Pinnacle 2002 – Masters’ Biographies

Manuel Blum (Computer Science)
Manuel Blum is Carnegie Mellon University's Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is interested in computers (of course), physics, mathematics, logic, complexity theory, algorithms, cryptographic protocols and machine learning. His interest in computer science arose out of his interest in brains and a desire to understand how to think. Toward this end, he worked for several years in the Neurophysiology Laboratory of (first mentor) Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts. He did his PhD under (second mentor) Artificial Intelligence guru Marvin Minsky. In his spare time, Manuel would like to know what is consciousness. Will our computers and robots have it? Will they feel pain as we do? Will they too need to sleep and dream? These are elusive questions, but he feels the time is ripe to tackle them.

Manuel's approach to his questions is exemplified by his CAPTCHA project. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." A CAPTCHA is any program that can distinguish humans from computers. Such program must be able to generate -- and grade -- tests that humans can easily pass but that computers will fail. This is a paradoxical requirement, as this means that a CAPTCHA must be able to grade a test that it cannot itself pass. Can there even exist a test that a human can pass but that a computer cannot pass? Manuel himself believes that there will come a time that computers can pass every test that any human can pass. Until that time arrives, however, CAPTCHA's can and do exist. [For examples, see captcha.net]. These tests, moreover, have a certain utility. Yahoo uses one of Manuel's CAPTCHAs to give email accounts to humans but not robots.


Lenore Blum (Computer Science)
Lenore Blum received her Ph.D. in mathematics from M.I.T. in 1968 (the same year Princeton first allowed women to enter their graduate program). She then went to UC Berkeley as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics. In 1974 she founded the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Mills College (serving as its Head or co-Head for 13 years). In 1988 Blum joined the Theory Group of the newly formed International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. From 1992 to1996 she also served as Deputy Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley.
Straddling the historic handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China on July 1, 1997, Blum spent two years, 1996-1998, at the City University of Hong Kong as Visiting Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. Here she completed her book, Complexity and Real Computation, with colleagues and co-authors Felipe Cucker, Mike Shub and Steve Smale.

In the fall of 1999, Lenore and her husband Manuel had the good fortune to be able to join their son Avrim on the faculty of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Here she is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and co-Director of the NSF-ITR ALADDIN Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration.

Lenore Blum's research, from her early work in model theory and differential fields (logic and algebra) to her more recent work with Shub and Smale in developing a theory of computation and complexity over the real numbers (mathematics and computer science), has focused on merging seemingly unrelated areas. She has given invited talks at international conferences in the US, Europe, Asia, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Africa.

Blum is also well known for her work in increasing the participation of girls and women in mathematics and scientific fields. She was instrumental in founding the Association for Women in Mathematics (serving as its President from 1975 to 1978), the Math/Science Network and its Expanding Your Horizons conferences for middle and high school girls (serving as co-Director from 1975 to 1981). Since its inception, well over ½ million girls have attended EYH conferences nationwide. Blum’s recent work at Carnegie Mellon with Women@SCS has received national attention for transforming the culture of computing.


Michael Gandolfi (Music Composition)
Michael Gandolfi was born on July 5, 1956 in Melrose, Massachusetts. His earliest musical involvement was in rock and jazz improvisation beginning at age eight as a self-taught guitarist. As his improvisational skills developed he became increasingly interested in music composition and began formal study in his early teens. He received the B.M. and M.M. degrees in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as fellowships for study at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, the Composers Conference, and the Tanglewood Music Center.

Mr. Gandolfi is the recipient of numerous awards including grants from the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music has been performed by many leading ensembles including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

In April 1999 Mr. Gandolfi’s Pinocchio’s Adventures in Funland, written for young audiences, was premiered by the New Millennium Ensemble with David Margulies, narrator at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall. It was commissioned by the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center on a text by Dana Bonstrom. It subsequently received over twenty performances, including those by the Boston Musica Viva, the Santa Barabara Symphony at the Ojai Festival, The Tanglewood Music Center, the Andover Chamber Music Society, and the Portland Chamber Music Festival. It received its European premiere last season in Portugal by the Remix Ensemble.

