• Jonathan Murray
  
  
• Ram Raju
  
  
• Mazen A. R. Saghir
  
  
• Mauricio Ulargui
  
  
• Bassam Eter
  
  
• Alexander Vaschillo
  
  
• Mark Lewin
  
  
• Serge Lidin
  
  

• Mr Daniel Vlok
  
  
• Prof Barry Dwolatzky
  
  
• Rossouw von Solms
  
  
• Arkady Retik
  
  
• John Lefor
  
  
• Alexander Holy
  
  
• Rizwan Tufail
  
  
• Dr. Arshad Siddiqi
  
  

Jonathan Murray

Vice President &
EMEA Chief Technology Officer
Microsoft Corporation

As Vice President and EMEA Chief Technology Officer, Jonathan leads the EMEA Technology Office which engages with technology policy makers concerning the future direction of high impact technologies and the implication of these trends on government’s social and economic policy agendas. Through these engagements, Jonathan and his team work to ensure that the unique needs of government and public sector organizations are increasingly reflected in Microsoft’s technology and development strategies. Jonathan also leads Microsoft’s community of World Wide Technology Officers. In this role he is responsible for ensuring that the expertise and engagement experience of the company’s technology officers is shared globally for the benefit of public sector technology policy makers around the world. Jonathan writes on technology policy issues at http://www.technologypolicyblog.com

Prior to his current role Jonathan spent 10 years at Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Most recently he held the position of Vice President of Global Accounts; an organization which he founded in 2000. The Global Accounts Organization is responsible for managing the relationship with Microsoft’s fifty largest global customers. He held this position for three years prior to moving into his current role. Jonathan joined Microsoft in July 1994 as marketing manager in the Worldwide Enterprise Technical Marketing organization and subsequently held the positions of group manager, director and then general manager of this organization until May 1999 when he became general manager of the Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Satisfaction organization.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Jonathan spent five years with ARCO International Oil and Gas as a technology strategist. He was responsible for information technology projects aimed at improving organizational effectiveness though improved collaboration and knowledge sharing. Jonathan previously worked for Scientific Software Intercomp (SSI), an oil industry consulting company, and for Logica, one of the UK’s leading systems integration companies, on various large-scale systems projects.

Jonathan was born in the United Kingdom and is a keen amateur photographer and astronomer. He graduated in 1984 from Kingston Polytechnic in the UK with a Bachelor of Science.

The Future of Computing in the Sciences

Microsoft's vision of how the software industry can contribute to accelerating scientific research and engineering innovation.

Ram Raju

Ram Raju holder of B.A., B.Sc., MBA is the President and CEO of e-academy Inc. based in Ottawa, Canada.

In 1997, after 12 years as an educator and administrator at Dalhousie University in Canada, Ram has founded e-academy Inc. (formerly PowerKnowledge Inc.)
The mission of e-academy Inc. was to reduce all barriers between software manufacturers and educational institutions in order to enhance education.
e-academy Inc. has also pioneered software rentals for a host of applications including statistics, mathematics and CAD/CAM software. e-academy Inc currently operators storefronts in 46 countries in five languages.

Ram's specialization before entering software was in mathematical modeling of marine ecosystems.
Other than his passion for removing barriers to software access in education, Ram enjoys being with his family, and traveling to remote places to improve his moderate skills in watercolor painting.

Mazen A. R. Saghir

Is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He received his BE in Computer and Communications Engineering from AUB in 1989, and his M.A.Sc. & Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1993 and 1998, respectively. Prior to joining AUB, he worked as Embedded Software Engineer at Nortel Networks (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) and Senior Software Engineer at Improv Systems (San Jose, California, USA). His research interests include computer architecture, optimizing compilers, configurable computing, and embedded systems design.

MSR-Sponsored Research at the American Univesrity of Beirut: Experiences and Lessons Learned

In 2003, the American University of Beirut (AUB) won an Embedded Systems Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft Research to investigate accelerating next-generation Windows CE.NET applications using run-time configurable coprocessors. The award was a first for a university in the Arab world. This talk describes our experience and highlights some of the issues that we faced while working on the project. It also makes suggestions for enhancing future collaboration between Microsoft Research and universities in the region.

