Speaker: Prof. Raj Reddy
Turing Award winner and member of the National Academy of Engineering
Title: The Million Book Digital Library Project
Date and Time: April 23, 2004, 3:30 p.m.
Place: Coates Hall 143, LSU
Abstract:
Increases in storage densities and falling costs make it possible to envision a future when all the publicity available human knowledge is made available to anyone, anywhere at anytime. In spite of determined praiseworthy efforts for two decades, projects such as Guttenberg have only been able capture a few thousand books accessible online. At a rate of under a thousand books per year, the estimated a million books ever published in the world will take a thousand years to digitize and we may never be able to catch up with the ever increasing new publications. Capturing born-digital publications at the time of creation (by requiring publishers to submit a digital copy as well the currently mandated physical copy) and scanning all the older publications at a rate of million books per year is one of the solutions being explored at this time to resolve this conundrum.
Digitizing a million books a year requires finding, scanning, processing and storing in a web accssible form about 5000 every day. The million book project is an attempt to understand and solve the technical, economic and social policy issues of providing online access to all creative works of the human race.
Biodata:
Dr. Raj Reddy is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Director of Carnegie Mellon West. He began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Stanford in 1966. He has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1969. He served as the founding Director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999.
Dr. Reddy's research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His current research projects include spoken language systems, gigabit networks,universal digital libraries and distance learning on demand.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 1987 to 89. Dr. Reddy was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterand of France in 1984. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1994. He served as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.
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Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer
TO BE ANNOUNCED
Speaker: Prof. Shankar Sastry from University of California, Berkeley
Date: TBA
Place: TBA
Biodata:
S. Shankar Sastry became Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley in January, 2001. The previous year, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA. From 1996–1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, an organized research unit on the Berkeley campus conducting research in computer sciences and all aspects of electrical engineering. During his Directorship from 1996–1999, the laboratory grew from $29M to $50M in volume of extra-mural funding. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and a Professor of Bioengineering.
Dr. Sastry received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as Asst. Professor from 1980–1982 and at Harvard University as a chaired Gordon Mc Kay professor in 1994. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, Canberra, the University of Rome, Scuola Normale, and the University of Pisa, the CNRS laboratory LAAS in Toulouse (poste rouge), Professor Invite at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (CNRS laboratory VERIMAG), and as a Vinton Hayes Visiting fellow at the Center for Intelligent Control Systems at MIT. His areas of research are embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, computation in novel substrates such as DNA, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid systems, embedded systems, sensor networks and biological motor control.
Nonlinear Systems: Analysis, Stability and Control is Dr. Sastry’s latest book, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. He has coauthored over 250 technical papers and 6 books, including Adaptive Control: Stability, Convergence and Robustness (with M. Bodson, Prentice Hall, 1989) and A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation (with R. Murray and Z. Li, CRC Press, 1994). He has co-edited Hybrid Control II, Hybrid Control IV and Hybrid Control V (with P. Antsaklis, A. Nerode, and W. Kohn, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively) and co-edited Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (with T.Henzinger, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998) and Essays in Mathematical Robotics (with Baillieul and Sussmann, Springer-Verlag IMA Series). Books on Embedded Software and Structure from Motion in Computer Vision are in progress.
Dr. Sastry served as Associate Editor for numerous publications, including: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Control Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; the Journal of Mathematical Systems, Estimation and Control; IMA Journal of Control and Information; the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing; Journal of Biomimetic Systems and Materials.
Dr. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 “for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems.” He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development award for 1983–1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the Eckman Award of the of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M.A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.
He has supervised 45 doctoral students to completion and over 50 M.S. students.
His students now occupy leadership roles in several locations such as Dean of
Engineering at Caltech, Director of Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford,
Army Research Office, and on the faculties of every major university in the
United States and abroad.