Speaker: Prof. Ingrid Daubechies, Duke University

When: October 10, 2016, 11:00 AM

Where: Qualcomm Institute / Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall

Reunited

For the first time in more than 100 years, the eight known panels—and one re-created missing panel of a 14th-century Italian altarpiece depicting Jesus’s crucifixion and scenes in the life of St. John the Evangelist can been seen and appreciated as one magnificent work of art. The contrast between the vivid colors and the burnished gilded background of the new panel and the faded, aged colors and the matte and craqued old gilding was the impetus to a virtual rejuvenation of the old panels and a virtual ageing of the newly painted one, adding a completely different dimension to the exhibit which opened on September 10, 2016 in the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Link: Reunited: The Ghissi Alterpiece

Speaker: Prof. Robert Calderbank, Duke University

When: October 10, 2016, 2:00 PM

Where: Qualcomm Institute / Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall

Remembering Shannon

The foundation of our Information Age is the transformation of speech, audio, images and video into digital content, and the man who started the digital revolution was Claude Shannon. He arrived at the revolutionary idea of digital representation by sampling the information source at an appropriate rate, and converting the samples to a bit stream. He then characterized the source by a single number, the entropy, which quantifies the information content of the source, and he created coding theory, by introducing redundancy into the digital representation to protect against corruption.

Shannon started from the grand challenges of his day, he developed models that captured what made them so difficult, translated these challenges into mathematical terms and then developed fundamental limits. This talk will review some of what Shannon did, and it will speculate about what he might have done if he were among us today.

Link: Remembering Shannon

Speaker: Dr. John E. Kelly III, Senior Vice President, IBM

When: October 11, 2016, 11:00 AM

Where: Qualcomm Institute / Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall

The New Era of Cognitive Computing

Cognitive computing is a new era of technology that is augmenting and scaling human knowledge, expertise, and understanding. Dr. John E. Kelly III, Senior Vice President, Cognitive Solutions and Research, IBM, will describe this exciting new technology and examine how individuals and businesses are applying IBM Watson and cognitive computing to gain novel insights, solve problems, and foster new discoveries across many industries. Following his lecture, he will have a moderated discussion with Sandra A. Brown, Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, San Diego, to discuss how this technology emerged, where it is going, and the implications on society.