The panel includes:
John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author who has founded or co-founded businesses, magazines, and websites. Currently on leave from Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Battelle, 38, is also a founder and Executive Producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and "band manager" with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, Chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures.
Battelle is also at work on a forthcoming book, "The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google" (Penguin/Portfolio), and is the monthly "Titans of Technology" columnist for Business 2.0 magazine. He also maintains a daily site covering the intersection of media, technology and the internet at www.battellemedia.com.
Battelle was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and a finalist in the "Entrepreneur of the year" competition by Ernst & Young. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Peter Norvig is the Director of Search Quality at Google Inc.. He is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," the leading textbook in the field.
Previously he was head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis, neuro-engineering, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison shopping service; Chief designer at Harlequin Inc; and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
Dr. Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.
Richard F. Rashid, Ph.D., is currently charged with oversight of Microsoft Research's worldwide operations. He previously served as the director of Microsoft Research, focusing on operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. In that role he was responsible for managing work on key technologies leading to the development of Microsoft Corp's interactive TV system and authored a number of patents in areas such as data compression, networking and operating systems. In addition to running Microsoft Research, Rashid also was instrumental in creating the team that eventually became Microsoft's Digital Media Division and directing Microsoft's first e-commerce group. Rashid was promoted to vice president of Microsoft Research in 1994, and then to senior vice president in 2000.
Before joining Microsoft in September 1991, Rashid was professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After becoming a CMU faculty member in September 1979, he directed the design and implementation of several influential network operating systems, and published dozens of papers about computer vision, operating systems, programming languages for distributed processing, network protocols and communications security. During his tenure at CMU, Rashid developed the Mach multiprocessor operating system, which has been influential in the design of many modern operating systems and remains at the core of a number of commercial systems.
Rashid was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2003 for his work in operating systems and for innovation in industrial research. He also is credited with co-development of one of the earliest networked computer games, "Alto Trek," during the mid-1970s. An updated version of this game has been developed by Microsoft and has been released under the name "Allegiance."
Rashid is a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Directorate Advisory Committee. He is a past member of the DARPA UNIX Steering Committee and the CSNet Executive Committee and a former chairman of the ACM Software System Awards Committee.
Rashid�s research interests have focused on artificial intelligence, operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. He has participated in the design and implementation of the University of Rochester RIG operating system (1975&1979), the Rochester Virtual Terminal Management System (1976&1979), the CMU Distributed Sensor Network Testbed (1980&1983) and CMU�s SPICE distributed personal computing environment, which included the Accent network operating system (1981&1985). He has published papers on computer vision, operating systems, programming languages for distributed processing, network protocols and communication security.
Rashid received a Master of Science (1977) and Doctoral (1980) degrees in computer science from the University of Rochester. He graduated with honors in mathematics and comparative literature from Stanford University in 1974.
Jim Spohrer is the Director of Almaden Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. IBM Global Services (IGS) is a people-intensive, information-intensive business of over 170,000 professionals world-wide, accounting for almost half of IBM's yearly revenues, and innovation for IGS and similar entities is the focus of Spohrer's group. Human sciences, On-Demand Innovation Services (ODIS), deep industry knowledge of future trends, and operations technology are areas of active exploration.
From 2000-2002, Spohrer was CTO of IBM's Venture Capital Relations Group, where he identified technology trends and worked to establish relationships between IBM and VC-backed portfolio companies. Previously, he directed the IBM Almaden Research Center's (ARC) Computer Science Department, and before that was senior manager and co-strategist for IBM's User Experience/Human Computer Interaction research.
From 1989-1998, at Apple, he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group. He led the effort to create Apple's first online learning community and vision for "mobile anytime, anywhere" e-learning. From 1978-1982, he developed speech recognition algorithms and products at Verbex, an Exxon Enterprises company.
Spohrer received a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1988. In 1989, Spohrer lived in Rome where he was a visiting scholar at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and lecturer at major universities across Europe. Spohrer has published broadly in the areas of speech recognition, empirical studies of programmers, artificial intelligence, authoring tools, online learning communities, open source software, intelligent tutoring systems and student modeling, new paradigms in using computers, implications of rapid technical change, as well as the coevolution of social, business, and technical systems. Spohrer has also helped to establish two education research non-profit web sites: The Educational Object Economy and WorldBoard: Associating Information with Places. He is a frequent advisor to the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, and other groups (www.merlot.org, www.newmediacenters.org) on the implications of rapid technological change to the future of education.
This is a presentation delivered at the Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco, CA, October 5-7, 2004. Our thanks go to MediaLive International and O'Reilly Media, the producers of Web 2.0, for permission to bring you this session, one of many from Web 2.0 here on IT Conversations.
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