Digital Wonders: Open House at Rutgers
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Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on May 3, 2000. All rights reserved.
Dysfunctional Behavior: Deborah Lubar
E-mail: MelindaSherwood@princetoninfo.com
Don’t let dysfunctional family behavior creep into your
family business, says Deborah Lubar, who presents "You Talkin’
to Me? A Workshop in Really Listening," at the Rothman Institute
of Entrepreneurial Studies on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University
in Madison on Thursday, May 4, at 8:30 a.m. Call 973-443-8842.
According to Lubar, one of the most common and often destructive habits
among family members is tuning each other out. "With family members
we often think we know exactly what they’re going to say so we stop
listening," she says. "In a family situation, there’s a lot
of baggage, which can be beneficial, but sometimes it gets in the
way of hearing a new idea or solving a problem. You’re playing the
old family roles."
Role-playing can impede progress, but it also can heal, as Lubar,
an actor and writer who lives in Lincoln, Vermont, knows well. Lubar
spent nine years in the theater department at Smith College and does
a one-woman show in which she portrays real people — women she
has interviewed in various places in the world. In her most recent
show, for example, she portrays each of six Palestinian women living
in the West Bank. "The combination of interviewing and 12 years
of practicing a certain kind of energy healing have combined to give
me a special perspective on listening to people," says Lubar,
who has a BA from Oberlin and an MFA from Rutgers.
On the same day that Lubar gives her workshop, young entrepreneurs
from three New Jersey universities, all winners of the 2000 New Jersey
Collegiate Entrepreneur Awards program coordinated by Fairleigh Dickinson
University’s Rothman Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies, will be
honored at an awards ceremony at 6 p.m.
The New Jersey competition, sponsored by Bell Atlantic, is presented
in conjunction with the North American Collegiate Entrepreneur Awards
competition program coordinated by St. Louis University in Missouri.
The New Jersey winner automatically advances to the North American
competition.
The first place winner is Nicholas Leidl of Ringwood, founder
and owner of Entertainment Explosion, a full service entertainment
provider for events ranging from weddings to corporate affairs. Leidl,
a senior at St. Peters College in Jersey City, will receive $750 and
become eligible for a $10,000 award if he wins the North American
competition.
The second place winner is Constantino Procaccino Jr., owner
of La Borgata LLC, the Italian restaurant located in the Kingston
Shopping Center. Procaccino, a senior at Rider University, will receive
$300. The third place winner is Matthew Mastrorillo of Spring
Lake, owner of Night and Day Press LLC, a multimedia firm that publishes
information, products and services via print and electronic means.
Mastrorillo, a senior at Monmouth University, will receive $200.
Judges for the competition included Kenneth J. Burkhardt, co-founder
of Dialogic Corporation; Caren S. Franzini, executive director,
New Jersey Economic Development Authority; and Dick Forney,
business reporter, CNBC.
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Digital Wonders: Open House at Rutgers
E-mail: BarbaraFox@princetoninfo.com
It’s a cold and stormy day, and your first grader must
shiver and wait at the curb for 20 minutes because the school bus
has been delayed. But imagine this: a Palm Pilot-like device will
notify each household exactly when the school bus will ’round the
corner. It’s part of the "Digital Sprinkler" technology to
be discussed at the 30th anniversary celebration open house for the
Rutgers Department of Computer Science on Thursday, May 4.
The open house starts at 9:30 a.m. in the CoRE building on the Busch
Campus with a welcome by Francis Lawrence, Rutgers’ president,
and is followed by the keynote address by Kevin Kennedy, senior
vice president of Cisco Systems. Also speaking will be Tomasz Imielinski
and Saul Amarel of the department plus faculty members doing
demos and lectures on digital sprinklers and digital music libraries.
The program, including lunch and a reception at 5 p.m., is free by
preregistration. Call 732-445-2380 or E-mail: colvill@cs.rutgers.edu
Craig Nevill-Manning will present "A Digital Library of
Popular Music" at 2 p.m. Also in that time period, "Digital
Sprinklers: What You Want, When & Where You Want It" will be explained
by B.R. Badrinath, Richard Martin, and Brett Vickers.
Badrinath and Imielinski were among those who pioneered the "Dataman"
technology. Dataman’s mission was to develop ways to access the Internet
from mobile sources. "Infostations" could supposedly transmit
E-mail, faxes, voicemail, maps, and other complex computer files in
lightning-fast times to recipients on the move, using a technology
related to global positioning systems (U.S. 1, September 24, 1997).
"Dataman was more of a generic protocol," says Badrinath,
a 1983 graduate of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore with
a doctor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
"Now we are implementing the architecture and trying to make it
local."
Like a lawn sprinkler that puts water around a very small area, a
"digital sprinkler" spreads information in a local area, information
that would not be covered by radio traffic reports — telling,
for instance, if a particular road is icy or obstructed, or if a particular
school bus is delayed. Sensors by the side of the road could detect
just when a particular school bus passed by. Or GPS (global positioning
system) technology could be employed. Either way, the news flash would
go to all households on the route: "Bus will arrive at Stop 14
in six minutes." Similar services could be available for commuter
routes, to tell how long the backup is on Alexander Road versus Harrison
Street.
Who would pay for this? The neighborhood 7-11 or Dairy Queen might
buy this service as an advertising vehicle. Or it could be sold as
a subscription to parents of a particular school district.
Nevill-Manning will tell about an entertaining use of human genome
research — matching patterns. He works with bioinformatics but
he is also a jazz pianist, and so he is trying to create a digital
library of popular music.
"If you remember a tune but you can’t remember the name, you might
go to Tower Music and hum a bit of it. Actually, people at Tower Music
and music librarians get this all the time," says Nevill-Manning.
A computer science major at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury,
Class of 1989, he has a PhD from the University of Waikato and did
postdoctoral study at Stanford in biochemistry.
He uses MIDI technology (the digital music-rendering software often
used for Internet greeting cards) to record tunes for the library.
When someone sings a tune, the software program tries to match the
file with a MIDI file. If this research comes to fruition, any company
that sells CDs on the web or in a bricks and mortar store could help
their customers search, not only by text query, but also by singing.
One issue to be resolved is that to play the piece of music with good
fidelity would require an MP3 file. A MIDI file is like a card catalog
entry compared to the "real thing," the MP3 file. Another
problem: when the music is fully orchestrated, how to pick out the
important notes that the person is likely to sing.
"Because I play jazz piano, I like to make a connection between
my computer science research and music," says Nevill-Manning.
"In bioinformatics, many of the same problems come up — matching
protein sequences for the human genome project and matching music
sequences. If we can impress a teenager with our work we can be considered
a success."
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Entrepreneur of the Year
<B>Michael Hierl, CEO of Pacesetter Group, will receive
the Princeton Chamber’s Eight Annual Entrepreneurial Person of the
Year award on Thursday, May 4, at 11:30 a.m. at the Chamber meeting
at the Doral Forrestal.
Jay Brandinger, CEO of Westar Photonics, will also speak on
"Nurturing Small Business." Call 609-520-1776. Cost: $30.
www.princetoninfo.com/200004/00426s03.html
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