Lectures given by community members in the field of IT, USF Lakeland professors and visiting professors from other institutions. DATE:   3rd Wednesday of each month (unless otherwise indicated, during the academic year) TIME:   12:00 pm (unless otherwise indicated) WHERE:   LAC 1280 on the USF Lakeland campus (unless otherwise indicated)   The lectures are free and the public is welcomed. For more information please call Lisa Wetmore at (863) 667-7064 Let’s Talk About IT!!! Wednesday, February 20, 2008 -The Role of IT at FedEx Freight: Key projects, Current and Future Technologies Dennis Michael Vice President of Information Technology FedEx Freight System View Presentation

Past Presentors

Fall 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 -IT Virtualization

This colloquium will give students and IT professionals a complete overview of the latest developments in virtualization technology and applications.

Guest speakers will address various aspects of virtualization, including how it can aid the quality assurance process and help with disaster recovery. Representatives from VMware and Red Hat will discuss the latest technology and applications. More Info

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Thursday, November 1, 2007 -AutOMathic Blocks: A computer-based method for teaching arithmetic to young blind students.

Arthur Karshmer, Professor in the College of Professional Studies at the University of San Francisco

Learning mathematics has always been a daunting task for the visually impaired student. For the most part, a task that restricted their entry into careers based on the reading and writing of mathematical equations. There have been some notable exceptions, but for the most part education in the domains of math, physics, computer science and engineering have been beyond the grasp of blind students. In the current work, a new system is being developed to help young blind students learn both arithmetic and basic algebra.

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Wednesday, Sept 19, 2007 -How to make the most of today’s cutting edge of wireless technology

Phillip J. DuMas, Director of research, development and engineering, F4W, Inc.

DuMas is a network and technology professional with more than 16 years of experience designing, implementing and maintaining some of the most unique and complex networks in the world. He designed the recovery network the U.S. Coast Guard used for rescue operations immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Actively involved in academia, he holds over 22 industry certifications in networking and network security.

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Spring 2007

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 -

Eric Jones, Help Desk Team Lead at Bunch & Associates

Eric has over 15 years experience in information technology, he holds two MCPs and an A+ certification. He is almost entirely self taught. He has worked as a PC Specialist, Systems analyst, Network Administrator, Senior Tech, Level II Technical Manager, Teacher, and his current roll as the technical manager of the help desk at Bunch. He will discuss Bunch & Associates IT Department with emphasis on help desk skills and Bunch IT department breakdown, as well as ideas for furthering IT students’ education.

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - Control of Search and Rescue Robots Using Wireless Communication and Challenges in Real-World Conditions

Dr. Dave Armitage, Interim Chair of the Department of Information Technology at the University of South Florida Lakeland

Dr. Armitage will discuss the control of robots and the requirements and difficulties in using wireless communications for that function, especially for robots being used for search and rescue applications in real-world conditions

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Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - Using On Demand Software Delivery to Manage Mission Critical Information

Dave Wiggins, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Document Advantage Corporation

Document Advantage Corporation, with technical offices located in the USF Research Park, Tampa develops and implements electronic document and business process management applications. Mr. Wiggins will discuss the rapid progression of delivering software applications with an On Demand or Software as a Service delivery model and why market analysts are predicting software revenue generated by Software as a Service products will increase to 25% by 2011. Find out how this type of application delivery can be used by companies of every size.

Mr. Wiggins serves as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Document Advantage Corporation. He has nearly twenty years of experience in the electronic document/content management market space in product architecture, development and application management. His client expertise includes business process analysis, design, development and implementation of customer centric document and business process management technologies. His industry experience includes a wide range of EDMS technologies and web-enabled product architectures.

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Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - "Building in" Business Continuity for Greater Protection

Lawrence Giorgio, Director of BC Practice and co-founder of Business Continuity Solutions Inc.

Lawrence Giorgio is Director BC Practice at Business Continuity Solutions Inc. He will review the expanding roles of the BC professional in the corporate environment. The main focus of the presentation will detail the building blocks of a BC/DR recovery strategy that promotes the concept of “building in” business continuity, for each mission critical business application at its inception. The concept is based on the basic Pythagorean Theory that “the whole = the sum of its parts” He will discuss how the BCP is the road map to invoke each BC pod that was or should have been designed in thus creating a “chain mail armor” approach of protection.

