The History, Controversy, And Evolution Of The Goto Statement
Andru Luvisi, Sonoma State University
02/07/2008
This talk will touch on how standard usage patterns for the Goto statement became embodied in higher level control structures, ways in which higher level control structures can often express the intent of the programmer more clearly than lower level control structures, ways in which programming in a restricted set of control structures can sometimes make programs easier to reason about and prove correct, some of the controversy surrounding the Goto statement, common reasons for and ways of using Goto, and common ways of implementing arbitrary control structures in languages that do not contain the Goto statement.
Shadow In The Corner
Donald Ensley, Signet Testing Labs
02/14/2008
An overview of a FORTRAN program implementation of the Phong reflection model is given as a PowerPoint slide presentation with narrative including program origins, Phong model vectors used, grids, normal’s, and output graphical samples.
Disaster Recovery -- A Holistic Approach
Ron LaPedis, Citrix
02/18/2008
Many IT technologists think that Disaster Recovery is all about recovering the computer systems and applications after disaster strikes. But not only is this not correct, they aren't even using the right words. The real objective is Business Continuity -keeping the business running -and without recovering your workforce, that's impossible. This talk will present the proper focus of a business continuity plan as well as a new product from Citrix that facilitates workforce recovery when disaster strikes.
To Boldly Go Where No Database Has Gone Before: Data Integration Through Data Federation
Mary Roth, IBM
02/21/2008
The relational database is an example of a research project gone right. Database researchers solved some challenging research problems (transaction management, backup/recovery, and query optimization), leading to an $8 billion industry in less than thirty years, and making Larry Ellison one of the richest men in the world. In fact, database management systems (DBMS) are so successful that nearly every enterprise has more than one DBMS instance, and more than one DBMS vendor. This leads to a new research challenge: how to extend the benefits of a DBMS to data stored outside the DBMS. In this talk, I will describe two different approaches to data integration, the benefits and drawbacks of each, and which approach appears to be gaining the most traction in the industry.
Declarative Information Extraction
Yunyao Li, IBM
03/06/2008
Information extraction --the task of deriving structured information from unstructured text --has become increasingly important in a wide range of software applications. This talk will discuss the shortcomings of traditional information extraction techniques and how we overcame those issues in our recent work on declarative information extraction. A live system demonstration will be included.