Subject: Multicast Seminar 2/18: Vernor Vinge - The Digital Gaia

From: Allison Mankin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:27:13 -0500

Vernor Vinge, "The Digital Gaia"

NGI Distinguished Lecture - 18 February 2000, 1 PM EST

    In this talk, I assume that Moore's Law continues to be valid for
    another quarter century, and consider the consequences of that
    progress for VR/wearable computing, fine-grained distributed systems,
    collaborations, and central-site technology: How far can we take
    ubiquitous computing? What will our lives and work be like as we
    soar along this trajectory of hardware and software improvement?

The DARPA NGI Program is proud to announce the start of a new series
of live and telecast seminars on Next Generation Internet
technologies.  The first NGI Distinguished Lecturer will be the
Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, Vernor Vinge.  Numerous
Internauts have said their imaginations were expanded by Vinge's
works, including True Names (1981), often considered to be the
introduction of the fictional concept of cyberspace (three years
before William Gibson's Neuromancer), The Peace War (1984), and A Fire
upon the Deep (1992).  A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is the prequel to
A Fire upon the Deep; both of these novels feature a richly imagined
intergalactic email infrastructure.  A collection entitled True Names
And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, reprinting the novella and
including essays by Richard Stallman and Danny Hillis, among others,
will appear in April 2000.  Vinge is also an associate professor of 
computer science at San Diego State University, where his interests
are in networks and distributed systems.

Location:

   National Center for Supercomputing Applications
   ACCESS Facility:
   Ballston Metro Center Office Tower, Suite 800
   901 North Stuart Street
   Arlington, Virginia 22203

Attendance:

   Space is limited.  Please RSVP to [email-masked].
   Directions for getting to the Access Facility can be found at:
   
    http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VEG/homepages/tcoffin/ACCESS/directions.html

Multicast/Webcast:

  The NGI Distinguished Lecture Series will be multicast live and also 
  webcast using RealMedia.  The live multicast will allow for questions and 
  comments from the remote audience.  To tune into the Internet multicasts,
  look for the announcement in your MBONE session directory program
  ('sdr').  If the announcement is not present there, it still may
  be possible to receive the session by manually configuring the client
  programs ('vic', and 'rat' or 'vat') with session addresses.  The
  session addresses, webcast details, and information on non-live access 
  to the seminar will be posted on:

    http://www.ngi-supernet.org/conferences.html

  During the seminar, any technical difficulties about the multicast can
  be addressed to [email-masked].

NGI Distinguished Lecture Series Future Speakers:

  23 March 2000   Kim Claffy, CAIDA (date tentative)
  Date TBA        Vint Cerf, Interplanetary Internet