Mauricio Ulargui

Mauricio is currently responsible for the Microsoft Academic Developer Initiative across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This includes all activities with students and faculties and connecting research establishments with industry. He joined Microsoft in 2001 as .NET Director for Spain, responsible for .NET platform adoption amongst developers, ISVs, enterprises and academia, plus sales and marketing responsibilities for all development tools. He started his career as a researcher at Telefonica R&D working on object oriented technology and distributed systems. Later he started his own company focused on advanced systems for the financial market which merged with an Internet consultancy firm at the end of the 1990’s. Mauricio graduated as a computing engineer from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid and has an MBA from IESE Business School.

Bassam Eter

Bassam Eter graduated from the "Compiègne" University in France on December 1994 with a PhD in computer science. Since 1995, he's an associate professor at the Lebanese University, faculty of engineering, and teached in several others universities such as Balamand and Kaslik Universities of Lebanon. He is teaching programming and is involved in some researches on network security, neural networks and Bayesian nets. He has extensive experience in software developing on several platforms such as .Net, Unix and VxWorks real time executive. He is fluent in Pascal, C, C++ and C# .Net. In 2004, he introduced the .Net in the learning curriculum of the Lebanese University faculty of engineering. He is also involved in elearning and developed an online C# course for UNESCO in the framework of the Avicenna Virtual Campus project. He also published two French books for students: C/C++ (2000) and C# .Net (2004).




Teaching .Net at University

This presentation asks the following question: must universities introduce the .Net platform in their teaching curriculum? Maybe the question must rather be what are the advantages of such an introduction. We lean in this presentation on Bob Plummer's (Stanford university) proposition in which he recommends the introduction of a course dedicated to the .Net platform in the academic curriculum. We think that it's worth to adopt this platform as a development environment during the whole academic curriculum, and we propose a complete curriculum for teaching programming technologies at university. We finally put the stress on teaching C# and on the contents of the first programming course for undergraduate students.

• Need of .Net introducing.
• .Net: a special course or a development platform?
• Bob Plummer's (Stanford University) point of view.
• A curriculum proposal.
• Why to teach C#?
• The first programming course.

Alexander Vaschillo

Has been working in the database area since 1995, when he joined High Performance Database Research Center in Miami, Florida which he managed until early 2000. In his role of a Lead Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server he led the design and development of SQL Server XML functionality (SQLXML, SQL Server Web Services Toolkit), contributed to the design of WinFS, and database schemas for several Windows application domains. Alexander is a recipient of a number of excellence awards in Computer Science, holds multiple patents in the database modeling area, is a member of ACM and IEEE societies, has M.S. in Mathematics from St. Petersburg State University, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida International University.





Trends in Database Development: XML, .NET, WinFS

Session Synopsis:

Some of the biggest advances in database technology are nowadays happening in the areas other than relational optimizations, transactions, and query processing. This talk shows a number of new developments undertaken in SQL Server since the last release. Different ways to implement XML functionality in relational databases are explained (XML Datatype, SQLXML). New programming models for both server side (SQLCLR) and client side (Web Services) development are described. A new database-based file system (WinFS) that allows better data integration and more efficient data querying is introduced.

Mark Lewin

Is Manager, University Research Programs, in the University Relations Group of Microsoft Research. Mark supports academic research and teaching projects in the areas of compilers, runtimes, programming languages, tools, and associated topics. A key part of his portfolio is SSCLI - the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure, a package that includes source code for the C# compiler and the .NET infrastructure. Mark is a nine year veteran of Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, he worked closely with the Unix ISV community on Microsoft Developer Relations initiatives. Mark was also Program Manager for Microsoft's RPC technologies, the "Cairo" operating system project, and Microsoft LAN Manager.





