Strategy, policy, architecture, managementInformation Futures

Information Futures Forum series 2006

To stimulate a broad-ranging conversation about our scholarly information environment, the Information Management program invites distinguished experts to deliver guest lectures during the academic year.

The Information Futures Forums are open to staff and interested students of the University.

 

The 2006 Information Futures Forums

 

20 September 2006 - where is it? Enterprise search - promises and challenges

Dr David Hawking, is Science Leader for the Information Retrieval area in the CSIRO ICT Centre. He is also chief scientist of Funnelback Pty Ltd, the company spun off to commercialise CSIRO's enterprise search technology.

Universities, like other organisations, are beginning to realise the significant business cost of ineffective search facilities, both in external competitiveness and in internal productivity. The issues, challenges and exciting possibilities of enterprise search will be outlined and illustrated with examples drawn from the university sector. A number of promising ideas for improving the quality of search will be presented as will new methods for measuring how well they actually work.

Dr Hawking leads a very active research program in Workplace Information Retrieval, and supervises PhD students at ANU and the University of Sydney. He is an author of over 60 scientific publications, sits on the editorial boards of Information Retrieval and Computational Intelligence and is a member of the program committees of many of the leading conferences in the areas of the Web search and information retrieval. For more information see Dave's home page.

 

21 June 2006 - new media realities: the user revolution

Tony Walker, Manager, ABC Digital Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, says the balance of power is shifting from media producers to the audiences. The triumph of personal technology over mass technology is giving birth to new behaviours. No longer is media consumption a passive pursuit, with viewers, listeners and readers waiting for media companies to produce and deliver content. Now audiences can use a growing variety of platforms to get what they want when they want it. But not only is content distribution passing into the hands of the consumer. So is content production. Increasingly, consumers are becoming producers, distributing their content to their own audiences, and this is where the heart of the media user revolution lies.

With 30 years working in the Australian media and a background in journalism, program making and broadcast management, Tony Walker is Manager ABC Digital Radio, responsible for the planning, development and management of new services within the ABC Radio division and the identification and analysis of strategic issues and developments in broadcasting.

 

25 May 2006 - thoughts on technology and the 21st century university

Dr Tracey Wilen-Daugenti from Cisco Systems (Global Education, USA) presents a global overview of issues and trends of information technology in higher education, including multi-disciplinary research, teaching spaces, libraries and the value of partnerships.

Tracey is the Managing Director of the Internet Business Solutions team at Cisco Systems Inc. In her current role she leads Higher Education institutions in innovation and excellence by using the Internet to achieve institutional goals. Before joining the Internet Business Solutions Group, Tracey held a number of positions at Cisco for the past eleven years in the areas of Business Development, Marketing, and Operations. Prior to Cisco, Tracey held executive positions at Hewlett Packard and Apple Computers.

Tracey holds an MBA and Doctorate in International Business and is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University . She has been an adjunct professor for graduate and doctoral programs for a number of Bay Area universities for the past 15 years. Her areas of expertise are International Business, Leadership, and Women Studies. Tracey was recently named San Francisco Women of the year, by the Women in Business Organization in San Francisco , for her outreach in the field of academia, women’s research, and technology.

 

23 March 2006 - SAKAI and community source software for higher education

A three-hour forum and workshop led by:

The forum uses Sakai as a model of community developed and supported software to provide a seamless course management, research and project collaboration environment in the higher education sector. It covers the nature of the community, its governance, how it interacts with other higher education open source communities and the role of standards in successful community source development.

Dr Charles Severance is a Software Architect at the University of Michigan Duderstadt Center working on tools for online collaboration for teaching, learning, and research. He is currently Chief Architect on the Sakai project (www.sakaiproject.org). He also is working on the NEESgrid project and the National Middleware Initiative grid portal project. Charles is the author of the book High Performance Computing, Second Edition, published by O'Reilly and Associates, and has taught computer science courses at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University .

Charles has developed several tools to assist in the production of multimedia web-based lectures. The tools are called the Sync-O-Matic 3000 and ClipBoard-2000. He has a BS, MS and PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University . His research area is the use of parallel processors for High Performance Computing and the use of the Internet to deliver educational content.

 

9-10 February 2006 - the library of the future

We were very fortunate to have two world experts on the storage and retrieval of information to speak to our first Information Futures forum for 2006. Speakers Daniel Clancy and Sandy Payette were both in Australia as keynote speakers at the 2006 VALA Conference.

Daniel and Sandy both addressed the same topic: "The library of the future - spreading the word: capturing and delivering libraries of information in the 21st century."

Sandy Payette leads digital library research and development projects at Cornell University's Information Science program. She is founder and co-director of the internationally-recognised Fedora Project that deploys sophisticated open-source software that forms the basis of digital libraries, institutional repositories, digital archives, and educational software.

Sandy is currently collaborating with colleagues from Cornell and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the NSF-funded Pathways project to design new information architectures for integrating heterogeneous digital repositories and services, and to demonstrate a next-generation scholarly communication system.

Sandy's other research areas include digital preservation, information networks, and automated policy enforcement.

Dr Daniel Clancy is Engineering Director for Google Book Search, USA. The Google Book Search project is focused on indexing offline printed content to make it full text searchable via the web.

Prior to coming to Google, Daniel worked at NASA Ames Research Center for seven years. He was Director of the Information Sciences and Technology Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. Daniel Clancy received his PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Texas at Austin.

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