Roger Needham      Microsoft Research Ltd, Cambridge, UK

"Should CS students use modern tools?"

Roger M. Needham has been in computing at Cambridge since 1956. His 1961 Ph.D thesis was on the application of digital computers to problems of classification and grouping. In 1962 he joined the Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, and has been on the faculty since 1963. He took a leading role in Cambridge projects in operating systems, time sharing systems, memory protection, local area networks, and distributed systems over the next twenty years.

Dr. Needham has worked at intervals on a variety of topics in security, being particularly known for work with Schroeder on authentication protocols (1978) and with Burrows and Abadi on formalism for reasoning about them (1989).

Dr. Needham graduated from the University of Cambridge in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1956, and then took the Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing in 1957. He was Head of the Computer Laboratory from 1980 to 1995, was promoted Professor in 1981, elected to the Royal Society in 1985 and the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1993, and appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 1996. He became Director of Microsoft Research Limited in 1997, retiring from the University in 1998.

Risto Näätänen      University of Helsinki, Finland

"How to measure and analyse sound-discrimination accuracy directly from brain waves"

Risto Näätänen´s main research are is cognitive neuroscience and curretly he is the director of the cognitive brain research unit at the University of Helsinki. In 1978, he with his group found the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response which currently provides the only objective measure for the accuracy of auditory perception and therefore has several clinical and other applications. Currently MMN is one of the most popular measures of cognitive electrophysiology. In 1995, Näätänen received the award for distinguished contributions to psychophysiology by the Society of Psychophysiological Research (SPR) and in 1997 he was given the first science prize of Finland. Näätänen is the author of more than 200 international refereed articles and two English-language books (with Summala: Road-User Behavior and Traffic Accidents, North-Holland and American Elsevier 1976; Attention and Brain Function, Erlbaum 1992).

Lynn Andrea Stein      Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

"Radically Rethinking CS1"

Lynn Andrea Stein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received the A.B. degree in computer science from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1986 and the Sc.M. (1987) and Ph.D. (1990) from the Department of Computer Science at Brown University.

Dr. Stein's research spans the fields of cognitive robotics, commonsense reasoning, software agents, human-computer interaction and collaboration, object-oriented programming, and computer science education. She is a recipient of the 1995 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award as well as the of the 1992 General Electric Foundation Faculty for the Future Award.

Dr. Stein spent 1998 as a Fellow at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute. There, she expanded her work on computational metaphors and computer science education, including writing a draft of her forthcoming textbook, Introduction to Interactive Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers). That book, a part of the Rethinking CS101 Project, is currently being beta tested by over a thousand students in half a dozen classrooms around the world.