This year’s Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) 2009 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings to be held from October 6 to 8 at Academia Sinica will feature a keynote speech by Dr. Stephen M. Griffin, Program Director of the Information Integration and Informatics (III) cluster in the U.S. National Science Foundation's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. The overall topic of the conference will be “Social Computing”. Media are welcome to attend.

Prior to joining the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, Mr. Griffin served in several research divisions, including the Divisions of Chemistry and Advanced Scientific Computing, the Office of the Assistant Director, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and staff offices of the Director of the NSF. For the period 1994-2004, Mr. Griffin managed the Special Projects Program which included the Interagency Digital Libraries Initiatives and the International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research and Applications Testbeds program.

He has been active in working groups for Federal high performance computing and communications programs, and serves on numerous domestic and international advisory committees related to digital libraries and advanced computing and networking infrastructure. In 2004-2005 he was on special assignment to the Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Initiatives, to assist with the National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program. His research interests are in topics related to interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication. He has been active in promoting cultural heritage informatics and computing and the humanities and arts.

On October 6, Dr. Griffin will give a keynote address entitled “Recovering the Past through Computation”. He will discuss emerging state-of-the-art scientific methodologies applied to discovery, recovery, restoration, representation, analysis and ultimately new understanding of a broad range of cultural heritage artifacts. 

October 7 keynote speakers will include Vice President Ts’ui-jung Liu speaking on the topic “Impact of Digital Archives on Humanities” and Dr. Edward Ayers, the president of Richmond, USA, who will give a talk on “Space, Place, and Time: Mapping Historical Changes”. In addition, Prof. Chuen-Tsai Sun from National Chiao Tung University, will give a lecture entitled “Game-Native teacher’s attitude toward Digital Game in School” and Prof. Pierre-Yves Manguin from The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), France, will present “Khmer heritage research and documentation at the EFEO: Building a digitized corpus of archaeological and epigraphic data”; the last keynote speaker will be Timothy Tangherlini from UCLA, USA, whose topic will be “Maps and Networks”.