Rhode Island Nexus

Make the most out of your lunch hour on March 13 and join the Business Innovation Factory for a casual meet-up with entrepreneur and network impresario Ellen Levy. Levy — interventionist, bridge builder, arbitrager — is a self-proclaimed opportunist who has an indefatigable ability to make powerful connections between people and concepts.

Over lunch, Levy will discuss her experiences building purposeful networks — networks that go beyond social networking to discover actionable connections between people and organizations.

We're on for February, for a very special Valentine's Day meetup. On second thought, let's make it a perfectly normal meetup, one that just happens to fall on Valentine's Day. We'll have our regular freeform discussion of anything relevant to the day, downtown at Tazza. Please RSVP below.

Special deal, which I'll sponsor: Yahoo employees fleeing to Providence because of the Microsoft takeover bid can eat for free!

"Intuitive Global Connectivity for Personal Mobile Devices"

Bryan Ford, MIT

...The Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) is a suite of design principles and experimental protocols that provide robust, efficient global connectivity among mobile devices while relying for configuration only on simple, intuitive management concepts. UIA uses "personal names" rather than traditional global names as handles for accessing personal devices remotely. Users assign these personal names via an ad hoc device introduction process requiring no central allocation. Once assigned, personal names bind securely to the global identities of their target devices independent of network location. Each user manages one namespace, shared among all the user's devices and always available on each device. Users can also name other users to share resources with trusted acquaintances. Devices with naming relationships automatically arrange connectivity when possible, both in ad hoc networks and using global infrastructure when available. We built a prototype implementation of UIA that demonstrates the utility and feasibility of these design principles. The prototype includes an overlay routing layer that leverages the user's social network to provide robust connectivity in spite of network failures and asymmetries such as NATs, a new transport protocol implementing a novel stream abstraction that more effectively supports the highly parallelized and media-oriented applications demanded on mobile devices, and a flexible security framework based on proof-carrying authorization (PCA) that provides "plug-in" interoperability with existing secure naming and authentication systems.

"Computational Bio-Molecular Modeling and Analysis for Drug Discovery

Chandrajit Bajaj, University of Texas at Austin

Human functional processes are mediated through complicated biochemical and biophysical interactions amongst proteins, and other biomolecules. A comprehensive computational model and analysis of these interactions, provide important clues for developing therapeutic interventions related to infections and disease. In this two part talk I shall first describe a combination of image and geometric processing algorithms to efficiently reconstruct spatially realistic structural models of target proteins, that are culpable in the spread of viral infections. Next, I shall introduce a new class of algebraic surface spline finite elements, and the use of irregular fast Fourier estimation methods in the very rapid computation of protein binding energetics, essential for drug screening analysis and discovery.

Two entrepreneurs from Rhode Island's most successful emerging companies will share their insights on how to present a business plan and raise millions of dollars from investors, as they have...

...Each team may send up to two people to the workshop...Open to anyone considering applying to the 2008 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition.

Cost: free, but space is limited so please pre-register.