Dick Thornburgh and Herbert S. Lin, Editors

Committee to Study Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography and Their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Internet Content

Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

National Research Council



E.

 

Biographies




E.1.

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS



Richard Thornburgh, chair, served as governor of Pennsylvania, attorney general of the United States and under-secretary-general of the United Nations during a public career that spanned more than 25 years. He is currently counsel to the national law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP, resident in its Washington, D.C., office. Elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1978 and reelected in 1982, Thornburgh was the first Republican ever to serve two successive terms in that office and was named by his fellow governors as one of the nation's most effective big-state governors in a 1986 Newsweek poll. After his unanimous confirmation by the U. S. Senate, Thornburgh served 3 years as attorney general of the United States (1988-1991) under Presidents Reagan and Bush. Thornburgh took vigorous action against racial, religious, and ethnic hate crimes, and his office mounted a renewed effort to enforce the nation's anti-trust and environmental laws. During his tenure as attorney general, Thornburgh twice personally argued and won cases before the U. S. Supreme Court. All told, Thornburgh served in the Justice Department under five presidents, beginning as a United States Attorney in Pittsburgh (1969-1975) and Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division (1975-1977), emphasizing efforts against major drug traffickers, organized crime, and corrupt public officials. Thornburgh was educated at Yale University, where he obtained an engineering degree, and at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he served as an editor of the Law Review. Thornburgh served as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government (1987-1988) and was a visiting lecturer at the George Washington University Law School (1995). Thornburgh is a member of the board of directors of Elan Corporation, plc and serves on the boards of the Urban Institute, the National Museum of Industrial History, the DeWitt Wallace Fund for Colonial Williamsburg, and the National Academy of Public Administration. He is chairman of the State Science and Technology Institute and vice-chairman of the World Committee on Disability. He also chairs the Legal Policy Advisory Board of the Washington Legal Foundation. He is a member of the American Bar Foundation, the American Judicature Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nicholas J. Belkin is a professor at the Rutgers University School of Library and Information Science. His research involves the development of theory, design principles, and systems that will lead to effective and humane information support for human problem management. Such a program entails understanding people's problem situations, and how they attempt to resolve them....in a variety of contexts; the nature and functions of information support communication; and information representation, retrieval, and presentation appropriate to such contexts. These factors lead to specific research goals, which currently include characterization and classification of human information-related problems; description and an analysis of human-human information interaction and design of human-computer information interaction; and classification of human information-seeking strategies and interactions with texts.

The Reverend William J. Byron, S.J. teaches "Social Responsibilities of Business" in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where he holds an appointment as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Ethics and serves as rector of the Georgetown Jesuit community. From 1982 to 1992, he was president of the Catholic University of America. Prior assignments include service as president of the University of Scranton (1975 to 1982), dean of arts and sciences at Loyola University of New Orleans (1973 to 1975), and various teaching positions in his field of economics and social ethics. Father Byron is the author of several books, including Quadrangle Considerations (Loyola, 1989; winner of the Catholic Press Association's 1990 Best Book Award in Education), and Answers from Within: Spiritual Guidelines for Managing Setbacks in Work and Life (Macmillan, 1998); he also edited The Causes of World Hunger (Paulist, 1982) and Take Courage: Psalms of Support and Encouragement (Sheed & Ward, 1995). He is a trustee of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, Loyola College in Maryland, and the University of San Francisco; he was a founding director and past chairman of Bread for the World, a public member of the board of commissioners of the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, and an original member of the board of directors of the Federal Commission on National and Community Service (now the Council of Independent Colleges' Academic Leadership Award). Father Byron grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended St. Joseph's Preparatory School. After service in the Army's 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in 1945 to 1946, he attended Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia for 3 years before entering the Jesuit order in 1950. He was ordained a priest in 1961.

Sandra L. Calvert is director of the Children and Media Project at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in developmental and child psychology from the University of Kansas in 1982. Dr. Calvert is a professor of psychology, an associate member of the linguistics department, and a core member of the communication, culture, and technology program at Georgetown University. Her research involves how information technologies, such as television and computers, influence children's attention, memory, and comprehension. She is particularly interested in how the forms of media (i.e., features such as action, sound effects, and language) interface with how children think (e.g., visually or verbally) at different points in their development. Her recently published book, Children's Journeys Through the Information Age (McGraw Hill, 1999), provides a critical synthesis of the research on children's social and cognitive development in relation to information technologies.

