Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman of CMU (Silicon Valley) will be presenting the following keynote at OpenSym 2015:

Title: Barriers and Pathways to Successful Collaboration

Abstract: Effective collaboration is essential to virtually every human endeavor, since there are relatively few significant tasks that can be accomplished by a single individual. Successful collaboration efforts can be ascribed to a shared vision, strong and charismatic leadership, and the ability to overcome technical, organizational, and personal obstacles to achieving the project’s objective(s). At the same time, there are many barriers that can make these efforts fail. While these barriers can’t always be overcome, the chances of success are greatly improved if people are aware of the various challenges and take steps to anticipate them in advance. This talk addresses these issues, and draws examples from the FLOSS community, from startups, and from other disciplines.

Biography: Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman is a Professor of Software Management Practice at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of its Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), focused on evaluation and adoption of open source software. In 1980, as a Professor at UC San Francisco, he released the software for his User Software Engineering research project under a BSD license. Subsequently, as CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), he incorporated some of that software in IDE’s Software through Pictures multiuser modeling environment, released in 1984, making it among the very first commercial products to include open source software. After IDE, Tony was VP of Engineering for a dot-com, and later became VP of Bluestone Software, where Bluestone’s open source Total-e-Mobile toolkit allowed mobile devices to connect to JavaEE web applications. Tony is very active in the international open source research community, and served as General Chair of the 2009 and 2014 Int’l. Conference on Open Source Systems. He is on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Board of Advisors of Open Source for America Tony is a Fellow of the ACM and a Life Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to software engineering and software development environments. He received the 2012 Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE’s Technical Council on Software Engineering and the 2013 Influential Educator Award from the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. Tony has been to almost 70 countries, including some that no longer exist, and posts his photos on Flickr.

Peter Norvig of Google Research, will be presenting the following keynote at OpenSym 2015:

Title: Applying Machine Learning to Programs

Abstract: Certain tasks, such as recognizing speech, or correcting spelling errors, are now routinely handled with machine learning algorithms. But most tasks are handled the old fashioned way, with programmers writing code line by line. Machine learning algorithms work by amassing large numbers of examples and extracting patterns from them. We certainly have amassed a large number of examples of code; what can algorithms, and we, learn from them?

Biography: Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc. Previously he was head of Google’s core search algorithms group, and of NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Robert J. Glushko of University of California, Berkeley, will be presenting the following keynote at OpenSym 2015:

Title: Collaborative Authoring, Evolution, and Personalization for a “Transdisciplinary” Textbook

Abstract: This presentation is a case study about a book titled The Discipline of Organizing, which proposes a transdisciplinary synthesis of ideas from library and information science, computer science, informatics, cognitive science, business, and other disciplines that “intentionally arrange collections of resources to enable interactions with them.” This case study discusses the interrelationships between the transdisciplinary goal for the book, the process of collaborative authoring required to write it, the novel architecture of the book’s content, and the innovative reading experiences in print and ebook formats that are enabled. The idea that abstract concepts and methods of organizing define a new discipline that is contextualized by more specific concepts and methods inevitably led to a collaboratively-authored book whose design embodies this intellectual architecture. The book’s content is organized as a transdisciplinary core with supplemental content identified by discipline. This content model creates a “family of books” with thousands of siblings, any of which can be published in print or as an ebook by filtering on the disciplinary attributes. This “design-time” customization was enhanced to enable “reading-time” personalization for ebook formats. In addition, the rich semantic markup that enables customization and personalization is fodder for further experimentation about “smart textbooks” that can be continuously made smarter by dynamic discovery and inclusion of content.

Biography: Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at UC San Diego in 1979, he spent about ten years working in corporate R&D, about ten years as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and now has worked over ten years as an academic. His interests and expertise include information systems and service design, content management, and ebook design and publishing. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML for electronic business before its acquisition by Commerce One in 1999. He is a co-author of Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services, published in 2005. More recently, he is the principal author and editor of The Discipline of Organizing, named an “information science book of the year” in 2014 by the Association of Information Science and Technology.