University Business - May 2011 - (Page 12)

Behind the news P E O P L E W AT C H John J. Petillo, who has brought his executive and educational experiences to the top spot at Sacred Heart University (conn.) as interim president since october 2010, is officially the catholic university’s sixth president. he is the former dean of the John F. welch college of business at sacred heart, past chancellor and ceo of Seton Hall University (n.J.), and past president of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. he has been an executive with blue cross blue shield of new Jersey and the newark alliance. … barbara K. Mistick has been hired to lead Wilson College (Pa.), starting July 1. her current role is president of the carnegie library of Pittsburgh, which serves approximately 1.2 million people and includes 19 locations and John J. Petillo other facilities. she will succeed lorna Duphiney edmundson, who will retire June 30. … Cleveland State University (ohio) has named craig M. boise dean of the cleveland-Marshall college of law, to begin July 1. Most recently, boise served as law professor at DePaul University in chicago, where he was director of the graduate tax Program. … Mary b. Marcy will lead Dominican University of California beginning July 1. she will succeed Joseph r. Fink and become the ninth president of Dominican. … David b. williams, former president of The University of Alabama at Huntsville, is now dean of The Ohio State University college of engineering. … thomas Maher is now vice president of finance and administration at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. … Ivy Tech Community College (ind.) has named Darrell l. cain as vice chancellor of student affairs for the central indiana region. … D. Michael lindsay has been named the eighth president of Gordon College (Mass.), to begin July 1. … Dean l. hubbard is now officially president of Saint Luke’s College of Health Sciences (Mo.) after serving as interim president since october 2010. … Karan l. watson has been named provost and vP for academic affairs at Texas A&M University. nancy cantor, chancellor and president of Syracuse University (n.Y.), received the 2011 reginald wilson Diversity leadership award from the american council on education. —K.D. U watson goes to school If you are a fan of Jeopardy!, then you probably watched in february as all-time champs Ken Jennings and Brad rutter battled it out with an IBM computer named Watson. Built around IBM’s deep Question answering technology, Watson is capable of parsing “natural language” clues in the Jeopardy! categories. although it had several missteps, Watson emerged as the winner. In late March, Watson went to Carnegie Mellon University (pa.) to participate in the first of several symposia exploring real-world applications for the technology. faculty and students from CMu and the University of Pittsburgh discussed the potential of the technology in the areas of medicine, law, business, computer science, and engineering—and tried their hand at Jeopardy!. But Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation and university programs for IBM, says, “The events aren’t just about Jeopardy!. They are about the natural language processing world and what its implications are for society. This is a game changer.” IBM chose Carnegie Mellon for the initial symposium because of the school’s key contributions to Watson’s development, and the university’s role as a leading center for computer science research and education. In addition, the university of pittsburgh has a long and productive partnership with IBM in research projects such as cloud computing, carbon nanotubes, and smarter healthcare research around pandemic disease outbreaks and tissue regeneration. “at the end of the Jeopardy! program, what everyone saw was the sausage, but they didn’t see what went into making the sausage, which was quite incredible,” Meyerson says. The project started as “a crazy bet,” where engineers were challenged to build a machine that could ultimately compete on the quiz show. “The nerve it takes to claim that you can innovate your way past all the issues that stopped us from getting there in the past is extraordinary,” he says. “It took four years and an astonishing amount of work on natural language, on codification, how you parse a question, even how you deal with humor and sarcasm—things that no machine learning system has ever tried to tackle. and it had to be done numerically, so at the end you can issue a level of confidence in the answer.” —Tim Goral SOUND BITE cannot I considersee for the life of me why we would ‘ these. —Nevada System of Higher Education Regent Ron Knecht on proposed school closure and consolidation options ‘ 12 | May 2011 universitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - May 2011

University Business - May 2011
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Ad Index
Behind the News
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Human Resources
Community Colleges
Networks Freshen Up
Collaboration Station
Someone to Watch Over You
What's New
End Note

University Business - May 2011