Michael Fisher, Ph.D.

Using open source code has become a popular way to save time and money in software development projects.  In many cases, open source can give you free functionality, access to a knowledgeable community of fellow programmers, and stability and performance as good as, or possibly even better than, that of commercially available code.  But just because the code is free does not mean that it is not subject to a license.  Hidden dangers lurk for those who incorporate open source code into their projects without understanding what they’re agreeing to.  Some common licenses such as the GPL have extreme provisions and implications. This talk will review some of the advantages and disadvantages of open source, common open source licenses and their key provisions, and approaches for avoiding the pitfalls of some of those licenses.

Biography:

Michael A. Fisher, Ph.D. is an intellectual property attorney who draws on his background in electrical engineering to represent medical device, electronics, computer, semiconductor, and other clients in complex patent and trade secret litigation matters. He also devotes part of his practice to patent licensing, patent counseling, and software copyright matters.  Prior to his legal career, Dr. Fisher worked as a research and development engineer in the areas of solid state electronics, equipment-control software, and micromechanical devices.

Michael Mayor, P.E. of Systems-Science PLLC

This presentation covers the science of search engine rankings developed by Google. This is a multinational, publicly traded, company very well known in the Internet, built around the hugely successful search engine. In fact, the search engine and particularly the mathematics behind it, is one of the reasons of Google’s huge success in the Internet arena. Search Engines have become an integral part of handling Big Data where searches must be conducted, preferably in seconds, over millions of entries. This talk addresses first a brief history of Information Retrieval and the early search engines, like Boolean, Vector Space, Probabilistic and Meta Search Engines and subsequently goes into an in depth explanation of the search process. The lecture continues with an explanation of the Page Ranking method and the Mathematics of Google’s PageRank. Finally, I present an overview of the massive Computer Hardware, i.e. server farms, which make possible a practical, real-time, implementation of the PageRank algorithms. Cleve Moler, the founder of Matlab, wrote an article for his October 2002 Newsletter Matlab News that cited PageRank as “The World’s Largest Matrix Computation.”  Then Google was applying the power method to a sparse matrix of order 2.7 billion. Now it is up to 8.1 billion.

Biography:

Mr. Mayor is currently an independent consultant providing Telecommunications Systems Engineering Services in the area of Secure wireline and wireless Communications Networks. His consulting services extend to Digital Signal Processing Algorithm development, RF propagation analysis and applying Model Based Systems Engineering Design. Formerly, he was Vice President, Advanced Technology Research, at ITT Defense Electronics. In this capacity he conducted Research and Directed the Development of a wide range of secure communications systems and their components, including Radio Frequency Transceivers, Software Defined and Cognitive Radio Systems, Digital Receivers, Digital Signal Processing algorithms and Precision Emitter Geolocation Systems. He authored six patents in the areas of Spread Spectrum Communications and Digital Instrumentation.

Mr. Mayor is a Licensed Professional Engineer and holds an MSE from the Moore School of EE, University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), a member of the National Military Intelligence Association and a member of the Association of Old Crows (The Electronic Warfare Association).

Michael Fisher

Biography:

Address:Philadelphia, United States

Michael Mayor, P.E.

Biography:

Address:Philadelphia, United States