SSCLI: The Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure for Research and Teaching

Session Synopsis:

SSCLI, the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure, is a portable working implementation of the ECMA CLI and the ECMA C# language specification, the technologies at the heart of Microsoft’s .NET architecture. This talk will provide a technical overview of the .NET programming model, a detailed discussion of SSCLI, and introduce the SSCLI Toolkit, a rich collection of information resources which support the use of SSCLI in research and teaching.

Serge Lidin

Has worked as a software developer for over 20 years – in different countries, different languages and platforms and in different areas, including astrophysical models, industrial process simulations, transaction processing in financial systems, and many others. For the last six years he has worked on the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime team. His responsibilities include design and development of IL Assembler, IL Disassembler, Metadata Validator, run-time metadata validation and file format verification in the execution engine. He still has nostalgic memories of the times when he lugged around a bagful of punched cards but likes his present laptop much better: it weighs less and holds more stuff. When not writing software or sleeping, he skis, plays tennis and reads books (his literary taste is below any criticism). Serge shares his time between Vancouver, BC, where his heart is, and Redmond, WA, where his brain is.





IL Assembler Today and Tomorrow

Session Synopsis:

This session will cover an Intermediate Language Assembler Technology Overview including compilers and build environments that employ IL Assembler. We will look at recent developments such as Generics, Custom Attribute encoding, Declarative security encoding, Compilation control directives, Reference aliasing (.typedef directive), Targeting 64 bit platforms, Type forwarding, and IL Disassembler new features. The session will also take a peek at the future, with Componentization, Nautilus Project, and the Phoenix Project.

Mr Daniel Vlok

Daniel is the Head of Department (Acting), Department of Information Systems. University of Fort Hare, South Africa.








Re-thinking the Mission of Information Systems departments in tertiary institutions

Session Synopsis:

Students graduating with degrees in Information Systems face an identity crisis. Contemporary IS academic offerings emphasize the importance of systems development throughout the curriculum, yet many students fail to deliver solid applications. Despite many hours spent by students to develop a near descent application, few manage to really pull it off. Worse, experience with systems development projects suggests that students spent such a lot of time trying to achieve some degree of functionality or adding frills that they miss the fundamental point of the exercise, namely to solve a real business problem.

Some will argue that IS academics simply do not prepare students adequately for current and future challenges. Others might argue that many students simply do not have the aptitude required for programming excellence. Fact remains, despite an eagerness to be part of IT in its different forms, many young graduates become disillusioned when wanting to enter the job market. They face tough competition from other young job seekers, particularly from those who had sound exposure to programming and other technical content at undergraduate level. Industry’s stance on the matter is: “we won’t hire IS graduates to do programming jobs!” The author argues that current IS offerings need a new mission and unless academics respond to certain critical signs and change their curricula accordingly, many IS departments could easily become irrelevant.

Prof Barry Dwolatzky

Prof. Barry is Professor of Software Engineering, Wits University, Johannesburg / Academic Director, Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE)
Prof Barry Dwolatzky qualified as an Electrical Engineer at Wits University. After completing his doctorate at Wits in 1979 he spent 10 years in Britain working on software-related research at both the Universities of Manchester (UMIST) and London (Imperial College), and at the GEC-Marconi Research Centre. He has worked on a number of large software development projects.

He returned to Wits in 1989 where he educates software engineers and carries out research. Barry’s driving passion is to promote the growth and development of the South African software industry. He has been the driving force behind a number of strategic initiatives at Wits. He set up the Information Engineering option in Electrical Engineering at Wits. He developed a course-based Masters programme in Software Engineering, and succeeded in having this registered as a Learnership within the SA Government’s skills development framework. He has also been a major player in setting up the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering at Wits (JCSE).

Prof Dwolatzky has published over 40 research papers in journals and conferences and has supervised 24 MSc students and 3 PhD’s. He consults for Eskom and other large organisations. He is also Chair of the SA Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society.

