people manage to work together without reorganizing
the totality of all the knowledge soup in their heads. Instead
of legislation, they use negotiation to make the minimal adjustments
needed to get the job done. To make negotiation possible among
computer systems, several processes must be accomplished: defining
the task to be done, mapping the task-related concepts to the
available structures of each system, and making adjustments only
when necessary. This talk discusses the mechanisms of negotiation,
analyzes their implications for system design, and shows how they
can enable legacy systems to interoperate in dynamically changing
environments.
Biography:
John F. Sowa spent thirty years working on research and
development projects at IBM. He is now the chief scientist at
a new company, Genumerix Inc., which is developing software to
deal with the kinds of problems discussed in this talk. He has
a BS degree in mathematics from MIT, an MA in applied mathematics
from Harvard, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit
Brussel. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, he has participated in ANSI and ISO standards projects
for conceptual graphs, knowledge sharing, and ontology, and he
has written and edited many books and papers on those topics.
