Type of Talk: UTCS Corporate Connection/FoCS

Speaker/Affil

iation: Dr. Joseph Sirosh/Amazon.com

Date/Time: Tuesday, September 21

, 2010, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host: FoCS

T

alk Title: "The Internet Gaia Hypothesis"

Talk Abstract: The Gaia prin

ciple of ecology views the earth as a single organism of the living and non

-living that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth

in a balanced state. Dr. Sirosh hypothesizes that the collective intelligen

ce emerging on the internet has many of the same properties. The internet i

mbues Gaia with a brain, a powerful collective intelligence that is rapidl

y evolving. This talk will give a (hopefully) entertaining introduction to

this emerging collective intelligence and what it means to the denizens of

the internet.

Speaker Bio: Joseph Sirosh is currently Vice President o

f Transaction Risk Management at Amazon.com. Prior to joining Amazon, he w

orked at Fair Isaac Corporation as VP of the Advanced Technology R&D group

, exploring analytic and data mining applications. At Fair Isaac and at HN

C Software prior to that, he led several significant R&D projects on compu

tational fraud detection, predictive modeling, information retrieval, co

ntent management, intelligent agents, bioinformatics and computational ne

uroscience. Dr. Sirosh has published over 20 technical papers and one book

, and has been a lead investigator of various research grants from DARPA an

d other Government agencies. He holds a PhD and Masters in Computer Science
from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science
& Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.