Program
New Keynote Speaker Confirmed – Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis is the author of two books — “Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live” and “What Would Google Do?” — as well as the Kindle Single “Gutenberg the Geek.” He directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He blogs at Buzzmachine.com and is a cohost of the podcast “This Week in Google.” In prior lives, Jarvis was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of a large publishing company; creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine; TV critic for TV Guide and People magazines; and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner. His book “Public Parts” is a call to protect not just privacy but also the value of publicness and its greatest tool, the internet. So he is honored to be speaking about these freedoms at WWW.
Dr. Luis von Ahn (www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/) is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known as the pioneer of the idea of “Human Computation”, sometimes called crowdsourcing. His latest project is DuoLingo, which allows people to learn foreign languages online for free, while contributing to translate the Web.
He is also the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009. As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation, and has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the “genius grant”) in 2006,the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, and a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to many recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10, Silicon.com’s 50 Most Influential People in Technology, Technology Review’s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35, and FastCompany’s 100 Most Innovative People in Business.
First Keynote Speaker Confirmed
Jon Kleinberg (www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/) is the Tisch University Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of MacArthur, Packard, and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, as well as awards including the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.
Computational Perspectives on Social Phenomena in On-Line Networks will be Jon’s speech. With an increasing amount of social interaction taking place in the digital domain, and often in public on-line settings, we are accumulating enormous amounts of data about phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us: the collective behavior and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people, recorded at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution. Analyzing this data computationally offers new insights into the design of on-line applications, as well as a new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences. We discuss how this perspective can be applied to questions involving network structure and the dynamics of interaction among individuals, with a particular focus on the ways in which evaluation, opinion, and in some cases polarization manifest themselves at large scales in the on-line domain.