Selected Events

The 21st century organization is enormously complex, difficult to understand, and even more difficult to manage. A volatile mix of dynamics are triggering changes in the workplace. As the complexity increases, effective managers must have a strong knowledge of the people in the organization and the tasks they perform. And they must have the skills to use that knowledge in practical and flexible ways. This program will present innovative perspectives on managerial problems and offers practical ways to solve them. The issues examined apply across organizations, national boundaries, and technical domains.

Examined in a carefully sequenced schedule of daytime (and sometimes evening) lectures and workshops, program topics will include:

* Forces that are transforming traditional management goals and practices
* New perspectives on managerial decision making—what managers can learn from recent studies on information processing, cognitive biases, and individual problem-solving skills
* Improving the quality of decisions made under conditions of ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk
* Techniques designed to insure the success of temporary, problem-focused groups such as task forces and project teams
* Innovative incentives that organizations can offer to attract, retain, and manage employees who do not respond to familiar workplace rewards or aspire to traditional careers
* Critical success factors for implementing technological change in environments where failure rates are commonplace and few technologies seem to be implemented smoothly
* Diagnosing organizational cultures, the role and process of cultural change, and what managers can do to understand and shape that culture

Participants in this program will learn to understand and harness such critical factors as:

* Strategic organizational design
* Informal networks
* Leadership styles
* Negotiation skills

This program is designed for general managers and senior functional managers who coordinate diverse groups and groups of diverse individuals. It can also benefit staff executives who manage training and education. The benefits of the program are reinforced when three or more managers from the same organization attend. Companies are encouraged to sponsor cross-functional team participation.

Titles of past participants have included:

* VP, Human Development
* Executive Manager, Communications
* Director, Organizational Learning
* COO
* Change Manager
* EVP, Operations
* Director, Corporate Strategy
* Director of Organizational Development
* Deputy Branch Chief
* Director of Projects and Management Systems
* Executive Director, Process Excellence
* Manager, Organization and Methods
* Manager, Strategic Human Resources
* Organizational Development Specialist
* Organizational Development and Training Lead
* Programs and Business Development Manager
* Senior Business Engineer
* Executive Manager, HR

Martin Wimmer
Vienna University of Technology

Host: Charles E. Leiserson, MIT CSAIL

Pheet, a task-scheduling framework that allows for easy customization of internal data-structures, is a research vehicle for experimenting with high-level application and low-level architectural support for task-parallel programming models. Pheet is highly configurable, and allows comparison between different implementations of data structures used in the scheduler, as well as comparisons between entirely different schedulers (typically using work-stealing). Pheet is being used to investigate high-level task-parallel support mechanisms that allow applications to influence scheduling decisions and behavior.

This talk will give a brief overview of Pheet and the algorithms and (lock-free) data-structures used to enable some of Pheet's unique features like scheduling strategies and mixed-mode scheduling. It will also give a brief glimpse of the model for hyperobjects used in Pheet and their wait-free implementation.

Martin Wimmer studied computer science at University of Vienna. Since 2011 he is at the Vienna University of Technology, working on his PhD on algorithms and data-structures for fine-grained task scheduling on shared memory systems, which he expects to finish by the end of 2013. He is the main developer of the Pheet open source task scheduling framework.

Peter Sanders
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Host: Charles E. Leiserson, MIT CSAIL

For many applications, the data sets to be processed grow much faster than can be handled with the traditionally available algorithms. We therefore have to come up with new, dramatically more scalable approaches. In order to do that, we have to bring together know-how from the application, techniques from traditional algorithm theory, and on low level aspects like parallelism, memory hierarchies, energy efficiency, and fault tolerance. The methodology of algorithm engineering with its emphasis on realistic models and its cycle of design, analysis, implementation, and experimental evaluation can serve as a glue between these requirements. The talk outlines the general challenges and gives examples from my work like sorting, full text indexing, graph algorithms, and database engines.

Peter Sanders received his PhD in computer science from Universität Karlsruhe, Germany in 1996. After 7 years at the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken he returned to Karlsruhe as a full professor in 2004. He has more than 170 publications, mostly on algorithms for large data sets. This includes parallel algorithms (load balancing,...) memory hierarchies, graph algorithms (route planning, graph partitioning...), randomized algorithms, full text indices,... He is very active in promoting the methodology of algorithm engineering. For example, he currently heads a DFG priority program on AE in Germany. Peter Sanders won a number of prices, perhaps most notably the DFG Leibniz Award 2012 which amounts to 2.5 million Euros of research money.

Stefan Schmid
TU Berlin

Host: Nancy Lynch
Host Affiliation: CSAIL

Abstract:
After virtualization revamped the server business, the cloud now spills over
to the network. This talk first reviews the vision of distributed cloud
computing and network virtualization. Subsequently, two algorithmic challenges
of this paradigm are discussed: (1) competitive access control and embeddings
of virtual networks, and (2) competitive virtual service migration. We will
formally present new models introduced by this paradigm, and we will sketch
online algorithms and their competitive analysis. Finally, we will extend the
discussion to security aspects and raise the question: Are adversarial virtual
network embeddings a threat for ISPs?

