Date:
November 04, 2009
Time: 7 - 9 P.M.
Location: SCA: Ray Stark Family Theatre, Room 108
Time: 7 - 9 P.M.
Location: SCA: Ray Stark Family Theatre, Room 108
Imagine the World in 2050
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SCA faculty member Richard Weinberg, Ph.D., will moderate the discussion.
IBM Research is one of the world's most prolific and far-reaching commercial labs, with five Nobel Prize winners and 16 years of US patent leadership. IBM Research is engaged with many public and private researchers around the world to better understand and address some of the biggest issues of our time and make the planet operate in smarter ways.
Make Your Reservation
Panelists include:Melissa Cefkin
Melissa Cefkin is a member of Almaden Services Research at IBM Research. A Fulbright award grantee with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Rice University, she is a business and design anthropologist with experience in research, management, teaching and consulting specializing in workplace ethnography, services research, product and service design and deployment, organizational change management and learning research and program development. She is dedicated to pursuing a critical understanding of the intersections of anthropological practice within business and organizational settings.
Cefkin was previously a Director of User Experience and member of the Advanced Research group at Sapient Corporation where she managed Sapient’s New York office Experience Modeling team. Prior to that, she was a Senior Research Scientist at Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). Cefkin has conducted research in Turkey, Germany, the Philippines, Spain, the UK and throughout the US. She is the editor of Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflection on Research in and of Corporations (Berghahn Books) and served as the co-chair of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference in 2007 and 2008 conference. She is also on the editorial board for Cultural Anthropology, and on the Committee for the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing (CFPEP) for the American Anthropology Association (AAA).
John Cohn, IBM Fellow
John Cohn is featured on the Discovery Channel's series The Colony, which is a controlled experiment that isolates ten people for two months in an urban environment and challenges them with rebuilding a functioning society in a simulated post-disaster situation. Cohn is an expert in many areas, including fixing, making or hacking anything electronic, building structures out of natural materials, tying knots, growing edible plants, etc. He helps build chips at the heart of the world's leading video game consoles and IBM servers.
At home, Cohn is a self proclaimed Mad Scientist and he has performed a Jots and Volts electricity show to more than 50,000 people across America. In 2006, Cohn and his wife Diane's 14-year-old son, Sam, was killed in a traffic accident. Since then, Cohn has dedicated all of his education outreach work to Sam's memory. He is always eager to share his love for science and engineering with anyone who will listen.
Don Eigler, IBM Fellow
Don Eigler is a physicist and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. On September 28, 1989 he achieved a landmark in humankind's ability to build small structures by demonstrating the ability to manipulate individual atoms with atomic-scale precision. He went on to write I-B-M using 35 individual Xenon atoms; this event was likened to the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk by Jack Uldrich in his book, The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change The Future of Your Business. Eigler's feat was performed using a low temperature ultra high vacuum scanning tunneling microscope that he designed and built.
Since then, his group's results include the invention of quantum corrals, discovery of the quantum mirage effect, demonstration of a fundamentally new way to transport information through a solid utilizing modulated quantum states, the demonstration of nanometer-scale logic circuits based on molecular cascades, and invention of spin excitation spectroscopy.
In addition to his professional pursuits, Eigler has been building his skills as a trainer of service dogs, specializing in dogs that assist the mobility impaired. The IBM Corporation, sensitive to the needs of employees, has graciously allowed him to utilize the Almaden Research Center as a real-world training ground for his dogs, Argon and Neon. His dogs-in-training are a regular sight at Almaden; because one or both of them is nearly always with him, they have been included in New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle feature stories on IBM Research.
Winfried Wilcke, IBM Research Scientist, Nanoscale Science
Winfried Wilcke is currently senior manager of the nanoscale science and technology group at IBM Research - Almaden. He recently launched a long-term effort around advanced battery systems and energy storage - key technologies that will support widespread use of electric cars, the smart power grid and more. Their goal is to create next-generation rechargeable batteries capable of storing ten times more energy than today's most powerful Lithium-ion batteries.
At IBM, he has had his hand in a variety of key technologies including supercomputing, hardware design, nanotechnology, data-intensive computing and storage, and more. His career has included time at national labs like Los Alamos, Silicon Valley start-ups and more. An experimental nuclear physicist by training, Wilcke has coauthored well over 100 papers on nuclear heavy-ion reactions and muon physics. An avid, pilot, sailor, filmmaker and diver, Wilcke recently published an anthology Random Walk about his many (mis)adventures in science and technology.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is Chairman Emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, and Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In November 2009, Wladawsky-Berger will be Innovator in Residence at USC Annenberg School for Communication. Prior to retiring from IBM in June, 2007, Wladawsky-Berger was responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing appropriate activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on them. In his emeritus role with the IBM Academy, Irving continues to participate in a number of technical strategy and innovation initiatives. At MIT, he is involved in multi-disciplinary research and teaching activities focused on how information technologies are helping transform business organizations and the institutions of society.
Wladawsky-Berger began his IBM career in 1970 at the Company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He is Adjunct Professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Council for BP International and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was co-chair of President Clinton's Information Technology Advisory Committee, and served as a member of the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories. He was also a founding member of the Computer Sciences & Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. A native of Cuba, he was named the 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year.
Thomas G. Zimmerman
IBM Research Scientist, Human/Machine Devices & Paradigms
Thomas G. Zimmerman is a member of the research staff exploring the frontiers of human-computer interaction at the IBM Research--Almaden. His 30+ patents cover position tracking, user input, wireless communication, biometrics and encryption. His Data Glove invention established the field of Virtual Reality, selling over one million units. His electric field PAN invention sends data through the human body, exchanging electronic business cards with a handshake, and prevents air bags from injuring children in the Honda Accord.
Zimmerman runs a National Science Foundation funded science-enrichment after school program, is a regular contributor to Make Magazine and was honored by California Governor Schwarzenegger with the California Volunteer of the Year award for 2009.
| USC School of Cinematic Arts Ray Stark Family Theatre Room 108 950 West 34th Street Los Angeles, CA 90089 |
Wednesday November 4 7 - 9 P.M. |
Contact:
Dr Richard Weinberg
Research Associate Professor
Hench-DADA
213.740.3239
| Associated Person: | Richard Weinberg |
