Brief Bio of Dr. Mark M. Davydov

Mark M. Davydov is a recognized expert and consultant on the subjects of software architecture, and software evolution and reuse. He received the Diploma of Electrical Engineer from the State Academy of Chemical Engineering in Moscow, Russia, followed by a Ph.D. in Applied Informatics (1978).

 

Dr. Davydov has planned and implemented enterprise-wide architecture initiatives for over 30 Fortune 500 companies. Currently, he is a vice president and senior solution delivery architect at Bank of America, where he is responsible for domain architecture definitions, software architecture life cycle processes, and software reuse.

 

Dr. Davydov is the author of over 100 highly acclaimed articles in computer-related publications. His 2001 book "Corporate Portals and e-Business Integration - A Manager's Guide", McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, introduced many ideas that influenced the progression of Service-Oriented Architecture and the Web services model. He has taught instructor-led courses on component-based software engineering and generative programming in industry (e.g., at Royal Bank of Canada, Mastercard, and Southwestern Bell). He has also presented papers and invited talks at many international conferences, including tutorials on software architecture and service-oriented computing (e.g., SD2000 East, ICSOC04, FinanceCom05, ECIS 2005, etc.).


Abstract:
In the past decade, consistent software design and software reuse with their proclaimed benefits have become the most illusive themes in IT. Many organizations in government, public and private sectors have been overwhelmed with extensive software process improvement and architecture-based programs focused on fostering consistency and software reuse. Although some of these programs were very successful, the majority have failed – failed to ensure a broad-based applicability, failed to produce sustainable results, and, most importantly, failed to guarantee noteworthy productivity improvements in software engineering – reductions in cost and time-to-market for large complex software development projects.

 

 

Brief Bio of Dr. Bebo White

Prof. Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the national high energy physics laboratory at Stanford University. In addition, Prof. White holds faculty appointments at Hong Kong University, the University of San Francisco, and Contra Costa College. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, academic institutions, and for commercial organizations around the world. Prof. White has been a member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) since 1996 and in that time has served as General Co-Chair of two of the conferences and Tutorial and Workshops Co-Chair for four of the conferences. White is often found on the program committees of the international conferences on Web Technology. He is one of the managing editors of "The Journal of Web Engineering" and "The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching."


Abstract:
"Web 2.0" is rapidly becoming a buzzword in the Web design and development communities. Despite this attention, a definition of the term and its scope are still evolving. To many observers "Web 2.0" appears to be a loose collection of recently developed concepts and technologies including Weblogs, Wikis, podcasts, Web feeds and other forms of collaborative publishing. Added to this mix are social software, Web APIs, Web standards, online Web services, AJAX, and more. In this talk, Bebo White will describe some of common unifying goals of "Web 2.0" and speculate that rather than being a new technology that it actually represents the natural evolution of the Web. He will also discuss the implications that "Web 2.0" promises to have on the future of Web Information Systems.

 

 

Brief Bio of Dr. Carmel McNaught

Carmel McNaught is Professor of Learning Enhancement in the Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research (CLEAR) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Carmel has had over 30 years experience in teaching and research in higher education, and has had appointments in eight universities in Australasia and southern Africa, working in the discipline areas of chemistry, science education, second language learning, eLearning, and higher education curriculum and policy matters. Current research interests include evaluation of innovation in higher education, strategies for embedding learning support into the curriculum, and understanding the broader implementation of the use of technology in higher education. She has over 220 academic publications.


Abstract:
There are now a number of learning repositories available for teachers to use to source content material (learning objects) to use in their teaching. How have these learning repositories come into being? How are they organized? Just what is a learning object? There are several factors which must work together to make a learning repository sustainable. In this paper these cultural, social and technical factors will be explored. Two cases will be contrasted - a struggling repository in Hong Kong and a successful digital library in the US. From this comparison, a number of key success factors emerge.

 

 

Brief Bio of Dr. Piet Kommers

Dr. Piet Kommers is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Educational Science and Technology at Twente University in the Netherlands. His research field is the design and application of media in learning situations. His courses are Multimedia Design, Virtual Reality and Societal Effects of ICT. Concept mapping and metaphoric design stages play an important role here.

Projects are undertaken in the field of multicultural communication. The learning processes at individual and societal levels manifest in terms of existential expressions and awareness. Media play an ever more important role in it.

Conceptual representations for meta-cognitive awareness become a default language for identity and road maps for changing oneself. The high saturation of communication infrastructure offers the opportunity to participate in learning communities. Sharing experience and finding the right sparring partners for exploring alternative approaches in one’s job and continuous learning becomes realistic and offers a more dynamic personal development.


