Castello di Bertinoro
June 20, 2007

Representatives from leading companies in information technology will discuss with the business and academic worlds the research and development strategies that are vital for growth and global competitiveness. Participation in the event is by invitation only.

Established in 2001, the Bertinoro international Center for informatics (BiCi) promotes research and advanced education in scientific and applied areas of computer science.

Biographical sketches of the speakers


Paul Horn - Senior Vice President and Director of Research, IBM
Dr. Paul M. Horn oversees the world's largest and most prolific research organization dedicated to information technology, with 3,000 researchers at eight labs worldwide. Under Horn's leadership as senior vice-president and director, IBM Research has produced an unmatched string of technological breakthroughs, including the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue, the world's first copper chip, the giant magneto-resistive head (GMR) and strained silicon (a discovery that allows chips to run up to 35 percent faster). A solid state physicist by training, Horn has also led IBM Research into a distinctly cross-disciplinary Grand Challenge with project Blue Gene — a $100 million dollar effort to build the world's first petaflop-scale computer for the express purpose of helping to understand how human proteins fold.
Prabhakar Raghavan - Head, Yahoo! Research
Prabhakar Raghavan has been Head of Yahoo! Research since July 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. Prior to joining Yahoo, he was Senior Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer at Verity; before that he held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.
Eric Schmidt - Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO, Google
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company's strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. At Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Prior to his appointment at Novell, Eric was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun's platform-independent programming technology, and defined Sun's Internet software strategy. Before joining Sun in 1983, he was a member of the research staff at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. Eric has a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, and a master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California-Berkeley.