"How to Slay a Werewolf: Key Issues in Software Engineering Practice"

Session Synopsis:

Software engineers in the 21st Century no longer have only one development methodology in their toolbox. Development projects range in their complexity and size, and software engineers have to decide how "heavy" or "light" their methodology should be. The "Agile" movement has grown in receent years based on a family of new, lighter, methodologies. This talk goes back to basics and discusses what software development aims to achieve. The talk should be of interest to the Microsoft community, given the recent release of Visual Studio Team System that provides tool support for agile development.

This talk is a modified version of my Inaugural Lecture as Wits Professor of Software Engineering.

Rossouw von Solms

Professor Rossouw von Solms is the Head of Department of Information Technology at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, in South Africa. He holds a PhD from the Rand Afrikaans University. He has been a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) TC 11 committee since 1995. He is a founder member of the Technikon Computer Lecturer’s Association (TECLA) and is an executive member ever since. He is also a vice-president of the South African Institute for Computer Science and Information Technology (SAICSIT). He has published many papers in international journals and presented numerous papers at national and international conferences in the field of Information Security Management.






"Security in the SDLC: A primer for discourse"

Session Synopsis:

According to Microsoft, security is a core characteristic of Trustworthy Computing. At the MS Academic Days Conference in Dubai in February 2004, Ronnie Bjones stated: “Application security is more than technology”, also “Make the Application Builder more aware of security” and "You guys (academia) are training the software developers of the future".

Therefore, in Microsoft’s strive towards trustworthy computing, it is core that software developers are taught to integrate security into their systems. This is not an easy task because security is found in operating systems, in databases, in networks and in application software and all of these components constitute a single system ultimately. Further, security should be considered throughout all phases of the systems development life cycle to ensure that software security is properly integrated into software, and not merely patched on at the end.

The Centre for Information Security Studies at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University has, in cooperation with Microsoft, developed a complete course with the objectives of:

• To inculcate security considerations in systems development as a standard practice
• To introduce students to security elements, such as risks, threats, attacks, etc.
• To explain security considerations within the ambient computing environment
• To introduce a structured methodology for incorporating security considerations into the systems development life cycle (SDLC) in a seamless fashion
• To introduce the practical (programming) means and a best-practices approach to implementing secure computing/information systems.

Arkady Retik

Is a Program Manager in Platforms group. Prior joining Microsoft five years ago, he served for a decade as a researcher, faculty member and Professor in several universities mostly in UK. He holds DSc in Computing Aided Design and Planning from Technion. He has been recently appointed a Visiting Honorary Professor of Glasgow Caledonian University.





Windows Academic Program: Innovations in Teaching OS Concepts Using Native NT

Session Synopsis:

Want to integrate Windows kernel internals into your Operating Systems (OS) courses? Do your students want more real-world illustration of the principles being taught? Want to include Windows kernel examples, but need access to the source?

This talk introduces a new academic program that delivers instructional material and resources to support teaching operating system concepts using Microsoft Windows XP. In particular, the talk will focus on the Windows OS Internals Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK) , freely available to supplement OS lectures with Windows kernel illustrations, a novel environment for low-level OS projects (code named ProjectOZ) which leverages the native Windows layer to simplify OS experimentation for teaching and research, and Windows Research Kernel (WRK) , our project to open up the Windows kernel source code for wide, noncommercial use by universities for research and instruction.

John Lefor

Is a Program Manager in MSR defining and expanding the Phoenix Academic Program. His interest in compilers started when he was an undergraduate, many years ago, at the University of Rochester and he never quite grew out of appreciating the issues of codegen and performance. John came to Microsoft in 1990 and worked on various projects including OLE, Window 95 as well as internal Microsoft tools used for performance measurement and optimization. His most recent work on the Phoenix framework is aimed at making Phoenix an excellent tool for research and instruction.

