Dr. Anoop Gupta – Microsoft

Don Johnson - DoD Advance Distributed Learning Initiative

Dr. Geoffrey Fox - Syracuse University

Anoop Gupta Microsoft Research

Abstract of Building a Platform for Online Education and Collaboration

Information technology has made huge strides in recent years enabling fundamental changes in the way we teach and learn. Our educational institutions, however, have not exploited technology for teaching/learning---most teaching still occurs face-to-face in classrooms using the blackboard. While our higher-education system has not changed, the demands placed on it are definitely changing. With life-long learning becoming necessary and pervasive, we expect a significant increase in demand for higher education. Furthermore, the learners will demand anytime/anywhere access to the content, they will want the content personalized to meet their specific needs, and the content delivery to match the learning style that works best for them. Finally, such education must be delivered at a much lower cost than what we find today.

Achieving these goals of scalability, access flexibility and cost-effectiveness while maintaining educational excellence will not be simple. It will require us to re-think how we educate (e.g., making tradeoffs between learner-centric versus teacher-centric paradigms), and to use technology aggressively though judiciously to create leverage. The talk will cover issues in use of technology for education and collaboration, including a description of some projects just started at Microsoft Research.

Donald Johnson Office of the Secretary of Defense

The DoD’s vision is to be able to ensure that its people have "access to the highest quality education and training, tailored to needs, wherever and whenever it is required." Efforts to achieve these goals resulted in the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative. In developing ADL, it quickly became apparent that the guidelines and standards, implementing technologies, and learning objectives that serve DoD’s needs are almost identical to those of other public government agencies and the private sector. Recognizing this commonality, the President’s memorandum cited the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative as a model for both the Federal and National efforts. ADL brings together the public and private sectors to expedite implementation of learning technologies to enhance performance and to develop a common technical framework based on several key elements, including:

• Widespread collaboration;
• Network technologies;
• Next-generation learning technologies; and
• Reusable content and development tools that are platform-independent.

Geoffrey Fox Syracuse University

Abstract of Experiments in Distance Learning and Collaboration in the PET Program

Distributed computing centers, distributed users and the distributed PET team make the HPCMO program a natural place to deploy and evaluate advanced collaborative tools. We describe some initial experiments with the WebWisdom system developed at Syracuse and used for distance education between Syracuse and Jackson State University. WebWisdom is built around the TangoInteractive collaborative environment and we contrast Tango’s use in education or training with that in collaborative computing and visualization. We also contrast the tradeoffs between synchronous (interactive) delivery as in Tango and asynchronous collaboration or learning as supported by systems such as Lotus Notes, the Cornell Virtual Workshop and the database backend to WebWisdom. We analyze the lessons from current experiments and the future profound implications for the future virtual University supporting lifelong learning.

In the recent past, Dr. Gupta has worked in the areas of computer architecture, operating systems, programming languages, simulation and performance debugging tools, and parallel applications. Along with John Hennessy, he co-led the design and construction of the Stanford DASH multiprocessor exploring scalable shared-memory architectures. The technology developed in the DASH project is now becoming widely available in commercial products, such as the "Origin" series machines from Silicon Graphics Inc. Subsequently, he worked on the Stanford FLASH Project, a sequel to DASH, exploring the architecture of communication controllers for multiprocessors. At Stanford, he also led the Virtual Classroom project, exploring video compression and networking issues in transmission of video over the Internet. The seeds of the technology developed in that project led to the formation of VXtreme Inc, a company that was recently acquired by Microsoft Corporation.

Dr. Gupta has published close to 100 papers in major conferences and journals, including several award papers. His book "Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware-Software Approach" co-authored with Prof. David E. Culler from UC Berkeley and Prof. Jaswinder Pal Singh from Princeton will be published by Morgan Kaufmann later this year. He was the recipient of a DEC faculty development award from 1987-1989, he received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, and he held the Robert Noyce faculty scholar chair at Stanford for 1993 and 1994. Prior to joining Stanford, he was on the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.