Mr. Gandolfi is presently completing commissions from the Michael Vyner Trust (a piano concerto), and the New World Guitar Trio. His music has been recorded on the Deutsche Grammophon and CRI labels. He is presently a visiting lecturer on music at Harvard University, and held a similar position there from 1996-1999. He is a faculty member of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Tanglewood Music Center.


Joan Oliver Goldsmith (Creative Writing)
Joan Oliver Goldsmith's first book, How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life, was published by W. W. Norton in August 2001. She writes occasional classical music criticism and features for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. As a member of the Minnesota Chorale, she sings with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, and other ensembles.

A freelance writer since 1987, Goldsmith has covered subjects ranging from strategic business issues to scientific principals to technical products to music and musicians. Writing for corporations like 3M and Medtronic in the late '80s and '90s, she developed a specialty in interdisciplinary communications. She conveys not only information but also the excitement, passion and practical implications of the topic in clear, human terms appropriate for the intended audience. Examples include educating engineers and chemists in brand management and giving financial managers the medical information they need to make sound decisions.

This interdisciplinary approach pervades How Can We Keep from Singing. Her book takes issues she has experienced in the course of singing the great choral repertoire (e.g., leadership, amateurism, the relationship between discipline and freedom) and applies them to many realms – including business, sports, education, and community. Interdisciplinary thinking has shifted her writing career into that of author/teacher/speaker. She teaches writers how to take technical information and transform it into living, breathing experience within their essays, fiction, and poetry. She recently began to speak on the themes of practice and followership (essential skills of choral singers and orchestral musicians) to audiences of conductors, civic leaders and business people.

Writing is her third and best career. She began as a singer and actor (the second maid in Life with Father, the voice of Montgomery Wards commercials for four weeks); then moved into the blue suit of corporate marketing. Along the way she also held positions as a toast maker, legal secretary, car saleswoman, and singing chambermaid. She won a 1994 Loft Creative Nonfiction award. She holds a BA in music from Oberlin College and an MBA from the Carlson Executive MBA Program at the University of Minnesota.


Alex Jones (Journalism)
Alex S. Jones is Lecturer in Public Policy and Director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. He covered the press for The New York Times from 1983-1992 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his articles on the collapse of the Bingham family's newspaper empire. In 1991, he co-authored (with Susan E. Tifft) The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. In 1992, he left the Times to work on The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (also co-authored with Tifft in 1999), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. From 1993-1997 he was host of National Public Radio's On the Media. He is currently the host and Executive Editor of PBS's Media Matters. In 1998 Jones and Tifft were jointly named Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism at Duke University. Jones has twice served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize competition. In 1981-82 he was Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He is on the Advisory Board of the Columbia Journalism Review, International Center for Journalists, Committee of Concerned Journalists, and the Bertelsmann Foundation's New York Media Project. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University.


Sam Maitin (Visual Arts)
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Sam Maitin attended what is now the Philadelphia College of Art on scholarship. In addition, he earned a BFA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. Now a world-renowned artist, Maitin is known for his fresh, vividly colored, exuberant work. His media include watercolor, gouache, and crayon adhered with wax on acetate. His processes include drawing, collage, painting, hand-blown glass, sculpture, and the full range of graphic art prints including etching, lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen. Maitin’s paintings, silkscreen prints, and sculptures are displayed in the permanent collections at the Library of Congress and National Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Klingspor Museum in Frankfort. In addition, Maitin’s work has been displayed in one-man exhibitions in the Frankfurt-on-Main in Germany, the Art Alliance in Philadelphia, the Yoseido Gallery in Japan, and the Comsky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Despite his representation in prestigious art galleries around the world, Maitin is best known for his public art – signature murals and three-dimensional constructs that enhance communal spaces. The work he is perhaps most proud of is a sectional mural he designed for the Christian Association at the University of Pennsylvania. Maitin has designed other works on the Penn campus, such as a polychrome dimensional mural entitled “Celebration,” which enlivens the lobby of the Annenberg School of Communication, and banners and prints for the Wharton School, the Dental School, and the School of Arts and Sciences. Maitin’s other recent work includes an outdoor polychromed metal sculpture and a 50-foot long 3-dimensional mural for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an outdoor banner for the Philadelphia Art Alliance, a poster for the Philadelphia Orchestra, four large collage paintings entitled “The Four Seasons” for the Main Lobby at the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, and a one-man exhibition of selected Biblical etchings and paintings at Keneseth Israel in Jenkintown, PA.