Phoenix: A Compilation, Optimization and Analysis Tools Framework for Research and Product Development

Session Synopsis:

The Phoenix Academic Program is aimed at making the Phoenix Optimization Framework available to the research community in the early stages of development. Phoenix can be a powerful tool to assist with static and dynamic analysis of IL and native binary code. The toolbox can be used for building compiler front-ends, code generators (native & JIT), Exe browsers, Static Analysis tools, etc. This talk will provide an overview of the Phoenix architecture, demonstrate specific capabilities of Phoenix as it exists today and describe how you can participate in the Phoenix Academic Program.

Alexander Holy
Technical Advisor, Microsoft EMEA HQ

With almost 20 years in the software development business, Alexander has been part of quite a few changes in the industry. Some of these changes have been as radical as Personal computers and desktop operating systems, graphical desktop operating systems, the introduction of 32bit operating systems and Windows NT to name just a few on the platform side. The change in development environments has been equally impressive. From arcane tools to early build environments to today’s graphical, intuitive solutions it has been a long way. Alexander has developed low level solutions, DOS programs, Windows solutions, ported quite a bit of Windows stuff to OS/2 and from OS/2 back to 32bit Windows. Alexander’s projects have included database, client/server and distributed solutions on a various number of systems. In 1996 he joined Microsoft Austria as technical specialist for SQL Server. In the years following he built the local Development (later the”Developer and Platform” group), introducing technologies such as COM, COM+ and .NET to the Austrian public. In 2005, Alexander relocated to Oxford, UK and is now part of the Europe, Middle East and Africa team at Microsoft where he focuses on Windows Vista development.

Rizwan Tufail
Regional Manager, Education, Middle East and Africa
Microsoft Corporation

Rizwan manages Microsoft’s education teams across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and is responsible for Microsoft’s education sector strategies, initiatives and programs in the region, including Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Program. As part of this work, Microsoft works with Governments and Ministries of Education to create initiatives, projects and programs that help the governments achieve their national objectives. Microsoft is engaged in several education reform and national e-learning projects with Ministries of Education across the Middle East and Africa region, as well as partnership initiatives with institutions of higher education.

Before joining Microsoft, Rizwan set up and successfully managed his own middleware technology start-up in the Silicon Valley for six years, looking after the business development, sales and marketing functions. After having led Clickmarks Inc. from a 3 people start-up to an 80-people strong organization, he inducted a professional management team and left the company to pursue his ambition of bringing ICT technologies to bear on the development of his native Middle East and Africa region.

Rizwan has a long standing interest in the twin issues of education and development, and served as a volunteer on a Task Force for Reform of Higher Education. His interest in education policy issues is coupled with more than six years of university-level classroom teaching experience. Rizwan has an undergraduate degree in an Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago. In addition he has completed doctoral courses at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

Overview of Microsoft’s Strategy and Vision in Education in the Middle East and Africa region

Dr. Arshad Siddiqi

Dr. Siddiqi is the current Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology at Institute of Business & Technology, one of the 10 A-rated Universities of Pakistan. Previously he was the Associate Chairman of the Center of Computer Studies at Institute of Business Administration, a 50-year-old top rated university of Pakistan. He has a PhD in System Sciences (MIS), an MBA and a BSCS from US. He has over 25 years of IT Industry at top-level management positions. He was the Managing Director of Network Solution, President of ACSC, Dallas TX, COO of the e-tech Group of Companies and Group Director of Jang Group of Companies. His area of research is ICT. He has done papers on Computer Based Education, especially for Pakistan education system and on the morality issued of IT on the youth.



Pakistanization of Junior Developer Curriculum

Microsoft developed the JDC for the American Students. This American version was not suitable for Pakistani students due to the vast difference in the two cultures. Thus it had to be localized for the Paksitani schools.

We wanted to have a theme that the students should be able to identify easily, thus we came up with the theme of a carnival, which in Urdu, our national language is called as "Mela". A student goes through the various stalls of the Mela learning with the different characteristics of .Net programming. The localized version of JDC was implemented at various schools across the country as the pilot project. This came through very successfully and the students really liked it. Now efforts are being made for it to be made part of the regular curriculum.