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Opening Plenary (Monday, 9:00-10:30)

Collective IQ and a Framework for Bootstrapping our Society - ACM Turing Award Lecture

Douglas Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, USA

Doug Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute founder and Director, has an unparalleled 30-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. From his early vision of turning organizations into augmented knowledge workshops, he went on to pioneer what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking, and organizational transformation.

Well-known technological firsts include the mouse, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. Integrated prototypes were in full operation under the NLS system, as early as 1968. In the last decade of its continued evolution, thousands of users have benefited from its unique team support capabilities.

After 20 years directing his own lab at SRI, and 11 years as senior scientist, first at Tymshare, and then at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, where he is working closely with industry and government stakeholders to launch a collaborative implementation of his work.

Engelbart has received numerous awards for outstanding lifetime achievement and ingenuity, including ACM's 1997 A.M. Turing Award. His life's work, with his "big-picture" vision and persistent pioneering breakthroughs, has made a significant impact on the past, present, and future of personal, interpersonal, and organizational computing.

Closing Plenary (Wednesday, 4:00-5:30)

The Design Studio of the Future

William J. Mitchell, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT, USA

Architectural design presents a particular challenge to the technologies of computer supported cooperative work. Architectural projects typically involve geographically distributed participants from a multitude of specialized disciplines, and require complex, graphically mediated discussions and negotiations. Since schedule and budget requirements are typically very rigorous, and since talented designers find themselves in great demand, the benefits from effective use of computer supported cooperative work technologies are potentially very great.

This talk will discuss a series of practical experiments in geographically distributed, computer-supported design that have been conducted at MIT over the last few years. MIT students and faculty have worked with collaborators in Japan, Hong Kong, Portugal, Canada, California, and elsewhere. They have linked to the offices of prominent architects who have served as design critics, to client organizations, to technical consultants, and to collaborators in other schools of architecture. They have worked with a wide variety of enabling technologies, ranging from straightforward videoconferencing to realtime automated language translation.

A critical analysis of the successes and failures of these efforts will be presented, lessons will be drawn, and some key challenges for the future of such enterprises will be outlined.

About the speaker. William J. Mitchell is Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, at MIT. Previously he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and before that Head of the Architecture / Urban Design Program at UCLA and Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at numerous universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

His most recent book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT Press, 1995) focuses on the architectural, urban, and social consequences of the unfolding digital revolution. Among his earlier publications are The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press, 1992), The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (MIT Press, 1990), Computer-Aided Architectural Design (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), and with Charles W. Moore and William Turnbull, Jr. The Poetics of Gardens (MIT Press, 1988). Mitchell is currently working on a new book tentatively titled E-topia.

William Mitchell, born in 1944, grew up in Australia and has resided in the UK and the USA. He holds a B.Arch. (honors) from the University of Melbourne, a MED from Yale University, and a MA from the University of Cambridge. He has been awarded an honorary AM from Harvard University, Doctor of Humane Letters from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Doctor of Architecture from the University of Melbourne.