he annual CCIS Distinguished
Speaker Series is gearing up
for an outstanding year, with

“We’re very pleased to be able to bring
such a renowned group of speakers to
campus,” says Professor Ravi Sundaram,
who is organizing the series. “We hope
they will be an inspiration to the students.”

Dates and times will be posted as the
academic year progresses. Please visit
www.ccs.neu.edu for the latest information.

Edward W. Felten
Edward W. Felten is a professor of computer science and
public affairs at Princeton University. His research on computer
security and privacy and technology law and policy has been
covered extensively in the popular press. His weblog, at
www.freedom-to-tinker.com, is widely read. Felten was a lead
witness for the Department of Justice in the Microsoft antitrust
case. He has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee
on digital television technology and regulation, and before the
House Administration Committee on electronic voting. In 2004,
Scientific American magazine named him one of 50 science
and technology leaders worldwide.

Helen Greiner
Helen Greiner is cofounder and chairman of iRobot, the leading
producer of robots for the industrial, consumer and military
markets. She was named by Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government and US News and World Report as one of
America’s Best Leaders, and received the Pioneer Award from
the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
(AUVSI). Technology Review magazine named her an “Innovator
for the Next Century.” Her robotic technology experience includes
work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT’s Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory. She is a director of the National Defense
Industrial Association (NDIA).

an internationally recognized roster of
experts in fields ranging from voting
security to robotics.

David MacKay
David MacKay is a professor in the department of physics at
Cambridge University. His interests include machine learning,
reliable computation with unreliable hardware, design and
decoding of error correcting codes, and communication systems
for the disabled. His contributions include the development of
Bayesian methods for neural networks, the rediscovery (with
Radford M. Neal) of low-density parity-check codes, and the
invention of Dasher, a software application for communication.
His textbook, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms,
was published in 2003. He is currently writing a second book,
Sustainable Energy—without the hot air (www.withouthotair.com).

J. Strother Moore
J. Strother Moore holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair
in Computing Theory at the University of Texas at Austin and is
chair of the department. With Robert Boyer, he is coauthor of the
Boyer-Moore theorem prover and the Boyer-Moore fast string
searching algorithm. With Matt Kaufmann he is coauthor of the
ACL2 theorem prover. Moore was a cofounder and chief scientist
at Computational Logic. In 2005, he, Boyer, and Kaufmann won
the ACM Software System Award. Moore is a Fellow of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence and an ACM Fellow.

Elizabeth Mynatt
Elizabeth Mynatt is an associate professor in the College of Comput-
ing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the research
program in Everyday Computing—examining the human-computer
interface implications of having computation continuously present
in everyday life. Themes in her research include supporting
informal collaboration and awareness in office environments,
enabling creative work and visual communication, and augmenting
social processes for managing personal information. Mynatt is
a principal researcher in the Aware Home Research Initiative,
investigating the design of future home technologies, especially
those that enable older adults to continue living independently.

Michael Stonebraker
Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of database research
and technology for more than a quarter century. He was the main
architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational
DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa.
Stonebraker has been recognized by Computer Reseller News
as one of the top five software developers of the century. Forbes
magazine named him one of the eight innovators driving the
Silicon Valley wealth explosion in 1998. He was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and is presently an
adjunct professor of computer science at MIT.