Invited Presentation
June 18th, 8:45a - 9:45a"Enforcing the Scientific Method"
Allen L. Brown, Jr., Ph.D.
Software Architect
Health Solutions Group
Microsoft Corporation
Abstract
Within Microsoft's Health Solutions Group we are engaged in the development of a platform to assist life sciences researchers - a class of extreme knowledge worker. We refer to this platform by the rubric, Pharos. Pharos has many objectives. One of the most important of those objectives is to supply an audit trail for research. This audit trail serves primarily to provide researchers and Pharos with a shared understanding of both the conduct of a scientific investigation and the results of a scientific investigation. But there are also other stakeholders in the audit trail, including regulatory agencies, funding agencies, tenure granting institutions and for-profit research managements. Put another way, Pharos is also concerned with the rigorous enforcement of the scientific method. In this presentation I will examine the roles and interplay of audited inference and audited workflow in constructing an audit trail.
Bio
Dr. Allen L. Brown, Jr. is currently the software architect of the Applied Research and Technology sector of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. During most of his 10-year tenure at Microsoft he has been involved in the development of the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems. In the years immediately prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Brown co-founded and developed a venture-backed startup enterprise providing digital media management software serving global corporate marketing needs. Roughly half of Dr. Brown's thirty-five years of professional involvement in computing was spent at the Xerox Corporation where he served, among other things, as a Research Fellow in its Corporate Research and Technology Division and as CTO of its XSoft Division. While much of the Xerox era was devoted to co-authoring 75+ papers and 24 US patents, Dr. Brown also contributed directly to products, including architecting some of the key facilities of the landmark Xerox "Star" system. He has also held academic appointments as Professor of Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University and James Welling Clark Professor at the George Washington University. Dr. Brown earned undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Chemical Engineering, and a doctoral degree in Artificial Intelligence, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.