Abstract:
Seen from a large time scale, learning has evolved from a life-span 'experience' into one of an instance capability. Terms like "just-in-time learning" and "learning on-demand" clearly reflect the urgence to control learning and to make it manifest "on the spot".
Seen from the media evolution it has become a realistic demand as well:
Finding solutions and finding persons that actually allow me to perform as if I have been trained in a certain aspect is a fascinating step forward.
The advantage of swift expertise has led us to become more alert on the need for competence as well. In addition to "performance" and "knowledge" it is the need foor exposing more complete abilities of a learner in real settings. In other words: the readiness for instant learning has stimulated schooling instutes to focus at a more critical line of learning achievements that can be recognized in complex environments.
The main thesis of this presentation is that mobile learning and learning in virtual reality are taking over the more complex phases of learning.
Mobile communication nowadays embodies the way human expertise is distributed along networks rather than individual minds. For optimizing the higher levels of learning, it is essential that the communicative practitioner is taken into account, and gets an explicit role in new learning scenarios.
Similar is the need for learning in virtual environments. Beyond visual and auditory information it is the enactive, the haptic and the tactile modality that allow learners to feel immersed in a quasi realistic setting. A striking domain is the medical: Before the first real-patient operation may be undertaken, it is a virtual patient with endoscopic devices and a screen that reflects the vectorized interior of the abdomen as if a camera enter the real patient.
The presentation wil demonstrate critical stages once the young surgeon enters the mannequin.
Mobile and virtual learning will allow constructionistic strategies to integrate in instructionistic procedures. The key question to be answered is how far trainees can be coached to invest in learning skills and becoming once own teacher. Examples like tools for making one's metacognitive stage explicit will de demonstrated, leading to the discussion on the estimated autonomy learner need to conquer before actual constructivism can be relied upon.

Brief Bio of Dr. Hermann Maurer

Study of Mathematics at the Universities of Vienna (Austria) and Calgary (Canada) starting in 1959. System Analyst with the Government of Sasketchewan (Canada) in 1963. Mathematician-programmer with IBM Research in Vienna 1964-1966. Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Vienna 1965.

Assistant and Associate Professor for Computer Science at the University of Calgary 1966-1971. Full Professor for Applied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe, West Germany, 1971-1977, and Visiting Professor at SMU, Dallas, and University of Brasilia (Brazil) for three months, each, and at the University of Waterloo, during the same period.

Full Professor at the Graz University of Technology since 1978, since October 2000 also Dean of Studies for Telematics. In addition, director of the Research Institute for Applied Information Processing of the Austrian Computer Society 1983-1998; chairman of Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media since 1988, director of the Institute for Hypermedia Systems of JOANNEUM RESEARCH since 1990, director of the AWAC (Austrian Web Application Center) of the ARCS (Austrian Research Centers) 1997-2000, member of the board of OCG (Österreische Computergesellschaft) 1979-2003, founder and scientific advisor of the KNOW Center (K+ Center), the first research center on Knowledge Management in Austria, since 2004/01/01 first Dean of the newly formed Faculty for Computer Science of Graz, University of Technology.

Adjunct Professor at Denver University 1984-1988; Professor for Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1993 (on leave from Graz), then Honorary Adjunct Professor and since May 2001 Honorary Research Fellow.

Since 2002 'Campus Graz 02' Captain (University College of the Styrian Chamber of Commerce), honorary title 'Visiting Professor' at the Danube University (Krems, Austria), Central European Evaluation Board Member WGLN (Wallenberg Global Learning Network); External Advisory Panel Member at Kuching University (Malysia) as of December 15, 2002 and Visiting Researcher at Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia) from February till April 2003.

He received a number of awards, among them the ADV Prize for Merits for Informationprocessing in Austria, the Honorary Doctorate of the Polytechnical University of St. Petersburg in 1992, the "Enter-Price" (a nice play of words with Enterprise) of the Styrian Chamber of Commerce in 1999, the Integrata-Prize (for Human Software) in 2000, the 'AACE Fellowship Award' of AACE (Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education) in November 2003; became Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 1996 and a member of the Academia Europaea in February 2000. In January 2001 he was awarded the "Austrian Cross of Honours for Arts and Science Class I", in July 2001 the "Large Medal of Honour of the Province of Styria" and in May 2002 the Honorary Doctorate of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.


Abstract:
Up to about 2004 the WWW has mainly offered large amounts of information and interactivity in the sense of "business to customer". I.e., in addition to providing a distributed information system it has allowed to order from various sources (most notably books), to arrange trips or theater tickets, and such. The only major person to person (or should one rather call it person with other persons) applications have been discussion and help forums, with fairly mixed success. This picture has been modifying with dramatic speed over the last two year: many activities that involve a large number of users are changing the character of the WWW. It started with a big wave of sharing audio files between individuals, soon extending into sharing other kinds of files, particularly photos, exending to commercial (paid for) file sharing systems, cooperative efforts in Wiki style, most famous probably Wikipedia and its cousins, blogs like the famous Craig List. It can well be claimed that even commercial services like eBay, networked gaming or portals for the direct sale of goods from one to other persons are not only booming but all belong to the emerging phenomenon of e-communities. In this talk we present a number of examples iluminating the phenomenon mentioned. Further, we analyse past and current developments and take a critical look at some of the commercial, legal and philosophical implications. We will also mention that surprising little is new, techncially speaking, but what is new is much higher usability. We explain how some of the current weaknesses can and will be overcome in the long run. Yes, in the long run: it takes a substantial time to have a community willing to accept novel concepts. This will be proven by means of a number of examples. For a detailed discussion of some of the aspects see the paper by Kolbitsch and Maurer in the 2006 February issue of J.UCS, www.jucs.org.