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Fall 2006

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - Mesh Networks: Wireless Architecture of Tomorrow?

Mr. Phil Dumas, Vice President Research and Development, Freedom 4Wireless, Inc.

Mr. DuMas has designed and implemented networks nationwide for a Fortune 50 company. He has worked for one of the largest resort ownership companies in the world deploying and securing a global network reach to the farthest and most exotic corners of the earth. Mr. DuMas worked for the founder of Home Shopping Network consolidating and evaluating the technologies of companies being considered for purchase. Currently, he holds over 22 industry certifications in Networking and Network Security and is actively involved in academia.

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - Low Bitrate Multimedia Coding Based on Adaptive Bitplane Modeling and GFA Representation

Dr. Paul Bao, Associate Professor, Information Technology

Dr. Bao is currently an associate professor in Department of Information Technology, University of South Florida. His research interests are in Computer Graphics and Virtual Reality, Image-based Rendering, Image/Video Processing, Multimedia systems and Wireless Multimedia Technologies. In this presentation, he will present a novel video coding scheme based on the statistically adaptive bitplane modeling and the generalized finite automata (GFA) representation. In the proposed scheme, a video sequence is represented in GoPs as an overall binary image by adaptively bitplane modeling the significant coefficients of the video sequence within subbands.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - The Convergence of the PC Desktop with the Future: Gaming, Robotics, Mobility, and More Improvement

Brandon McMillon, Microsoft Corporation

Brandon McMillon is the Academic Developer Evangelist covering Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. He started working for Microsoft in 1996, working for the Visual Interdev test team. In 1999, he moved to the Windows product team, spending 5 years there as a program manager and lead program manager. He was involved with shipping Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. As much fun as working on those products was, he’s extremely happy to be living in South Florida now, and out of Seattle.
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Spring 2006

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 - Application of Information Technology to Prehospital Emergency Medical Services and Healthcare Performance Improvement

Mic Gunderson, President of HealthAnalytics

Bio Information: http://www.healthanalytics.net/about/gunderson.htm

Prehospital Emergency Medical Services is a multidisciplinary field at the crossroads of public safety, public health and emergency medicine.
This presentation will focus on the IT applications and challenges associated with this unique industry.
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006 - Computer Technology in Manufacturing

Joanne Larsen, Ph.D., PE - Assistant Professor, Industrial Engineering, USF Lakeland

As in many technical areas, manufacturing depends greatly on a variety of computer technologies, from process control to the machine operation. This presentation will provide a demonstration of a robot arm used in the Industrial Engineering program to acquaint students with the latest manufacturing hardware and software.
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Fall 2005

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - The Other IT- Using instructional technology tools to enhance instruction, training, and presentation

Dr. Naomi Boyer - Director of Distance Learning, USF Lakeland

The IT in the IT Colloquium has traditionally been focused on information technology. However, in this presentation the area of instructional technology will be profiled by providing an overview of available tools in a hands-on format that provides and overview and the ability to practice with technologies in teaching and learning. While the bells and whistles of technological integration can oftentimes be considered distracting, these tools can enhance engagement, provide immediate feedback, and optimize interactive capabilities.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005 - Brick and Click: How Computers Transformed Libraries Inside and Out.

Catherine Lavallée-Welch, Associate Librarian, USF Lakeland

Computers have revolutionized the way libraries relate to the information, materials and resources they acquire and disseminate. Computers also changed the way the library world relates to its users. This presentation will review the history and the future of those transformations.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 - Businesses can recover from disasters thanks to Information Technology

Mike McMillan, Director of System Integration for DSM, a Lakeland-based company that specializes in systems integration and data recovery.

McMillan will discuss the need for these specific technologies today and where much of the system integration technology is expected to go in the future.