David Forsyth is associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned researcher in the area of object recognition; several of his papers describe systems for identifying humans and their activities in single images. He holds a BSc. and MSc. in electrical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a D.Phil from Balliol College, Oxford. He has published more than 60 papers in computer vision and computer graphics. He is currently co-authoring Computer Vision--A Modern Approach, a graduate textbook in computer vision; some 20 chapters are currently available on the Web. He has served as a referee for all the main professional journals in the area, and he is currently program co-chair for the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference and a member of the program committee for the European Conference on Computer Vision.

Daniel Geer is chief technologist officer for @stake Inc., a privately held confidential e-commerce consulting firm. Dr. Geer previously served as vice president and senior strategist for CertCo, as director of engineering at Open Market Inc., and as chief scientist, vice president of technology, and managing director for OpenVision Technologies. He has served as a technical director within Digital Equipment Corporation's research division and was for a number of years the manager of systems development for MIT's Project Athena, where he was the responsible manager for all technical development, including the X Window System, Kerberos, and others. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a Sc.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.

Linda Hodge of Colchester, Connecticut, is National PTA president-elect, 2000-2003. Prior to becoming president-elect, Hodge was National PTA Vice President for Programs, 1999-2001. She is a former National PTA Region 7 director, which included representing the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. She has also chaired the National PTA Bylaws, Technology/Safety, and Membership Committees and is a former member of the Executive, Budget, and Leadership Committees, and the IOD Cultural Arts Subcommittee. Hodge is a past president of Hawaii State PTA. Hodge is a National PTA honorary life member as well as an honorary life member of fourteen state PTAs. Included among her awards are the California PTA Honorary Service Award, the California PTA Continuing Service Award, and the Vallejo School District Award Recognizing Outstanding Parent Volunteers. Outside of the PTA, Hodge serves on the board of directors of the Flock Theatre, a regional theater group serving Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. Her volunteer activities have included serving on the boards of local Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Little League, and youth center organizations. Hodge holds an A.S. degree in computer science and is currently taking courses at Eastern Connecticut State University in business administration.

Marilyn Mason has more than 25 years of management experience with 20 years as a chief executive in complex and highly political organizations. She has served as director of two major urban library systems (Cleveland Public Library and Atlanta Public Library) and of the 1979 White House Conference on Library and Information Services. She has a demonstrated track record of providing the leadership and management expertise needed to bring about institutional innovation and change in short periods of time. She serves on the board of trustees of the Council on Library and Information Resources and the board of directors of Data Research Associates Inc., and has served on numerous national and international advisory committees. She has also directed research and management consulting projects and has published widely, most recently in the areas of strategic management and the integration of print and electronic information. She received her M.P.A. from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in 1978.

Milo Medin is senior vice president of engineering and chief technology officer of Excite@Home. Mr. Medin oversees the development of Excite@Home's high-speed backbone. @Home's performance-engineered scalable network removes Internet "traffic jams" and enables true end-to-end management. In addition, the network employs replication and caching technologies that dramatically improve network efficiency. Prior to joining Excite@Home, Medin served as project manager at NASA Ames Research Center. During his tenure, he directed the NASA National Research and Education Network project that, in combination with partners at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab oratory, deployed a high-speed national ATM infrastructure connecting major supercomputing and data archiving centers. He also supervised the primary West Coast Internet interconnect network. In addition, he pioneered the global NASA Science Internet project, providing network infrastructure for science at more than 200 sites in 16 countries and 5 continents, including Antarctica, and initially helped establish the TCP/IP protocol as an industry standard. Before working at NASA, Medin held various positions at Science Applications Inc., programming supercomputers for defense program activities at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab oratory and Los Alamos National Lab, under contract to the Defense Nuclear Agency. Medin has a B.S. in computer science from the University of California, at Berkeley.

