Two Nationally Known Computer Scientists to Lecture at the UO
Jiawei Han is a renowned computer scientist who specializes in research on Data Mining. Han, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will lecture May 08 on "Exploring the Power of Links in Information Network Mining. Data mining involves sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. It is usually used by business intelligence organizations, and financial analysts, but it is increasingly used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimental and observational methods.
Han has over 300 journal and conference publications. His book, "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" is used as a textbook worldwide. He is an ACM Fellow and has received the 2004 ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award.
For more information about the lecture see: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/Activities/Public_Talks/20080508-Han.php. For information about Jiawei Han see: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~hanj.
Barbara Simons, a former President of the ACM spoke on March 13 on "Computerized Voting Machines: Who is Counting your Vote?" She examined some of the technical issues relating to paperless computerized voting systems (Direct Recording Electronic or DRE's) and Internet voting. She also discussed the advantages of optical scan + ballot marking systems and reviewed ongoing legislative efforts aimed at making voting systems more secure and mandating random manual audits for all federal elections.
Simons is retired from IBM. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory. She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense's Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns.
For more information about Barbara Simons, see: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/activities/Public_Talks/20080313-Simons.php.