McMillan recently worked on a project where data recovery technology enabled him to recover 95 percent of a company’s data lost during the June 2005 fire that spread through Bartow's historic downtown district. During the talk he will also share what he has learned through 18 years of experience in the information technology field that includes work with the US Navy’s multimillion dollar Air Traffic Control system, the AN/TPX-42V12.
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Spring 2005

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - A Systems Perspective Study of the Performance of Different Supply Chain Inventory Models

Dr. Craig Knight, Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences, USF Lakeland

Business organizations are interested in Information Technology (IT), not so much in terms of the technologies themselves, but in terms of the processes that can be improved by the technologies. The extensive availability of IT is now permitting the development of new and different business processes for the accomplishment of the organization's purposes. One of the areas in which these new and different processes are having a significant impact is in the area of Supply Chain Management (SCM). This presentation is designed to discuss ways in which IT is being used to facilitate non-traditional inventory policies, allowing information to be shared and used in the operational decisions of organizations. Simulated supply chain behaviors will be presented, showing the magnitudes of changes created through the use of IT-facilitated business processes. Dr. Knight will offer insight into these new business processes and capabilities.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - "Where am I? Why am I Here? What am I Doing Here? The answer to one of these questions comes from computers in space. "

Dr. Art Karshmer, IT Faculty USF Lakeland

Throughout the history of mankind on earth, the knowledge of where I am on earth has been a burning question which took millennia to answer in an accurate way. From the earliest days of ships plying the oceans of the world, accurate positional information was a key element which could literally mean life or death to the sailor. In this presentation, a very brief history of navigational techniques will be presented as a prelude to the solution initiated in 1973 - the GPS or Global Positioning System. The discussion of GPS will be presented in practical terms with an emphasis on how it produces information so exact that the concept of cartography has changed drastically in the past three decades. Examples of its will be shown. Today, with a hand-held GPS device which can be purchased for under $100, you can pinpoint your location on earth within a tiny margin of error.
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005 - "Low Bitrate Multimedia Coding with its Comparison with MPEG4 and Application in Multimedia Communications"

Dr. Paul Bao, prospective candidate for the position of Instructor and Assistant/Associate Professor for USF Lakeland's Department of Information Technology.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 - "Using IT to Support a Learning Organization"

Dr. Andrew Artis and Dr. Naomi Boyer, Faculty USF Lakeland

Cutting edge organizations consistently thrive even in competitive and rapidly changing business environments by encouraging employees to develop superior knowledge and skills. These "learning organizations" succeed by creating a culture where self-directed learning is used to maximize individual performance and where the overall competency of the firm is improved by having employees share knowledge. Information technologies play an important part in facilitating the self-directed learning process, and the retention of knowledge to increase a firm's intellectual capital. This presentation is designed to provide managers with an overview of information technologies used by learning organizations, possible barriers to using technology, and recommendations to achieve desired outcomes. USFL faculty members Dr. Naomi Boyer, Director of Distance Programs, and Dr. Andrew Artis, Assistant Professor of Marketing, use their research in organizational and self-directed learning to provide insight and assistance to managers and the IT staff who support them.

Fall 2004

Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - "Outsourcing: What, Who, Where, When, Why, and How."

Dr. Ray Hawat, IT Faculty USF Lakeland

In recent years, and especially months, Outsourcing has been a very hot and discussed topic. The purpose of this colloquium is to pose, debate, and attempt to answer these basic questions.

One of the key points is that it is 'not' just IT that is getting outsourced.
So here is a more detailed framework...

What is outsourcing?
What is the difference between outsourcing vs. offshoring vs. nearshoring?
What is being outsourced?
Who is outsourcing? Which industries, etc.?
Where are we outsourcing from and to?
When did the outsourcing practice start? Is this something new?
Why do companies outsource?
Why do outsourcing companies accept the liability?
How does it work? How is outsourcing sold and managed?
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - "HCI and Automated Sign Language Recognition"

Barbara Loeding, Ph.D. and Sudeep Sarkar, Ph.D.

Human computer interaction is gradually moving towards speech-based I/O devices because of advances in automated speech understanding and synthesis. This shift is likely to present a barrier in the near future for people with disabilities. In particular, it may be next to impossible for people who rely on sign language to access state of the art technology unless these devices also incorporate automated recognition and translation of sign language into speech and vice-versa.

Sign language is not universal. Many countries use their own sign language which differs from American Sign Language (ASL) so research groups around the world are working on this challenge. In this talk, we will broadly sketch out the state of art in automated recognition of signed sentences based on the data sets used, features computed, technique(s) used, and recognition rates achieved by research groups throughout the world. We will also present results from our own research at USF with respect to one important aspect of ASL recognition, i.e. integration of non-manual features (e.g. facial expression) with manual ones to improve recognition rates.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004 - "Java: A programming language, an operating system, a computer architecture."

As Dr. Karshmer states, "Java has become a key programming tool worldwide. But, is this really the right way to go and what impacts does it present to our tradition view of computing?" The current talk looks into java and its impact on computing. The talk is based on some controversial assumptions that will certainly be the foundation for heated discussion.