John B. Rabun was a founder and has been the vice president and chief operating officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children since April 1984. He administers the national clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Virginia, with 5 branches throughout the United States, a staff of 154, and an annual budget of $38.5 million, two-thirds of which comes from Congress via the Department of Justice. Mr. Rabun received a B.A. from Mercer University in 1967, an M.S.W. from the University of Louisville in 1971, and membership in the Academy of Certified Social Workers in 1973. From 1973 to 1984, he was a sworn juvenile officer, founded and managed the Louisville-Jefferson Co. Kentucky Exploited and Missing Child Unit as the first police/social work special investigations team on child sexual exploitation. Immediately before that, he was the executive director for the Kentucky affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Rabun has provided consultation and technical assistance as a member of the international Expert Network on Self-Regulation of Internet Content for child protection for the Bertelsmann Foundation, Gutersloh, Germany, and INCORE (Internet Content Ratting for Europe), Munich, Germany, over the last 2 years. Mr. Rabun has authored numerous publications and frequently makes guest appearances on national TV and radio specials and news programs.

Robin Raskin is a technology consultant with Ziff Davis Media specializing in consumer technologies. She is regarded as one of the leading authorities on today's family and how they cope (or not) with technology. The former Editor in Chief and founder of FamilyPC, Raskin has been writing, lecturing, and consulting in the consumer technology arena for the past twenty years. Prior to launching FamilyPC, Raskin was the Editor of PC Magazine. As a freelance writer her work appeared in such magazines as PC World, PC Week, InfoWorld, Working Mother, Working Woman, Child and Newsday. Raskin has authored 6 books about parenting in the digital ages and is a frequent guest on many of the morning news shows. Raskin writes a syndicated column for USAToday.com and for the Gannett News Services, which appears in more than 150 newspapers around the country and is also the on-air host for a "connected family" TV broadcast that is distributed nationally, reaching 4-6 million viewers monthly. Raskin resides in New York City and Hudson Valley with her husband, three children, and a pile of ever-changing computer equipment.

Robert J. Schloss is research senior software engineer at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His work on digital endorsement, annotation, and reputation data as strategies for on-the-fly information quality assessment, on personalization strategies for Web content, and on modular data interchange vocabularies began in the early 1990s. Mr. Schloss was a major contributor to the World Wide Web Consortium's PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) recommendation (now implemented in major browsers, proxies, and Web servers), including the ability to filter using metadata provided by third-party rating/labeling agencies instead of, or in conjunction with, the metadata provided by the content owner. (PICS was one technology considered by the courts in ruling that the Communications Decency Act section of the telecommunications reform bill was unnecessary.) Mr. Schloss co-chaired the W3C's follow-on effort on metadata interchange frameworks, the Resource Description Framework Data Model and Syntax (RDF), which became a recommendation in 1999. His work includes content sharing strategies across broadband, Web and wireless systems. His work (with others) on XML Schema Language is a basis for the Data Description Language proposal being considered for the MPEG-7 proposed standards for description of multimedia content. He has been on the program committee of the WWW conferences, teaches tutorials on metadata strategies at WebNet and XML conferences, and is an IEEE senior member and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and ACM.

Janet Ward Schofield is a professor of psychology and a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a social psychologist whose research during the last 25 years has explored the impact of social and technological change in educational settings. This work has led to the publication of over 50 papers and three books, the most recent of which is Bringing the Internet to School: Lessons from an Urban District (Jossey-Bass, New York, 2002). Professor Schofield received a B.A. from Harvard University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in 1968. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in social psychology from Harvard University as well. She currently serves as a member of the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education of the National Research Council. She recently also served as a member of the governing body of the American Psychological Association, the Council of Representatives.

Geoffrey R. Stone is University of Chicago Provost and Harry Kalven, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Law. Professor Stone received his undergraduate degree in 1968 from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Law Review, was awarded his degree cum laude, and was elected to membership in the Order of the Coif. Following graduation in 1971, Mr. Stone served as law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He spent the next year as law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Stone was admitted to the New York Bar in 1972 and has been a member of the faculty since 1973. From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Stone served as dean of the Law School. Mr. Stone has served on the board of governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, Illinois Division, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an ex-officio member of the American Law Institute, a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the Board of Advisers of the National Association of Public Interest Law_The Public Service Challenge, a member of the Advisory Board of the Legal Aid Society, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation. Mr. Stone has taught courses in constitutional law, civil procedure, evidence, criminal procedure, contracts and regulation of the competitive process. Mr. Stone has written a casebook with Mr. Sunstein in the area of constitutional law. He has also written numerous articles concerning such matters as the freedom of speech and press, freedom of religion, the constitutionality of police use of secret agents and informants, the privilege against self-incrimination, the Supreme Court, and the FBI. Mr. Stone is the editor, with David Strauss and Dennis Hutchinson, of the Supreme Court Review.

