For each Lecture, OTUG will host a light hors d'oeuvres dinner at 5:30 PM, followed by the evening lecture from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, with a 20-minute break halfway for dessert and coffee. All Lectures take place at the O'Shaughnessy Education Center on the St. Paul Campus of the University of St. Thomas. 

OTUG 2001 DLS Ticket Information:
Tickets can be purchased at the door per event: $25 for members and students, $30 for non-members. Or save $20 by purchasing the entire series of four presentations in advance: $80 for members and students, $100 for non-members. If you wish to purchase tickets in advance, please send a check payable to OTUG, and mail to the address below. Note: pre-sales series ticket orders MUST be received by June 11th. Tickets and receipts may be picked up the night of the presentation. Single evening tickets may be pre-purchased up to one week in advance; otherwise they can be purchased at the door.

Mail to the following address:
OTUG 2001 Distinguished Lecture Series Ticket Sales
Talent Software Services
C/O Pam Rostal
5353 Wayzata Boulevard
Suite 200
Minneapolis, MN 55416

If you are not currently a member and you wish to join, you may downloading a membership form from the OTUG web site: www.otug.org . Complete it and turn it in along with your Distinguished Series purchase. Dues are $20.00 annually, or $35.00 for two years.

Please join ArchWing and OTUG for these exceptional presentations.


Lecture Overviews

Lecture 1

June 19th
"Making Machines Fit for Human Consumption"
Presented by Jef Raskin

We cannot live without our computers and information appliances, but they are certainly hard to live with. A lot of this difficulty is unnecessary, and is a consequence of bad design and a profound misunderstanding of human psychology. Every current computer-related product design is based on ideas that, while only a quarter-century old, already have the status of received truths.

Research old and new tells us how we should design these products, and the conclusions are novel and surprising, showing that modest "fixes" to today's methods cannot succeed. This talk calls for nothing less than a revolution in information product design.

Jef Raskin is a user interface and system design consultant based in Pacifica, California. He is the author of "The Humane Interface" (Addison-Wesley 2000), the inventor of the Apple Macintosh and the Canon Cat computers, and was the CEO of Information Appliance, Inc. His clients range from start-ups to multinationals and government agencies, including NASA, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, NCR, Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, McKesson, Intel, and AT&T. Raskin's publications number over 500 articles in some 40 periodicals including Wired, Forbes ASAP, IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Computer, Nature, Quantum, newspapers, Innovations, and the Communications of the ACM. Raskin has taught computer science at the University of California, Stanford University, and elsewhere. He was the conductor and music director of the San Francisco Chamber Opera Co. See http://www.jefraskin.com for further information.

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Lecture 2

July 17th
"People, Poetry & Culture: Re-inventing Software Development"
Presented by David West

Mathematics, logic and metaphors of machines, engineering, and science have driven software development for fifty years. Is it finally time to recognize the sterility and failure engendered by traditional approaches? Is it finally time to cast aside stale and tired ideas and attempt a radical reinvention of software development? If so, what philosophical foundations might we draw upon? What metaphors can we employ to guide our thinking? And what might we salvage from the past fifty years?

Dr. David West received his graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin, and joined the New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) faculty in fall 1999 as Professor of Management Information System. He has more than 20 years experience in systems and software development, as well as 12 years experience teaching at the university level. He developed the object and architecture curriculum at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, the largest graduate software engineering program in the world, and the new MIS curriculum for NMHU. He has also presented seminars to more than 100 corporate clients, such as IBM, Honeywell, and Wells Fargo Bank, throughout the United States and six other countries. The NMHU web site is under construction, but you can visit http://www.dreamsongs.com/ChiliPLoPinvite.html for an idea of what Dr. David West will be talking about.

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Lecture 3

September 18th
"A New Approach to Process Improvement using Patterns"
Presented by Linda Rising

In the new economy, new process approaches are needed. We are seeing lightweight methodologies like eXtreme Programming and Scrum but are we forgetting that process improvement itself must be implemented iteratively?

How can we improve if we can't learn quickly? Documenting successes as patterns and learning as fast as we can from our mistakes will enable us to improve. There are many approaches to knowledge management and patterns is just one of those. Patterns do more than capture good design practices; they are also useful for documenting process and organizational strategies.

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the area of object-based design metrics. Her background includes university teaching experience as well as work in industry in the areas of telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. She has been working with object technologies since 1983. She is the editor of A Patterns Handbook, the editor of a special issue of IEEE Communications on Design Patterns in Communications Software, and the author of a chapter on Patterns Mining in the recent CRC Handbook of Object Technology. She has also published A Pattern Almanac 2000 and a collection of Design Patterns in Communications. Linda has presented a number of tutorials and workshops at OOPSLA and other conferences. She was the conference chair for the first Southwestern patterns conference, ChiliPLoP, held in Wickenburg, AZ, March 1998.

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Lecture 4

October 11
"What Your Mother Never Told You about Object-Oriented Programming."
Presented by Kristen Nygaard

The first lecture will give a survey of how object-oriented programming was created and started to spread. Also a number of anecdotes, but mainly presenting the world picture -the perspective - of the Simula languages, and the various versions of that picture built into other object-oriented languages.

The next lecture will present what in Kristen Nygaard's opinion should be the basic concepts of informatics: 

* Perspectives,
* Information processes, with substance, states, and transitions as their basic aspects,
* Structure,
* Inheritance and virtual procedures and quantities.

The third lecture will be a continuation of the second lecture with some concluding remarks about the three basic families of languages:

* Substance-oriented (object-oriented languages, database languages as examples)
* State-oriented (the PROLOG language as example), and
* Transition-oriented languages (procedure-oriented languages, functional languages)

Then he will briefly cover his recent work in language constructs, using the theatre metaphor to model layered architectures.

Kristen Nygaard invented in the 1960s, together with Ole-Johan Dahl, the Simula languages, the first object-oriented programming languages, containing the key object-oriented concepts: objects, classes, inheritance, virtual procedures and multi-threaded program execution. Since then he has been a key actor in the field, developing the BETA language, as well as doing research in system development and social aspects of informatics (computer science). In October 1990 the American association Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility awarded him its Norbert Wiener Prize for responsibility in social and professional work. In June 2000 he was awarded a Honorary Fellowship for "his originating of object technology concepts" by the Object Management Group, the international standardization organization within object-orientation. See http://www.ifi.uio.no/~kristen/index.html for further information.

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