About the Speaker: Howard D. Wactlar is Vice Provost for Research Computing, Associate Dean, and holds the Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science chair in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has been University Vice Provost since 1979, serving in various research, technical and administrative capacities within CMU since joining them in 1967. He was a founder of the DoD funded Software Engineering Institute where he served as Director for Technical and Administrative Services 1984-88; served from 1992-95 as Director of the Information Technology Center, a research department within CMU focused on large-scale deployment and technology transfer. He was primary architect and is project director of the Informedia Digital Video Library, one of the national NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative projects. His research accomplishments have spanned from symbolic mathematics to distributed operating systems, multi-technology network architectures andultimedia platforms. His current research interests center on multimedia information systems; learning and intelligent systems including speech, image and natural language understanding; and very high performance networks.