Winnie Wechsler has been operating Internet businesses targeted to children and families since 1995. Most recently, she was executive vice president and general manager of Internet and broadband services for Lightspan Inc., an educational software and Internet services company. Prior to that, she was with the Walt Disney Company for 14 years, where she held various management positions. In 1995, she was one of the founders of Disney Online and was responsible for the launch and growth of Disney.com, which is currently the most visited destination for children and families on the Web. She was also senior vice president of Buena Vista Internet Group (now Walt Disney Internet Group), where she set strategic direction, both internationally and domestically, for all of Disney's Internet properties. Throughout, she has been concerned with the ways that commercial enterprises can create responsible methods for advertising and marketing to children on the Web. Prior to working in the Internet industry, she was a senior executive with the Disney Channel for 10 years. She holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from Wellesley College.


E.2.

 

PROJECT STAFF



Herbert Lin is senior scientist and senior staff officer at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, where he has been the study director for major projects on public policy and information technology. These studies include a 1996 study on national cryptography policy (Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society), a 1991 study on the future of computer science (Computing the Future), a 1999 study of Defense Department systems for command, control, communications, computing, and intelligence (Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges), and a 2000 study on workforce issues in high-technology (Building a Workforce for the Information Economy). Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986 to 1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He also has significant expertise in math and science education. He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1979. Avocationally, he is a long-time folk and swing dancer, and a poor magician. Apart from his CSTB work, a list of publications in cognitive science, science education, biophysics, and arms control and defense policy is available on request.

Gail Pritchard was a program officer at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, where she contributed research and administrative skills to help produce such reports as Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society; Being Fluent with Information Technology, and Building a Workforce for the Information Economy. Within the Center for Education, Ms. Pritchard has contributed to the reports, Developing a Digital National Library for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education; and Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education. She also served as study director of two committees charged with reviewing drafts of the most recent K-12 mathematics and technology standards, and is currently a program officer with the committees on Undergraduate Science Education and Science Education K-12. Prior to joining the NRC, Ms. Pritchard was a program specialist in the offices of the Secretary and the University and Science Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. Ms. Pritchard received a B.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College and an M.Ed. from the University of Virginia.

Joah G. Iannotta is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota and a research assistant for the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Since joining the Board, Ms. Iannotta has been involved in the development of a wide range of projects on topics including adolescent risk and vulnerability, children's development and computer technology, and the social and economic benefits and losses of family leave. She edited a report entitled Nontechnical Strategies to Reduce Children's Exposure to Inappropriate Material on the Internet and is a co-editor of Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability: Approaches to Setting Priorities to Reduce Their Burden, published by the National Academy Press. Prior to her position on the Board, Ms. Iannotta was a research fellow at the University of Minnesota's Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport. In addition to conducting analyses of the social and cultural impact of sport on issues of equity, Ms. Iannotta coordinated the Tucker Center's "Image Is Everything" program. This educational workshop introduced high school female athletes to a critique of the media's often highly sexualized portrayal of female athletes and encouraged them to develop their own action plans for addressing issues of equity in sports within their schools and communities. Ms. Iannotta is finishing her doctoral work at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Kinesiology with a concentration in sport sociology and a minor in feminist studies. Her dissertation work uses qualitative research methodologies to uncover strategies collegiate coaches use to address issues of equity (e.g., racism, sexism, and homophobia) within women's athletics in order to create tolerant and cohesive climates on their teams in which all athletes can thrive and develop.

Janice M. Sabuda joined the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board in August 2001. Currently, she is focusing on two projects, Privacy in the Information Age, and Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography on the Internet and Their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Content. She began her term with work on the Global Networks and Local Values project (2001). Prior to joining the National Academies, Ms. Sabuda worked as a customer service representative at eContributor.com, an online fundraising company, and as a product trainer and research associate at a Fairfax, Virginia, prospect research firm. She received her B.S. in business administration from the State University of New York College at Fredonia.











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Copyright 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences
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