2008 Keynotes Addresses

Ms. Carol B. Muller, Ph.D. Founder and CEO MentorNet

Carol B. Muller, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of MentorNet (www.MentorNet.net), the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science, a nonprofit organization, and consulting associate professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University.

An educator and social entrepreneur, she has spent 30 years working in higher education, including work in academic administration, strategic planning and budget development, external relations, faculty recruitment, admissions, educational program development, implementation, and evaluation, and facilities program planning and development. A longstanding interest in gender equity in education and employment, coupled with professional work in engineering and science education beginning in 1987, prompted her to develop a number of new initiatives to tap the full range of human resources in scientific and technical pursuits. Both the Women in Science Project at Dartmouth, developed when she served as associate dean for Thayer School of Engineering, and MentorNet have been awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Dr. Muller has authored numerous papers, is frequently an invited speaker, has received grants for her work from private foundations, corporations, and the federal government, a variety of awards, and serves on a number of boards.

A.B. 1977 (philosophy/English), Dartmouth College; A.M. 1981, Ph.D. 1985 (Administration & Policy Analysis), Stanford University.

 

Dr. Ronald J. Brachman Vice President of Worldwide Research Operations Yahoo! Research

Ron Brachman is Vice President of Worldwide Research Operations at Yahoo! Research, the advanced research arm of the worldwide leader in Internet services. Among his duties, Dr. Brachman heads the Yahoo! Research lab in New York City. He is also the head of Yahoo!’s Academic Relations organization. Between 2002 and 2005, Brachman served as the Director of DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office, and there developed DARPA’s Cognitive Systems initiative, which brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the national research community. For this effort he was awarded The Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.

Dr. Brachman earned his B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He has made numerous important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, including developing the cornerstone ideas behind the subfield of Description Logics, which has had substantial influence in the development of the Semantic Web. He has been awarded best paper and “Classic Paper” awards, and has published an important textbook with Hector Levesque, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Brachman started his career at Bolt Beranek & Newman in Cambridge, MA; spent several years at the Fairchild/Schlumberger Lab for AI Research in Palo Alto, CA; and, having developed a world-class AI group at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, moved into senior research management jobs at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. Brachman was President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 2003-2005. He is a Founding Fellow of AAAI and is a Fellow of the ACM. At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in January of 2007 he was awarded the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award. In January of 2008 he was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE.