Hal Abelson: The Responsibility of Universities in the Age of Information April 29, 2011

POSTPONED: to be announced

“Today, both the commons and the university communities that rely upon it are confronting stresses from both within and outside the university: squabbles over who owns academic work, technologies like Digital Restrictions Management that impede the dissemination of knowledge, and the impact of increasingly stringent and overreaching intellectual property laws.

“In this talk, I'll describe some things we've done at MIT to bolster the commons, like open publication of all our course materials, and our faculty policy on open publication of academic research. I'll discuss Creative Commons licensing and Free Software and the importance of tinkerability for empowering citizens in an information society. And I'll describe Google App Inventor for Android, a new programming tool that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, adults and kids—to create mobile applications for the Android phone. App Inventor is motivated by the vision that all of us can experience world of mobile computing as creators using tools that we can control and reshape, rather than only as consumers of packaged applications.”

“Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a winner of the 1995 Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science.

“He serves co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology, which oversees MIT's strategic educational technology activities and investments. In this capacity, he played key roles in fostering MIT institutional educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare and DSpace. Abelson is a leader in the worldwide movement towards openness and democratization of culture and intellectual resources. He is a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Free Software Foundation, and a director of the Center for Democracy and Technology—organizations that are devoted to strengthening the global intellectual commons.

“Together with MIT colleague Gerald Sussman, Abelson developed the computer science subject, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is organized around the notion that a computer language is primarily a formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology, rather than just a way to get a computer to perform operations. This work, through a popular computer science textbook and videos lectures, has had a world-wide impact on university computer-science education.

“Abelson collaborates in directing the Decentralized Information Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he is investigating privacy on the World Wide Web and developing a new approach to privacy based upon information transparency and accountability rather than access control. More generally, Abelson has a broad interest in information technology and policy, and he developed and teaches The MIT course Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier. He co-authored the 2008 book Blown to Bits, which describes the cultural and political disruptions caused by the information explosion.”

Thomas Golisano Hall
Room 70-1400
20 Lomb Memorial Dr
Rochester NY 14623

Official Website: http://www.gccis.rit.edu/node/973