The Department of Computer and Information Sciences formerly sponsored an annual lecture every fall.

Past speakers & abstracts

2004: Jonathan Coupal (NU College of Business Administration, 1993), VP, ITX Corporation
2003: Terry Penney, forensic accountant
2002: Dr. William R. Greco, Department of Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute
2001: Dr. Rohini Srihari, Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition, SUNY at Buffalo; and Founder & Chief Technical Officer, Cymfony, Inc.
2000: Dr. Gene Amdahl, computer pioneer and founder of Amdahl Corporation
1999: Dr. William L. Boeck, Professor of Physics and Computer and Information Sciences, Niagara University
1998: Byron R. Ball, President, Base Ten Consulting, Inc.
1997: Robert E. McDonnell, President, Business Telecommunications Systems, Inc.
1996: Benjamin Sayers, President, Interactive Voice Response, Inc.
1995: Regina Kienzle, Sales and Marketing Representative, Microsoft
1994: Richard Alberth, Software Engineer, School of Dental Medicine, SUNY - Buffalo
1993: Dr. Russ Miller, Computer Science and Engineering Department of SUNY - Buffalo, and Senior Research Scientist, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
1992: Dr. Gerald Goldhaber, Communications Department, SUNY at Buffalo, and President of Goldhaber Research Associates
1991: David N. Campbell, Computer Task Group, Inc.
1990: Patric D. Prince, Chair, ACM/SIGGRAPH
1989: Walter Doherty, Scientific Systems, IBM Watson Research Center
1988: Reed Sturtevant, Senior Program Development Manager, Lotus Development Corporation
1987: Paul R. Hessenger, VP of Research, Computer Task Group, Inc.
1986: William P. Jenney, President and CEO, Jenney Systems
1985: Seymour Zivan, VP of Information Systems, Xerox Corp.
1984: David A Crawford, Director of Information Systems, Harrison Radiator
1983: Patrick J. Kelly, Chief of Neurosurgery, Sister's Hospital of Buffalo
1982: David N. Campbell, Computer Task Group, Inc.
Disclaimer

2004: Although the least glamorous of the three responsibilities in the security triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability), the need to maintain a high level of availability for users of a production system is very important. Although there are a lot of products that portend to increase the availability for specific systems or services, this discussion addresses the problem from a processes and best practices approach. This will include a discussion of operational controls such as physical and logical security measures, auditing mechanisms, change management, capacity planning, and incident response procedures.

Presentation

Speaker's bio - Jonathan Coupal, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, ITX Corp.
Professional Accomplishments:

As Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of ITX Corp., a business and technology consulting firm based in Upstate New York, Jonathan Coupal manages the day-to-day and strategic operations of the Technology Infrastructure Practice Group. His 12 years of networking experience ranges from Servers to WANs and from security to design. At ITX, Mr. Coupal oversees a team of engineers and project managers. The services they offer range from hosting and operations support to research and implementation on Linux, Windows, Novell Netware, OS/400, AIX, and MacOS platforms.

Mr. Coupal has developed several ITX products and services, including a Linux-based server appliance (UPServer), Technology Preventive Maintenance, and Quickbooks Hosting Services. He also provides master-level escalation and troubleshooting services for ITX implementation teams. He has developed repeatable implementation processes and best practices and trains employees to become experts in both. This has enabled ITX to become a technology partner with such national organizations as NEC, AT&T and SSRN.

Mr. Coupal is now developing a Technology Research practice at ITX for customers who seek to evaluate and assess new technologies, or who wish to understand the best practices and methodologies involved in deploying new technologies into their enterprise.

Education and Certifications:

Mr. Coupal earned his Bachelor of Science in Commerce and Marketing from Niagara University, with minors in French and Psychology. He is a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE, Windows 2000) and a participant in the Harvard Executive Development Program. He holds his CompTIA Security+, i-Net+ and Linux+ certifications, and holds ISC2 CISSP credentials. Mr. Coupal received formal training in AS/400 System Administration and Control, MS Windows NT Server Installation & Support and Lotus Notes Application Development and participated in the development of the Linux+ as an SME.

2003: Computer and digital aspects of investigative techniques of forensic accounting, including Digital Analysis (Benford's Law and a series of related analyses), computer fraud and related risk exposures, such as intellectual property and virus impact on servers, with "real world" examples.

2002: Dr. William R. Greco, Department of Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute

If the movie, The Graduate, were made today, Dustin Hoffman would not be told to pursue a career in Plastics, but rather, in Bioinformatics.

