Highlights of the 2002-2003 Academic Year

Events:


Dr. Michael Kohlhase,


School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Math Working Group, World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kohlhase

CMU Course Capsules: Capturing the Content of Computer Science

Date: Friday, January 24, 2003
Time: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: Room 4-237
Beverages and dessert will be served.

Abstract: The talk presents the semantic knowledge management techniques employed for representing and delivering computer-supported courseware in the "Course Capsules Project" at Carnegie Mellon University. A course capsule is a collection of electronic documents together with an infrastructure that supports presentation over the web, detailed indexing, sophisticated search algorithms, and reuse of course materials. Capsules need not be bound to traditional units such as a semester long course, but can be constructed around specific topics that are of relevance in various places in the curriculum. The CCAPS project's objectives are the design and implementation of a system that will store, organize, index, and present course content and test in on undergraduate education at CMU. One of the pertinent tasks of computer science is to supply techniques for structuring data and representing it in a form that supports algorithmic problem solving and added-value services. It is surprising to note that the field does very little to apply these techniques to its own research and educational materials. We still predominantly use tools like LaTeX for publishing our papers and PowerPoint for presenting the CS theory and practice to our students. In effect, we produce large volumes of data about CS knowledge without turning it into a structured resource. In this talk I will present techniques for content-based markup of CS documents and some of the added-value services supported by these. Content markup techniques are becoming increasingly popular on the XML-based world wide web, as they add enough structure to allow for automated document processing -- in contrast to presentation markup, which facilitates human document processing -- without inflicting the burden of full formalization of the knowledge contained in the document. I want to discuss relevant content markup formats like MathML, OpenMath, DocBook, and OMDoc, and extend the latter with the ability for markup of program code (CodeML) to arrive at a full-coverage markup format for CS content.

Dr. Michael Kohlhase is an associate professor at the CS department of Saarland University (Germany) and an adjunct associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He studied pure mathematics at the University of Bonn (1989), and wrote his dissertation on higher-order unification and automated theorem proving (1994, Saarland University). Since then, he has taken up research in applying techniques from automated deduction in natural language semantics. His current research interests include automated theorem proving and content-based markup techniques for mathematics and computer science, and natural language processing. He has pursued these interests during extended visits to Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International, and the Universities of Amsterdam and Edinburgh.


Clifford A. Lynch,

Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

The Future of Scholarly Communication

Date: Monday, October 21, 2002
Time: 12:00 pm (noon) to 1:15 pm
Location: Bush Room (10-105)
Beverages and dessert to will be served.

Cliff will discuss the future of scholarly communication, touching on the future of the book, digital archives and online course materials, and digital rights management in the academy.

Clifford A. Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity.

Prior to joining CNI, Clifford spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Clifford holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization.

Clifford currently serves on the Internet 2 Applications Council; he was a member of the National Research Council (NRC) committee that recently published The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure, and now serves on the NRC's committee on Broadband Last-Mile Technology.


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