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Meet the Faculty: Lance Fortnow4:00 p.m.
February 29, 2008
Tech L324
Meet the Faculty: Lance Fortnow
"Computational Awareness" | ABSTRACT: What are we aware of? More than a philosophical pursuit, awareness plays a crucial role in decision making as one cannot make a choice that one is not aware of. Billions of advertising dollars are spent in increasing the awareness of their brands.
We will give some observations on how newer technologies, like search engines, have affected our awareness of various information, and how we can become unaware of objects we were once aware of. We discuss a couple of applications:
• Why do loopholes occur in laws and contracts? We give an explanation based on the lack of awareness of the legislators of future circumstances and of the judge's unawareness of what the legislature's awareness.
• We give a new view of sponsored search auctions based on awareness and show new bidding strategies when the advertisers wish to increase awareness of their products.
• This talk will cover mostly very preliminary research parts of which represent work with Kim-Sau Chung and Nikhil Devanur.
BIO: Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Michael Sipser. After two stints at the University of Chicago (spending four years at the NEC Research Institute in-between), Fortnow started as a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University in January of 2008. Fortnow also has a courtesy appointment at the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and an adjunct professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute–Chicago.
Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications. His major results on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satsifability have led to his election as a 2007 ACM Fellow. In addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97 where he spent a productive sabbatical year at CWI and the University of Amsterdam.
Lance Fortnow's website |
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