Keynote Presentations

The program committee is pleased to announce the following two keynote addresses to be presented at DocEng 2007.

Dr. Sara E. Church is a specialist in counterfeit deterrence and bank note authentication. After 13 years in securities technology at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, she assumed her current position as Scientific Adviser at the Bank of Canada. Her particular interests are the evolution of digital technologies and the counterfeiting threats they pose, counterfeit analysis and implications for currency design, and quantitative evaluation of public knowledge and perception of bank notes.

She holds a PhD (physical chemistry, Oregon State University) based on work in colloid and surface chemistry applied to model membrane systems using x-ray diffraction and monolayer films studies.

Most people handle bank notes every day without giving them a thought, let alone pondering their complexity. Yet every aspect of a bank note is highly engineered to serve its purpose. Every facet of the bank note’s existence, from the materials that comprise them to the equipment that produces them, from the machines that handle them to the shredders that destroy them, is carefully considered and designed. Layered on these functional requirements are human factors and the need to verify their authenticity, to be able to distinguish them from any other printed documents that clever would-be, ill-intentioned imitators might produce.

In the context of today’s print-on-demand environment and the glitter-and-glow appeal of craft and display products to all segments of society, the requirements for achieving this differentiation from the counterfeiters’ best products are increasingly challenging.

This presentation addresses how real bank notes are made, the practical factors that drive their function and form requirements and the interplay of these factors with their security requirements, to inhibit the manufacture of counterfeit bank notes.

Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto and a Canada Research Chair in Knowledge and Software Visualization. She is one of the principal investigators for CSER (Centre for Software Engineering Research in Canada) and an investigator for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, US. Her research goal is to understand how technology can help people explore, understand and share complex information and knowledge. She applies and evaluates techniques from knowledge engineering, social software and visual interface design to applications such as collaborative software development, program comprehension, medical ontology development, and learning in web-based environments.

Navigating computer-based information landscapes can be a challenging task for humans in almost any knowledge domain. Most documentation spaces are large, complex and ever-changing, which creates a significant cognitive burden on the end-user. Effective tool support can help orient the user and guide them to an appropriate place in the information space. In our research, we have been investigating how visualization tools can support navigation by leveraging the standard and folk classification systems that are embedded in information spaces. We have focused on two specific domains where navigating information can pose challenges: medical informatics and software engineering.

Within the domain of medical informatics, we have designed a visualization tool that supports the exploration and comparison of a set of clinical trials. The navigational support offered to the user is customized according to an ontology that describes the trial designs. For software engineers, we have developed a tool that generates "navigational waypoints" from informal tagging in software documents. These waypoints provide a way for the software engineer to create "tours" through the space of software documents. In our current work, we are now exploring how adaptive visualization tools may leverage both structured and unstructured information in providing navigational support. We believe that both kinds of information when presented in a coherent visual manner will lead to more effective cognitive support for users as they browse, query and search integrated knowledge spaces.