Please join us for a Web Science Invited Lecture by Ron Brachman, VP of Worldwide Research Operations at Yahoo! The title of his talk is "Emerging Sciences of the Internet." It will be on Wednesday, January 30th, 2p-3p at Klaus 1116, and a reception will follow.

The slides from Ron's talk are now available (PDF, 9 MB).

Talk Abstract: Depending on the industry and user perspective, there are widely varying views of what the Internet is and where it is heading. From the viewpoint of Yahoo! Research, important trends include the evolution of Web search, dramatic growth in social interaction, the creation and consumption of rich forms of media, and burgeoning opportunities for advertising and "monetization." While these areas will certainly benefit from conventional computing research, we believe it is important to think in new ways, even about older subjects like search and economics. Given the nature and scale of the opportunities, it seems likely that there will emerge a set of new sciences that are fundamental to future generations of Internet businesses. I will give an overview of the emerging scientific areas that have compelled significant investment by our research organization. These new areas contrast with those of traditional computer science, and we are eager to collaborate with the academic community on new approaches to computer science thinking and education.

Speaker's Biography: Ron Brachman is Vice President of Worldwide Research Operations and head of Academic Relations at Yahoo!. Previously he served as the Director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office, and held senior research management jobs at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. Brachman was President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 2003-2005. He is a Founding Fellow of AAAI, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the IEEE. At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in January of 2007 he was awarded the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award. He is also the author of an important AI textbook (with H. Levesque), Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.