Emerging Technologies And The Changing Payment System Trust Model
Richard Hite, VISA
10/09/2003
The value of the Visa brand is its acceptance as a de facto global currency; i.e., the best way to pay and to be paid. A major factor in the acceptance of Visa branded cards is the merchants "trust" that if the CVM is correctly performed, i.e., the merchants perform their responsibilities as required by the Visa International Operating Rules (VIOR), the merchant will be reimbursed by the Acquirer for those transactions. The Acquirer, on the other hand, trusts that the Merchant has performed the necessary steps to validate the authenticity of the cardholder. When the merchant fails in this responsibility, the bond of trust between the merchant and the Issuer is broken along with trust relationships that make up the remainder of the transactional trust chain. New technologies based on integrated circuit cards and cryptography are being used to secure these trust relationships.
Telecom Valley-Past, Present, And Future
George Hawley, CTO of Valo Petaluma (Co-founder and ex-CTO of Diamond Lane, bought by Nokia)
10/16/2003
This presentation reviews the beginnings of the formation of telecommunicationsequipment companies in the North Bay, the current scene, and where I think thing sare headed, including a review of the latest FCC findings and declarations ininterpretation of the Telecom Act of 1996.
Architecting Oracle Technology For High Availability
Jaywant Singh Rao, Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores
10/23/2003
Oracle and its partners provide all the ingredients and components to build a highly available architecture. However, choosing and implementing the architecture that best fits your availability requirements can be a daunting task. This architecture must encompass redundancy across all components, achieve fast client failover for all types of outages, and provide protection from user errors, corruption, and site disasters, while being easy to deploy, manage, and scale. This presentation describes a technical architecture that removes the complexity of designing a highly available (HA) architecture for your business. This is a straightforward, redundant, and robust architecture that prevents, detects, and recovers from different outages within a small mean time to recovery (MTTR), as well as preventing or minimizing downtime for maintenance.
Tools For Emergent Design
Jason Shankel, Maxis Corp., Walnut Creek
10/30/2003
Most modern computer games are highly linear experiences. Players attempt toachieve goals in detail-rich, authored worlds. Other games, such as SimCity and Railroad Tycoon, allow players to discover the rich complexity that can emerge from simple rules. This second category of game is more difficult to design, as the tools of emergence are not as well understood as the tools of linear storytelling. In this talk, I will describe some of the efforts we have made to formalize the design of emergent games.
Games And Networks
Christos Papadimitriou, University of California, Berkeley
11/06/2003
The Internet is the first computational artifact that was not designed by a single entity, but emerged from the complex interaction of many. Hence, it must be approached as a mysterious object, akin to the universe and the cell, to be understood by observation and falsifiable theories. Game theory plays an important role in this endeavor, since the entities involved in the Internet are optimizing interacting agents in various and varying degrees of collaboration and competition. We survey recent work considering the Internet and its protocols as equilibria in appropriate games, and striving to explain phenomena such as the power law distributions of the degrees of the Internet topology in terms of the complex optimization problems faced by eachnode.