The current ongoing revolution in modern biology and biotechnology has spawned a parallel discipline which seems to coming along for the ride: Bioinformatics. [It appears, however, that Bioinformatics may soon occupy the driver’s seat!!] Bioinformatics is the application of Mathematical, Statistical and Computer Science theory, approaches, algorithms and ways of thinking to the organization, recording, retrieval, display and analysis of the enormous, exponentially-growing, complex, and extremely-valuable international set of data generated by Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. Currently, this global data set is comprised mainly of sequences of the nucleotides and amino acids in the respective biological polymers, nucleic acids and proteins. This treasure trove is made even more valuable by an ever-growing set of complimentary international databases of molecular structure, function, and interaction. The World Wide Web (WWW) connects the databases, and disperses Bioinformatics tools to the world.

The word Bioinformatics carries a cachet unlike any other word coined in recent memory. The word implies genius of mind and billions of dollars. This lecture will focus on explaining what Bioinformatics is today, and what it may become in the future. Just as electricity generated from Niagara Falls gave the Niagara Frontier a spark of industrial innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, will Bioinformatics start a renaissance of the Niagara Frontier at the beginning of the 21st century?

2001: Dr. Rohini Srihari, Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition, SUNY at Buffalo; and Founder & Chief Technical Officer, Cymfony, Inc.
Information Discovery: Beyond Search Engines

With the proliferation of information available in electronic form, it has become necessary to formulate improved methods for searching and browsing for information. This is a necessary step in the continuum whereby data is transformed first to useable information and eventually to intelligence. Search engines are valuable when one knows what they are looking for and can express the request for information as a set of keywords. For advanced intelligence applications however, it is the unknown that is sometimes of critical importance. This pertains to both business intelligence as well as defense-related intelligence applications. We define information discovery as the ability to discover interesting associations, relationships and significant events in free text. For example, the fact that a particular individual is strongly associated with a certain organization may be of great interest to the intelligence community.

Cymfony was founded in 1996 by Dr. Srihari to introduce a revolutionary technology for information discovery and analysis of unstructured information. For the past several years, the company has been sponsored by the USAF to develop core information extraction technology based on a combination of machine-learning and rule-based techniques for natural language processing. This has resulted in the InfoXtract engine, a scaleable, portable, robust engine for automatic information extraction from various types of running text documents, including web pages.

This talk will motivate the need for a comprehensive information discovery platform, and discuss some of the core technology that Cymfony has developed, in particular, the InfoXtract engine. Two applications will be demonstrated: the first represents a broad-based information discovery platform for business intelligence. This system scours large amounts of business data from various types of sources, internal or external, and extracts, summarizes and visually presents the most useable information for quick decision-making. The second application represents a niche business focus, namely brand marketing. Applications relating to the intelligence community will also be discussed; recent events have sparked significant interest in this technology.

During the talk, Dr. Srihari will offer some perspectives on transforming an R&D focused organization into a commercial software development company. Experiences relating to running a high-tech company in the WNY region will also be presented.

2000: Dr. Gene Amdahl, computer pioneer and founder of Amdahl Corporation:

Future of Semiconductor Technology
How far can we go with CMOS?
What might follow?

1999: Dr. William L. Boeck, Professor of Physics and Computer and Information Sciences, Niagara University:

Watching Lightning from Space

The presentation includes video, computer animation, and live Web demonstrations. The program is:

Historic video of the discovery and early efforts to confirm and advance knowledge about the glowing objects now called sprites, jets, and ELVES.
An overview of the Lightning Imaging Sensor systems, including space hardware and ground software systems. Replay of scientific visualization software to examine some of the results of this mission.
Live demonstrations of Web access to satellite engineering data, a lightning search engine, and lightning and sprites Web sites.

1998: Byron R. Ball, President, Base Ten Consulting, Inc.:

Y2K - The Year 2000 Crisis

The following topics will be discussed:
Is There Really a Crisis?
World Wide Effect
Problem - A Triple Threat
Business Knowledge and Experience
Why is This Happening?
What About My PCs?
What Does This Really Mean?
Programs that Use Dates for Calculations are at Risk
Is My Organization Really at Risk?
How Can I Find if I'm in the 30% Risk Factor?
How Long Can I Push This Off?
OK, so I'm at Risk. What Can I Do?
Bottom Line: What Will it Take If I Do Have a Problem?
What Should I Do Midnight 12/31/1999?

1997: Robert E. McDonnell, President, Business Telecommunications Systems, Inc.:

Business Telecommunications Systems, Inc., was founded in 1986 with the deregulation of the telephone industry. During the initial years, a new niche was found in the corrections market, whereby BTS became one of only five companies to develop telephone programs to allow collect call telephone systems for inmate call processing. As the technology became more sophisticated, these systems evolved into automated call processing rather than live operator systems. This automation resulted in operating and cost efficiencies and provided added value to BTS customers. Numerous reports were added to assist correctional administrators in controlling and managing the inmate telephone activity originating from their facilities.

