FCRC '11 - Federated Computing Research Conference Plenary Speakers
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Valiant
Leslie G. Valiant is the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at
Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Before joining Harvard in 1982,
he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh. He is a
graduate of Kings College, University of Cambridge, with a BA in Mathematics, and Imperial College
London, where he received a Diploma of the Imperial College (DIC) in Computer Science. He earned a Ph.D.
in Computer Science from the University of Warwick.
Read more about Leslie Valiant and the Turing Award on ACM's site.
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Ferrucci
David Ferrucci is the lead researcher and Principal Investigator for IBM's Watson/Jeopardy!
project. He has been a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center since
1995 where he heads the Semantic Analysis and Integration department. In 2007 Dr. Ferrucci
took on the Jeopardy! Challenge - tasked to create a computer system that can rival human
champions at the game of Jeopardy! In 2011, Watson prevailed over human Jeopardy! Champions
Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a nationally televised 3-evening match.
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Kannan
Ravi Kannan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India and an Adjunct Professor at the
Indian Institute of Science. Kannan studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and at
Cornell University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, he was on the faculties at MIT,
Carnegie Mellon, and Yale before joining Microsoft. Kannan received the Fulkerson Prize for
Discrete Mathematics in 1991.
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 Barroso
Luiz André Barroso is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. His interests range from distributed
system software infrastructure to the design of Google's computing platform. Prior to Google, Luiz
was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq, where his group
did some of the pioneering work on multi-core architectures.
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von Ahn
Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is working to develop a new area of
computer science that he calls Human Computation. He builds systems that combine the intelligence
of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. An example of
his work is reCAPTCHA, in which over 750 million people - more than 10% of humanity - have
helped digitize books and newspapers. Among his many honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a
Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, and
CMU's Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence and Alan J. Perlis Teaching Award.
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Mataric
Maja Mataric is Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics, Director of the Center for
Robotics and Embedded Systems, and Senior Associate Dean for Research in the Viterbi School of
Engineering at the University of Southern California. Her research is aimed at endowing robots with the
ability to help people, especially those with special needs, through social interaction rather than
through physical contact; she works with stroke patients, children with autism, individuals suffering
from dementia/Alzheimer's Disease, and healthy users across the age-span. She is a recipient of the
Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the NSF Career
Award, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award; she is a fellow of the AAAS and
IEEE.
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