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Keynote: "The Domestication of Computers"Wednesday, July 10th, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
The UPA 2002 conference keynote speaker will be Dr. Joel Birnbaum, Special Technical Assistant to the Chairman and CEO of the Hewlett-Packard Company. Dr. Joel Birnbaum talk is entitled "The Domestication of Computers".
The domestication of animals was a crucial step in the development of civilization; as humans learned to tame wild animals to permit access by ordinary people, they also developed selective breeding techniques for optimizing the animals' desirable characteristics. The horse or turkey of today, for example, is vastly different from its primitive ancestor. As computers and digital devices become pervasive in our society, it seems appropriate to consider whether we are evolving them appropriately, particularly in terms of universal accessibility and the supporting hardware, software and communications architectures.
This talk begins by examining where we are today, and how we got here. It then presents a personal view, in light of projected usage and emerging technologies, of what we might aspire to, and presents some speculative examples of the new breed of information appliances and the infrastructure needed to support them.
Biography:Joel S. Birnbaum Ph.D. is Special Technical Assistant to the Chairman and CEO of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). In this newly created position, he reports directly to HP CEO, President and Chairman Carly Fiorina. Dr. Birnbaum's role is to continue to help the company shape its technology strategy and to communicate this strategy to the marketplace. Before assuming his current role, Dr. Birnbaum was senior vice president for research and development (R&D) and director of HP Laboratories-a role he retired from in February 1999. He was responsible for the coordination of worldwide activities in R&D and served as the company's chief technical officer.Dr. Birnbaum joined HP in 1980 after 15 years at IBM Corporation's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where he last served as director of computer sciences. He was the founding director of the Computer Research Center within HP Labs. One of the technologies developed under his direction was the precursor of HP Precision Architecture, the basis for all Hewlett-Packard's RISC computers. In 1984, Dr. Birnbaum was named director of HP Labs and an HP vice president. In 1986, he was named general manager of the Information Technology Group. He was responsible for the development of all core hardware platforms and systems software for the Precision Architecture product line. After the first successful shipment of these systems in 1988, Joel Birnbaum was named general manager of the new Information Architecture Group, which developed systems architectures for cooperative-computing environments. This became the basis for HP's open client server system products. In 1991, he was elected senior vice president of R&D and director of HP Laboratories. In this role, as a member of the Management Staff, he was responsible for coordinating HP's global research and development, directing central research, and acting as the technology spokesman for the company. Joel Birnbaum was born in the Bronx, N.Y. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and master's and doctoral degrees in nuclear physics from Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Dr. Birnbaum was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the UK, a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology, a Sheffield Fellow of Yale University, and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has been granted an honorary doctorate by the Technion University of Israel and was the year 2000 winner of the IEEE Weber Prize, given for career engineering management achievement. Joel Birnbaum's board memberships include the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Technion University of Israel, Veridian Corporation, Indigo Corporation, Hermes Softlabs, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He also serves on advisory councils at Exemplary and Digital Archway corporations. |
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