Sam Maitin has received international recognition for his artwork. In 1968, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to England. He was awarded the Owens Prize on the 100th anniversary of the Fellowship of the Academy of Fine Arts (1997), the Percy M. Owens award, and the Art Matters Award of Excellence (1988). In addition, he has been featured in a cover article of Art Matters.


Martin Seligman (Psychology)
Dr. Seligman works on positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and optimism and pessimism. He is currently Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. A best-selling author and former president of the American Psychological Association, he is well known in both academic and clinical circles.

Dr. Seligman’s bibliography includes fifteen books and 150 articles on motivation and personality. Among his books are Learned Optimism (Knopf, 1991), What You Can Change and What You Can’t (Knopf, 1993), The Optimistic Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), and Helplessness (Freeman, 1975; 1993). He is the recipient of two Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards from the American Psychological Association, the Laurel Award of the American Psychological Association for Applied Psychology and Prevention, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. He holds an honorary PhD from Uppsala, Sweden, and a Doctor of Humane Letters from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Seligman received both the American Psychological Society’s William James Fellow Award and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award.

Dr. Seligman’s research and writing have been broadly supported by a number of institutions, including the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. His research on preventing depression received the coveted MERIT Award of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1991. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Prevention and Treatment, the electronic journal of the American Psychological Association. He is the network director of the Positive Psychology Network, Scientific Director of the Values-In-Action Classification Project of the Mayerson Foundation, and the chair of the Board of Advisors of the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.

For 14 years, Dr. Seligman was the Director of the Clinical Training Program of the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He was named “Distinguished Practitioner” by the National Academics of Practice. He is a past president of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Seligman served as the leading consultant to Consumer Reports for their pioneering article that documented the effectiveness of long-term psychotherapy. With the theme of bringing practice and science into harmony, he was, in 1996, elected President of the American Psychological Association by the largest vote in modern history.


Cumrun Vafa (Theoretical Physics)
Cumrun Vafa was born in 1960 in Tehran, Iran. He came to the US in 1977 to continue his education. He received a BS degree in Mathematics and in Physics in 1981 from MIT, and a PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 1985. In 1985, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, became a junior faculty member at Harvard in 1988 and has been a professor of physics at Harvard University since 1990.

Professor Vafa has received a number of awards, including the Packard Foundation award, the Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the Sloan Foundation award. His research is in theoretical physics, where he has published over one hundred papers in various journals on Physics and Mathematics.

Professor Vafa's interest in physics started early on, beginning with childhood questions such as ``Why doesn't the moon fall down?'' His interest in understanding how nature works has led him to the study of fundamental laws of nature including what the elementary particles are made of, what forces govern their interactions, how the universe began, quantum aspects of black holes, etc. These are all studied in the context of a theory known as superstring theory, which is widely believed to be the most complete fundamental theory of nature presently known. He is most well known for his contribution to superstring theory (for example for a derivation of 'Bekenstein-Hawking' entropy of a black hole, which was a major puzzle for physicists in the past twenty years). His contributions to superstring theory are well documented in the popular science book The Elegant Universe, written by Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University.