Conference: Keynote Speakers

Roger B. Dannenberg
The Music Technology Revolution
Banquet Keynote, 7:45pm, Nov. 15
IIT Pritzker Club Dining Room, MTCC

Abstract
Today, more than ever, is a time of technological change. It does not seem an exaggeration to claim that we are in the midst of a musical revolution as evidenced by huge changes in music formats and distribution, new modes of music distribution, and the near collapse of live music. The revolution is not over. Most of the changes we have seen recently can be explained in terms of music storage (the CD, digital studio, and iPod) and transmission (radio, cell phones, Internet). It is remarkable that computers have been doubling in computational power every 18 months for 60 years, yet we have mainly used that power to move and store music more efficiently. While storage and transmission are obviously pivotal factors, I believe that ultimately computation will be seen as the major force of change. Computation gives us fundamentally new abilities that include searching, teaching, composing, performing, interacting, and playing with music. I expect these capabilities to emerge in the next decade, and I will show examples from today's research that hint at our musical future.

About the Speaker
Dr. Roger B. Dannenberg is an Associate Research Professor in the Schools of Computer Science and Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is also a fellow of the Studio for Creative Inquiry. His compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and many festivals. Dannenberg is well known for his computer music research, especially in real-time interactive systems. His pioneering work in computer accompaniment led to three patents and the SmartMusic system now used by over 100 thousand music students. He also played a central role in the development of the Piano Tutor, an intelligent, interactive, automated multimedia tutor that enables a student to obtain first-year piano proficiency in less than 20 hours. Dannenberg held a patent for large-scale interactive games controlled by crowd noise, and these "stadium games" have entertained many NFL fans. Other innovations include the application of machine learning to music style classification and the automation of music structure analysis. As a trumpet player, he has performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the Espace de Projection at IRCAM, and he is active in performing jazz, classical, and new works as trumpeter in the Roger Humphries Big Band, principle trumpet with the Edgewood Symphony, and member of the Capgun Quartet.

Vasant Honavar
Humanities as Information Sciences
Keynote Address, 2:00pm, Nov. 15
IIT Hermann Hall Ballroom

Abstract
Spurred by advances in sensors, digital media, computing and communications computers and software artifacts have become indispensable tools in virtually every aspect of human endeavor. The World-Wide Web and large-scale collaborative initiatives like Wikipedia have revolutionized the way we share, and sometimes even create knowledge. We have new forms of social interaction enabled by digital media, electronic mail, instant messaging, blogs, podcasts, and social networks. Information technologies enabled by advances in computer science have become ubiquitous, indispensable fixtures in our everyday lives, helping -- or hindering -- us as we manage information, create knowledge, and make decisions. Within the Humanities, digital content is changing the way we acquire, (re)present, analyze, synthesize, experience, communicate and share history, culture, languages, arts, and literature.

While the benefits of digital technologies in the humanities are rather transparent, the transformative impacts of computing in the humanities are perhaps not so obvious. Traditionally, the humanities have distinguished themselves from the natural and social sciences largely on the basis of their reliance on primarily analytic, critical or speculative methods as distinguished from the empirical methods that underpin the natural sciences. I will argue that this is a false distinction.

Acquiring, processing, and organizing, and integrating information about ourselves and the world around us is no less a central concern of the humanities than it is a concern of the sciences. Because anything that is effectively describable can be described by some computer program, computing provides a powerful formalism for (re)presenting, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, experiencing, communicating, and sharing history, culture, languages, arts, and literature. Consequently, Computer Science, the systematic study of information processing (regardless of whether such information is encoded in bits and bytes in a computer memory or information-bearing artifacts such as the works of literature, arts, culture), can play a transformative role in the humanities, by providing an orderly, formal framework and exploratory apparatus for the studies of the human condition. This should not come as a surprise because after all, the first investigations of computing were driven, more than anything else, by the human desire to understand what makes us human: our ability to acquire, organize, and share knowledge, reason from facts and observations to their logical conclusions, create, communicate, information-bearing artifacts. The central thesis of this talk is that humanities are first and foremost, information sciences. I will elaborate on this thesis, and its implications for humanities and computer science disciplines, in terms of both research and education.

About the Speaker
Dr. Vasant Honavar, professor of Computer Science at Iowa State University, is the founder and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning & Discovery.  His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioinformatics and computational biology, data mining, semantic web, and social informatics.  Prof. Honavar's recent work focuses on information integration and knowledge discovery from diverse data sources, learning from biological and textual data, and modular ontologies.

Stephen Wolfram
What Can Be Made Computable in the Humanities?
Keynote Address, 11:00am, Nov. 16
IIT Hermann Hall Ballroom

Abstract

This talk will explore the relationship of the three large projects of my life---Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram|Alpha---to the humanities. Mathematica (http://www.wolfram.com) provides a language and framework for representing formal models of any kind. Many applications of it have been made to the humanities (e.g. http://demonstrations.wolfram.com). In A New Kind of Science (http://www.wolframscience.com), I systematically explored the computational universe of possible programs---identifying many new phenomena and mechanisms of broad potential relevance to the humanities. In Wolfram|Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com), the goal is to make all possible systematic knowledge immediately computable. Some of this knowledge is formal and scientific, but much of it relates to traditional humanities topics. I have never talked broadly about the relation of my work to the humanities; this will be my first attempt to do so.

About the Speaker
Stephen Wolfram (http://www.stephenwolfram.com) is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. Born in London in 1959, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, and received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979. As an academic, he made various contributions to particle physics, cosmology and computer science, and played a founding role in the development of complexity theory. He launched Wolfram Research in 1986, released Mathematica 1.0 in 1988, A New Kind of Science in 2002 and Wolfram|Alpha in 2009. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and has received numerous awards for science, technology and business in the years since.