NYU WinC Group Visit to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne - 30 March 2007

NYU Women in Computing Group Visit to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne on 30 March 2007:
30 NYU students visited IBM including 9 PhD, 16 MS, and 12 BS students from Courant and Stern.

At the end of the sessions, we proposed the following:
- making the NYU visit to IBM an annual activity
- running a workshop on technical topics in the fall at NYU

Here is the agenda for the visit
- 11:00-11:50 Cathy Lasser (VP, Industry Solutions and Emerging Business) Research Overview
- 11:50-12:10 Susan Puglia (VP, Quality and Process Transformation Executive for Technical Career Paths Development and Technical Support)
- 12:10-12:35 Brenda Dietrich (Director, Mathematical Sciences) Mathematics at IBM
- 12:35-13:00 Anshu Kak (Executive IT Architect) Services-Oriented Architecture
- 13:00-14:00 Lunch with NYU Alumni, speakers, Charles Lickel (VP, Software),
- 14:00-14:45 Fran Allen (IBM Fellow Emerita, ACM Turing Award Recipient)Compiling a Career
- 14:45-15:15 Mahesh Viswanathan (Lead Architect, Information on Demand)Web 2.0: Challenging the Status Quo in Information Technology

Here are some comments from the students about the visit:

• Lectures were interesting and engaging! It would be great to have similar speakers on campus.
  
• Interesting and fun. Learned a lot.
  
• It was great!
  
• Inspiring and fun!
  
• Very informative and fun!
  
• It was very nice to hear from people who are experienced in the field I am interested in.
  
• Great to learn about IBM and how they fit into technological innovation. Exceptionally inspiring.
  
• Very interesting, would have liked to have seen the facility more.
  
• Very useful and practical advice. Also, fun. Great.
  
• Useful for my future -> Very diverse topics and great speakers!!
  
• Amazing set of speakers. Exciting topics. Very well-organized. I learnt a lot! Thanks a lot!
  One idea: have a 5-10 min break in between talks such that students can interact with the speaker informally - and rest-room break.
  
• I appreciate the support and encouragement from IBM's employees.
  
• Great, informative, educational day. Wonderful opportunity to listen to exemplary figure like Fran Allen and other amazing speakers from different departments of IBM.
  Suggestion: A little more detail regarding internship opportunities in different departments would have been useful and made a difference.
  Reply: Here is some information on the IBM Research internship program.
  
• Thanks a lot for the great trip!
  Suggestions: More technical content and more detailed description of ongoing research would be of interest, e.g., examples of specific research problems and approaches etc).
  
• Please provide the speakers contact information if possible.
  Reply: Can contact me initially if information not available above.
  
• Would like to have a trip inside the IBM Building
  
• It is great.
  
• Very informational, Gave me lots of insight to the company.
  

Community Maintained Artifacts and The Social Web

John Riedl, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota
Friday, March 30, 10:30AM-noon
IBM Yorktown, Room 26-024
Host: David Cohn

Many online communities are emerging that, like Wikipedia, bring people together to build community-maintained artifacts of lasting
value (CALVs). Motivating people to contribute is a key problem because the quantity and quality of contributions ultimately determine
a CALV's value. We pose three related research questions: 1) How does intelligent task routing---matching people with work---affect the
quantity of contributions? 2) How does reviewing contributions before accepting them affect the quality of contributions? 3) How do
recommender systems affect the evolution of a shared tagging vocabulary among the contributors?


About the Speaker: Professor Riedl specializes in collaborative filtering, systems, and information filtering. He also often speaks as an expert on the topic of online social networks. In 2006, he was named a Senior Member of the IEEE and also won the Best Paper Award at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference. Riedl has also received the Commerce Technology Award, The MIT Sloan School Award for Innovation in E-Commerce, and at least half a dozen teaching awards. Riedl has served on many program committees and has authored more than 50 publications, including one book, journal and conference papers, short articles and book chapters. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE organizations, and an Editorial Board member for the Journal of Electronic Commerce Technologies.

Enabling Data Retrieval - by Ranking and Beyond

Title: Enabling Data Retrieval - by Ranking and Beyond
When: 29 March, 2007 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Where: IBM Hawthorne GN-K35
Speaker: Chengkai Li, Ph.D. Candidate, UIUC
Availability: Open


Database management systems (DBMSs) are facing challenges in supporting non-traditional data retrieval for emerging applications. We need retrieval systems over data, much like a "Google" for databases, parallel the well-established information retrieval over text. Such systems should allow users to use flexible and intuitive queries capturing their information needs, and to explore the databases
effectively. In the talk, I will discuss this exciting research area and introduce my work in this direction. In particular I will present RankSQL, a DBMS that provides a systematic and principled framework for ranking by extending relational algebra. I will further introduce our work on ranking aggregate queries. Effective data retrieval mechanisms go beyond just ranking. I will discuss our proposal of generalizing Group-By to clustering, parallel to the generalization from Order-By to
ranking, and combining the two constructs. Moreover, I will briefly mention our study of inverse ranking queries.