In 1993, BTS developed and started distributing a customized Video Imaging database system, to enhance and reduce the cost of booking criminals. This led to educational and hospital packages that can be used for indentification and other customized institutional needs.

Other BTS product lines include:

Collect Call Automated Operator Systems
Video Imaging System -- a system that can generate badging in full color, encode magnetic stripes, etc., with numerous options
DWI Tracking Program -- provides a database of information that can be shared with neighboring jurisdictions
Commissary Package -- may be interfaced to the phone system at a correctional facility

1996: Benjamin Sayers, President, Interactive Voice Response, Inc.:
Computer Telephony
Intelligent Call Control
Call Centers
Voice & Fax Messaging
Unified Messaging
Voice Mail
Fax Systems
Telephone Database Interaction
IVR

1995: Regina Kienzle, Sales and Marketing Representative, Microsoft: Discover the Power of Microsoft Windows 95. Unlock the potential of your computer with Windows 95 and find out how you can work even easier and faster. From the redesigned graphical interface to the true multi-tasking, 32-bit technology, Windows 95 will open up a whole new world of possibilities.

1994: Richard Alberth, Software Engineer, School of Dental Medicine, SUNY at Buffalo: DentLE, the Dental Learning Environment, is a hypermedia software system. DentLE is a package that integrates concepts from the disciplines of dentistry so that learning occurs in relation to patients, as they appear in the real world: case-based learning. DentLE also provides the student with learning tools to facilitate their organization of information for understanding and for decision making.

1993: Dr. Russ Miller, Department of Computer Science (since 1998, Computer Science and Engineering), SUNY at Buffalo, and Senior Research Scientist, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute

Crystal structure analysis provides information for a variety of scientists, including chemists and biochemists. This information includes the number of atoms, as well as distances and angles between atoms, in a given structure. We have recently developed the Shake-and-Bake method of molecular structure determination, which attempts to minimize a complex function by alternating between two related spaces, while performing parameter optimization in each space. SnB is the commercially available package that we have developed, based on Shake-and-Bake, used successfully to solve over two dozen structures in a variety of space groups. Highlights include solving two previously complex and important unknown 100-atom structures, which had escaped solution for over a decade, in about an hour, and re-solving crambin, a 400-atom structure, in a matter of several hours. This is now the largest structure solved by direct methods. The original solution relied on special properties of the crambin molecule and the measurement of additional x-ray data. Further, previous attempts to solve the structure by direct methods in other laboratories had failed.

The program was developed on a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5, is currently available for both the CM-5 and Unix workstations, and is written in a combination of C and FORTRAN. This project represents a major collaboration of researchers at the Medical Foundation of Buffalo [now the Hauptmann-Woodward Medical Research Institute], the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Thinking Machines Corporation.

1992: Dr. Gerald Goldhaber, Communications Department, SUNY at Buffalo, and President of Goldhaber Research Associates

The Role of Modern Day Computers - A Political Pollster's Perspective

1991: David N. Campbell, Chairman and CEO, Computer Task Group, Inc.

Shaping Events -- The Role of Information in the World

1990: Patric D. Prince, Chair, Traveling Art Show, ACM/SIGGRAPH

The History of Computers and Art

1989: Walter Doherty, Manager, Scientific Systems Lab, IBM Watson Research Center

Computing Directions for the 90s

1988: Reed Sturtevant, Senior Product Development Manager, Graphic Products Group, Lotus Development Corp.

Trends in Computer Graphics

1987: Paul Hessinger, VP of Research, Computer Task Group

Software Technology Futures

1986: William P. Jenney, President & CEO, Jenney Systems

CIMware: Software for Computer Integrated Manufacturing

1985: Seymour Zivan, VP, Information Systems Group, Xerox Corp.

Systems as a Driver of Productivity

1984: David A. Crawford, Director of Information Systems, Harrison Radiator

Perspectives on Information Systems Management - The GM/EDS Story

1983: Patrick J. Kelly, MD, PC, Chief of Neurosurgery, Sister's Hospital of Buffalo

Computer Assisted Stereotactic Laser Microsurgery for the Treatment of Intracranial Neoplasms

1982: David N. Campbell, Chairman and CEO, Computer Task Group, Inc.

Careers in the Computer Field & Critical Factors for Success

Disclaimer: The affiliations of the speakers are those at the time of their lectures. The appropriateness of their assertions may change with the passage of time.