2008 GCER Featured Speakers
Hunter Heyck
Associate Professor of the History of Science
University of Oklahoma
Dr. Hunter Heyck is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. After graduating from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a B.A. in history, he went to work at the Office of Technology Assessment, “Congress’ Own Think Tank,” where he worked on a study of how new technologies were changing educational requirements in the workplace. He then went to graduate school in Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his PhD in 2000. His PhD thesis later became a book, Herbert A. Simon: the Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). The book is an intellectual biography of Herbert Simon, who was one of the central figures in the development of cognitive science and AI as well as a Nobel Prize winner in economics.
Professor Heyck came to OU in the fall of 2001, after working as co-curator of an exhibit at the National Library of Medicine comparing the history and social impacts of the telegraph and the Internet. This exhibit, The Once and Future Web: Worlds Woven by Telegraph and Internet, still has a Web presence at www.nlm.nih.gov/onceandfutureweb/ At OU, he has continued to be interested in the ways that people use new technologies as models or metaphors to help them understand their world. His current research project, which has won support from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, is titled The Branching Tree: structure, process, and hierarchy in 20th-Century human science. He is on the editorial board of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, and he is book reviews editor and member of the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
Gregg E. Maryniak
Director of the James S. McDonnell Planetarium
Secretary and Executive Vice President of the X PRIZE Foundation
Gregg Maryniak is the Director of the James S. McDonnell Planetarium and the Secretary and Executive Vice President of the X PRIZE Foundation. He formerly served as Executive Director of the X PRIZE Foundation, Senior Scientist of the Futron Corporation and Chief Executive Officer of the Space Studies Institute of Princeton.
Maryniak is a member of the faculty of the International Space University. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics named him a Distinguished Lecturer for his presentation, “The Harvest of Space.” He was awarded Russia’s Tsiolkovsky Medal for his work on the use of the resources of free space. He received the Space Frontier Foundation’s Vision to Reality Award for his role in creating the Lunar Prospector Mission launched in 1998.
An instrument-rated commercial pilot with more than 30 years of flight experience, Maryniak was the Flight Director for Erik Lindbergh’s New Spirit of St. Louis flights in 2002. In 2006 he was the recipient of the St. Louis Flight Instructors Association’s James Byrnes Aviation Excellence Award. He serves as the Vice Chairman of the Lindbergh Foundation.
Lynne Parker
Professor and founder of the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory
University of Tennesee, Knoxille
Dr. Lynne Parker is Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she directs the research of the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory. Additionally, she holds an appointment as Adjunct Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where she worked as a full time researcher for several years. Dr. Parker received her Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), performing her research in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with a minor in brain and cognitive science.
Dr. Parker has published over 100 articles in the areas of mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation. Her research has been supported by NSF, DARPA, ORNL, DOE, JPL, SAIC, Caterpillar, and HRL. For this research, she was awarded the PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) in 2000, and was the 2007 UT Department of Computer Science Professor of the Year. Prof. Parker is also committed to teaching and training the Next generation of scholars in computer science. She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate classes at the University of Tennessee in robotics, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and related topics. She is a senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and is on the Editorial Board of IEEE Intelligent Systems. Dr. Parker is a senior member of IEEE, and is also a member of Sigma Xi, AAAI, and ACM.
Deborah A. Trytten
Acting Associate Director and Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Oklahoma
Dr. Deborah A. Trytten is Acting Associate Director and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma. She received a B.A. in physics and mathematics from Albion College, in Albion, Michigan. She has MS degrees in both applied mathematics and computer science, and a PhD in computer science from Michigan State University. She is a Faculty Fellow of the K20 Center for Educational and Community Renewal. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Society of Engineering Educators.
Dr. Trytten’s current research interests include: gender and ethnic/racial diversity issues in engineering education, undergraduate education in computer science, collaborative learning, serious games, and the use of technology in classroom teaching. Dr. Trytten has authored papers in the Journal of Engineering Education, the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education, the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, College Teaching, Pattern Recognition, and the Frontiers in Education Conference. She has been an investigator on more than thirty grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Education, and several state agencies. She has receive the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Academic Advising, a Distinguished Lectureship in Engineering, College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Academic Advisor Award, and is a member of the Oklahoma State Science and Engineering Fair Hall of Fame.
Scott Wilson
Associate Director Star Schools Project
University of Oklahoma
Since 1992, Scott has served as a middle school/high school science teacher, technology coordinator, coach, library media specialist, instructional materials coordinator, instructional technology coordinator, educational technology team leader, science curriculum coach, and a federal grant administrator in both a small rural and large urban school settings.
He has B.S. in Natural Science Education from Southwestern Oklahoma State University, M.L.I.S. in Library and Information Studies from the University of Oklahoma, and a PhD in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum from the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include: digital game-based learning, technology integration, professional development (specifically technology integration PD), and management of constructivist classrooms.