Provost’s Lecture Series 2012/13
Information Futures: the future of informational and computational challenges and opportunities that exist in using “big data”
Monday, October 1, 2012
4:00-5:30 p.m.
0014 Westbrook Building, Divinity School
The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone
Daphne Koller
Rajeev Motwani Professorof Computer Science, Stanford University; Co-Founder and co-CEO, Coursera
Coursera is a newly founded social entrepreneurship company whose mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone by allowing the best universities to offer courses to people around the world, for free. Professor Koller will discuss this far-reaching experiment in education, and why they believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for on-campus students, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
5:00-6:30 p.m.
0016 Westbrook Building, Divinity School
Technologies for a Mobile Society
Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, Research Professor at Stanford University and Google Fellow
Sebastian Thrun is CEO of Udacity, an educational company, but also a part-time research professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow. Thrun’s work focuses on advancing society in areas as diverse as transportation, mobile computing, and online education. He has published over 350 papers, and was elected into the National Academy of Engineering at age 39. His work has been featured in various articles, and he has won numerous awards.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
4:00-5:30 p.m.
217 Perkins Library
Duolingo: Learn a Language for Free while Helping to Translate the Web
Luis von Ahn, Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Professor von Ahn wants to translate the Web into every major language: every webpage, every video, and, yes, even Justin Bieber’s tweets. With its content split up into hundreds of languages, most of the Web is inaccessible to most people in the world. This problem is pressing with millions of people from quickly developing regions entering the Web. In this talk, Professor von Ahn will introduce his new project, called Duolingo, which aims at breaking this language barrier, and thus making the Web truly “world wide.”
Additional events of interest
Franklin Humanities Institute, HASTAC, PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge and Program in the Study of Sexualities at Duke Sponsors a Presentation and Workshop by Modernism and Queer Theory Scholar Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Oscar Wilde’s Afterimages: Oscar Wilde and the Commodification of Queer Culture
October 4, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
Bay 6, Room 177 of Smith Warehouse, 114 S. Buchanan Blvd.
PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge Workshop (open to the public): How to create a humanities MOOC
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, with Cathy Davidson, and David Bell, will lead this conversation. Open to students of the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge and to the general public.
October 4, 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Bay 6, Room 177 of Smith Warehouse, 114 S. Buchanan Blvd.
https://hastac.org/events/oscar-wildes-afterimages-oscar-wilde-and-commodification-queer-culture
Provost’s Lecture Series 2012/13
Information Futures – the future of informational and computational challenges and opportunities that exist in using “big data”
The Provost announces the seventh series of related lectures on a topic of major campus and broader societal importance. The purpose of the series is to provide greater depth and a diversity of views on a topic of major public importance and lively debate which should appeal to our students and faculty both in their University roles and as citizens. The lectures are free of charge and open to the public.
Today, the ability to collect, store, analyze, and summarize large amounts of data is imperative for Duke to continue to advance as a world class university and for our faculty and students to navigate this new world. Leaders in academe and industry are being invited to present their views and experiences on meeting the data deluge challenge. Presentations will cover some of the following issues:
Scholarship: How might the availability of large data sets afford new opportunities to promote additional conversations within and between intellectual disciplines?
Instruction: Are there new opportunities for using the available data in classroom instruction and team and individual research?
Entrepreneurship: Does the rapid rise of social media companies offer opportunities to integrate entrepreneurship into the educational experience? What opportunities for industry partnership are emerging?
Infrastructure: What challenges exist in information systems, including Networking, Storage, and Visualization?
The Provost wishes to thank the following Lecture Series Advisors for their work in helping to design this year’s series: Ian Baucom (Franklin Humanities Institute), Robert Calderbank (Dean of the Natural Sciences), Vincent Conitzer (Computer Science), Stephen Craig (Chemistry), Cathy Davidson (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory/HASTAC), Andrew Janiak (Philosophy), Thomas Katsouleas (Dean, Pratt School of Engineering), Carlo Tomasi (Computer Science), and Keith Whitfield (Vice Provost for Academic Affairs).