Bio:
Stefan Schmid is a senior research scientist at TU Berlin and Telekom
Innovation Laboratories. Stefan received his PhD degree from the Distributed
Computing Group (Prof. Roger Wattenhofer) at ETH Zurich, and subsequently was
a postdoc with Prof. Christian Scheideler. Stefan is interested in distributed
systems, algorithms, network economics, and networking. Web:
http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/~stefan/

Jing Zhang
University of Southern California

Host: Manolis Kellis
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

The rapid advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies provide us the
opportunity to dissect transcriptomes with unprecedented resolution. Based on
RNA-Seq studies, alternative splicing has been more and more appreciated as a
key mechanism in higher eukaryotes to expand transcriptomes by generating
multiple isoforms from a single gene. Hence we developed several computational
methods to quantify the mRNA products and studied its regulation mechanism.
First, the deconvolution of isoform expression remains challenging because of
the non-uniform read sampling and read mapping ambiguity. Hence, we proposed a
weighted-log-likelihood expectation maximization method on isoform
quantification (WemIQ). WemIQ distributes reads among isoforms through EM
algorithm with the fragment length information and removes both inter- and
intra- gene bias estimated by Generalized Possion model in a data-driven
manner. Simulation studies and real data analysis show that WemIQ
significantly improves the quantification of isoform expression, exon
inclusion ratios, and gene expression.

In addition, we tried to decipher the splicing code from both structural and
context aspects. Specially, we performed a genomic study of mRNA secondary
structures around splice sites in humans, mice, fruit flies, and nematodes and
found that the stability of mRNA secondary structures is closely related to
the selection of splice sites. Besides, identification of splicing regulatory
elements (SREs) deserves special attention because these cis-acting short
sequences are vital parts of splicing code. We proposed a Varying Effect
Regression for Splicing Elements (VERSE) to discover intronic SREs in the
proximity of exon junctions by integrating other biological features. The
discovered tissue, region, and conservation preferences of the putative motifs
demonstrate that splice site selection is a complicated process that needs
subtle and delicate regulation.

Co-sponsor: Austrian Federal Economic Chamber

The MIT Vienna Conference brings together MIT's leading faculty members with Austria's leaders in technology, business, engineering, economics, and policy in a stimulating and thought provoking exchange of ideas and opinions on the most important issues facing European and Austrian industry. Co-sponsored with the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, the MIT Vienna Conference combines a superlative venue with remarkable people discussing future-shaping ideas and technologies.

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL CIO: ARCHITECTING THE ENTERPRISE OF THE FUTURE

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is where top Chief Information Officers, technology leaders and IT professionals from around the world meet. For one day, IT leaders network and explore how innovative technologies and leading-edge academic research can help address the practical challenges faced in today's changing economy. Senior IT decision makers will engage each other and with thought leaders from academia to find better ways to effectively use technology to improve business performance while sustaining their leadership.

Focused Content : MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is the only CIO event combining innovative ideas, new technologies and leadership education

C-level Networking: Attended by 800 + plus global senior IT, business leaders and members of MIT academia

Face-to-Face Interactivity : Engage MIT thought leaders debating the next disruptive technologies
The theme of the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is, The Transformational CIO: Architecting The Enterprise of The Future. Driven by economic, social, political, environmental and technological forces, the environment in which organizations operate continues to experience complex and dramatic change. This year's Symposium speaks to the CIOs who wish to understand and embrace this change and lead the organization to respond to the emerging reality. The enterprise of the future will be very different from the one we know. It will be complex, develop hitherto unforeseen forms, and will have to respond to unforeseen challenges--all while the windows of opportunity and response will continue to shrink. There will not only be the need to be agile and adapt to changes as they occur, but to be proactive in shaping the next generation enterprise to be ready for the future. What can the CIO do to lead the transformation and realize the opportunities that are coming? Find out at the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

VIEW THE COMPLETE AGENDA AND PANELS

Register early! Technology executives can rarely accomplish so much in one day through networking, symposiums, exhibits, panels and debate. And the best part? You'll actually have fun in a stimulating, engaging and thought-provoking IT gathering. However, due to what's become The IT Leadership event of the year, attendance is limited. So, act quickly and reserve your seat today!


Register today. Then Join us.
Details: MIT Campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Date: Tuesday, May 22, 2013 Full Day event

Evelina Fedorenko
MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department

What are the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the uniquely and universally human capacity for language? Since Broca's and Wernicke's seminal discoveries in the 19th century, a broad array of brain regions have been implicated in linguistic comprehension, production and learning, spanning frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, both hemispheres, and subcortical and cerebellar structures. However, characterizing the precise contributions of these different structures to language has proven challenging. Furthermore, although evidence from the investigations of patients with brain damage has long suggested some degree of independence between language and other high-level cognitive functions, many neuroimaging studies have argued that brain regions implicated in language are also engaged in many non-linguistic processes. In this talk I will argue that language is supported by the joint engagement of two functionally and computationally distinct brain systems. The first is comprised of the classic “language regions” on the lateral surfaces of left frontal and temporal lobes. Using individual-subject analysis methods which surpass traditional neuroimaging methods in sensitivity and functional resolution (Fedorenko et al., 2010; Nieto-Castañon & Fedorenko, 2012; Saxe et al., 2006), I have shown that these brain regions are specifically engaged in language processing (Fedorenko et al., 2011; see also Monti et al., 2012). The second is the fronto-parietal "multiple demand" network, a set of regions that are engaged across a wide range of demanding cognitive demands (e.g., Duncan, 2001, 2010). Most past neuroimaging work on language processing has not explicitly distinguished between these two systems, especially in the frontal lobes, where subsets of each system reside side by side within the region referred to as “Broca’s area” (Fedorenko et al., 2012). Using a variety of research methods I am now beginning to characterize the important roles of both domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms in language.

Bio:
Ev Fedorenko is a research scientist in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She seeks to understand i) the representations and computations that underlie human communicative abilities, and ii) the relationship between the language system and other cognitive/neural systems. To do so, she is adopting individual-subject MRI analysis methods that have been successful in other domains (e.g., vision), supplementing those with behavioral investigations of healthy and brain-damaged individuals and more temporally-sensitive methods like ECoG.