The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Strict implementation of data protection to support privacy protections for highly sensitive personal data can lead to difficult challenges for the development teams when faced with diagnostic, maintenance, and product evolution tasks. In this talk I will outline one specific privacy regime, healthcare data, that illustrates fundamental principles that will have to be addressed by all privacy-sensitive systems in the long term.

Bio:
Marc Donner was born in a log cabin on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the second half of the twentieth century. After high school he emigrated to Los Angeles where he studied electrical engineering at Caltech before taking a job at NASA working on planetary radar. He then joined IBM's research lab where he worked on a nine-million-pixel display. After a while he wandered off, ending up at CMU where he earned a PhD in computer science by programming Ivan Sutherland's six-legged walking robot. A talk on juggling by Claude Shannon inspired him to propose a juggling robot, which IBM Research generously funded. While that work was going on he sponsored Ted Selker's work on what ultimately became the IBM TrackPoint. He then got involved in large-scale distributed computing, which led to a trip to Morgan Stanley, where he built their intranet, re-engineered their back office, and eliminated over two million pages of daily paper and a further two million frames of daily microfiche data center output. This then led to several entertaining projects in the marketing department and finally on to the research department where he led the development of a number of cool financial modeling and simulation engines.

Today he's an engineering director at Google looking after the interests of the software engineers who build the software that manages Google's network as well as helping with cyber security and advising Google's work with major museums on the GoogleArtProject.com, all while writing articles about science fiction for an engineering magazine. Before networking he led Google Health and Google Finance for two years and before that he looked after the interests of the Ads engineers in New York, including the integration of the DoubleClick teams.