Spring 2004

Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - "Challenges of a blind student, software developer and entrepreneur"
Featured speaker, Ted Henter, owner of Henter Math, will speak on his experiences searching for jobs and eventually starting and running his own software development company. Mr. Henter is also the co-founder of Henter-Joyce, the developers and distributors of JAWS for Windows, the premier screen reader for the blind in the world. Without JAWS, few if any, blind computer users would be able to use personal computers. Since selling his company to Freedom Scientific, Mr. Henter has been developing new software to help the blind learn mathematics. News Release View presentation

Wednesday, March 17, 2004 - "Information Technology: Advancing Health Care for the Underserved"
Dr. Judy Karshmer is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the College of Nursing at the University of South Florida. She is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and her research interests include health care informatics and behavioral health in primary care.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - "Program Management Office (PMO) and its impact on project delivery"

In this presentation, Raed Hawat will cover:

• The blue print of a PMO
• The core values of a PMO
• Industry best practices and accreditations
• A typical methodology
• The business and financial benefits of the PMO and methodology

Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - "Publishing: From Hot Lead to Hot Web"

Barry Friedman, Electronic Media Editor for the Lakeland Ledger will present "Publishing: From Hot Lead to Hot Web."

Fall 2003

Wednesday, November 19, 2003 - "Creativity in Technology”

Richard A. Young, President and CEO of Xnext Omnimedia. Young, a USF alum, will discuss the growing importance of original thinking in today’s IT workplace.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - "IT Development and Support Challenges in a Large Organization"

Featured speakers will be Publix Information Systems leaders, Terry Brigman, Director I/S Services and Jerry Gates, Direction, I/S Development. As part of their lecture, the speakers will review the IT processes and roles implemented to help meet the challenges of the growing demand for high quality and superior service faced by businesses in today’s society.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 - "IT Degrees: at USF and Florida's Other Public Universities"

Featured speaker, Dr. David Armitage, USF IT professor, will speak on the approach to Information Technology taken by USF professors. As he states, "employers complain that their new IT workers graduate from college without real-world know-how, but what is IT and how do you teach it? I will discuss the exceptionally wide variety of degree program responses to this question by the ten public universities in Florida, using the USF IT degree developed at Lakeland as an example of a 'middle-of-the-road' approach."

Spring 2003

Wednesday, April 16, 2003 - "Using the Computer to Improve Access to Mathematics by Blind Students"

As Dr. Karshmer states, “One of the greatest stumbling blocks in the ability of the blind to enter careers in science, technology, engineering or mathematics is the paucity of tools to help them read and write equations. Over the years, there have been numerous projects with the goal of building special tools to help the visually impaired student read and write equations.”
In his presentation, Dr. Karshmer will describe some of the most interesting work in this domain and then attempt to make recommendations and/or predictions about the future.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003 - “Can a Small (Even Part-Time) Business Be Successful Using the Web?”

Bill Horde, the owner/operator of a successful part-time custom golf club business, will explore the start-up and promotion of his business. He will additionally demonstrate the ways his website has assisted in enhancing his business.

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - "Image database systems"

Image database systems have been very active over the past 20 years. With the explosive interest for the last 10 years in multimedia systems, content-based image retrieval has attracted the attention of researchers across several disciplines including computer vision, pattern recognition, human-computer interaction, and image databases. In this informative lecture, USF Lakeland Information Technology professor, Qinglong Zhang, will cover what a content-based image database is and present his recent work in this field.

Wednesday, January 15, 2003 - "Von Neumann's Computer Architecture"

The seminar will illustrate the concept of Adaptive Computation with the help of two biological metaphors: Evolution and Immunization. As humans, through history, have evolved to adapt to changes in the environment, so, too can computer programs. USF Lakeland Information Technology professor, Alessio Gaspar will demonstrate how an extremely simple algorithm, capturing some of the properties of these highly complex biological mechanisms, can help solve discrete optimization problems for which more classical approaches fail.

Fall 2002

Wednesday, November 20, 2002 - "Predicting the Future of Technology"

Featured speaker, Dr. David Armitage, USF IT professor, will focus on how technology has changed who we are, how we live, and how we can use the lessons of past technology to predict some ways in which technology will further change our personal and professional lives.