Featured Speakers
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has been referred
to as "one of the leading international experts on electronic voting." A
technology specialist, Rebecca defended her doctoral dissertation "Electronic
Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances" at the Engineering School of the
University of Pennsylvania, just eleven days before the 2000 U.S. Presidential
election. Subsequently, her testimony and opinions were sought in Bush v.
Gore and referenced in briefs presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2002
she was contacted by Janet Reno and her legal team to help solve the mystery
of the thousands of votes that vanished from the new touch-screen machines
being used in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Since then, Dr. Mercuri has
provided formal testimony and comment to the House Science Committee, the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Election Assistance Commission, the
National Institute of Standards and Technologies, the U.K. Cabinet, and numerous
U.S. state legislatures. Her advocacy work has directly influenced the wording
of state, federal, and international election legislation as well as standards
and best practices guidelines.
Dr. Mercuri has observed elections as a scientist, expert witness, poll-worker
and committeewoman in numerous U.S. States, for over two decades. Many of
Rebecca's views and numerous of her papers on electronic voting appear on
her website. She authors
the Security Watch
column for the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery,
where she also serves as a contributing editor. She has been frequently quoted
in the New York Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, by the Associated
Press, in the Congressional Record, and various other venues, including TV
appearances on Fox News, NBC Nightline, a debate on Lou Dobbs, and numerous
radio features including NPR's Morning Edition and This American Life.
A true renaissance woman, Rebecca has a deep commitment to artistic endeavors.
As a board member of the Delaware Valley Acoustical Society and the Philadelphia Audio Engineering Society,
her interests in music have included: owning a vintage RCA theremin; presenting
history talks about music synthesis; hobby and emergency activities in amateur radio;
research in directional hearing and room simulation; development and marketing
of interactive software in music education for Notable Software; and occasional
assistance in live sound reinforcement with her brother's company, Keystone
Studios. In addition to her Ph.D., Dr. Mercuri holds various degrees in engineering
and computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University
and Penn State, as well as a B.Mus. in classical guitar from the University
of the Arts, and honorary alumna status at Harvard/Radcliffe. A member of
the Philadelphia Folk Song Society, a soprano
in the Princeton Society
for Musical Amateurs, and a card-carrying affiliate of the Musician's Union, Local 77, she can often
be found enjoying and participating in the festivities at numerous folk festivals, during the summer months.
Following two fellowship years at Harvard University's Kennedy School of
Government and Radcliffe
Institute, Dr. Mercuri returned to the consulting company she founded,
to continue her work as a forensic computing expert
on a wide range of civil, municipal and criminal cases. She is a co-founder
and co-chair of the professional joint chapter of the Princeton ACM/IEEE Computer
Society, and a senior member of the IEEE and member of the executive board
of its Princeton
/ Central Jersey Section.
Some past talks by Rebecca Mercuri:
- Challenges
in Computer Forensics
- Department of Computing Sciences Colloquium, Villanova University,
April 24, 2006.
- E-voting
in an Untrustworthy World
- Computer Science & Engineering Department Seminar Series, Lehigh
University, November 10, 2005.
- University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, September 20, 2004.
- Technology and Society Forum Series, New Jersey Institute of Technology,
New Brunswick, NJ, September 23, 2004.
- Providence Section of the IEEE, Seekonk, MA, September 28, 2004.
- Distinguished Lecture, Arizona Center for Information Science and
Technology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, Dec. 8, 2004.
- Delaware Valley Mensa, Conshohocken, PA, January 9, 2005.
- E-voting: Perils
and Promises
- Electronic Voting in Massachusetts: Problems and Prospects conference,
Suffolk University Law School, Boston, MA, February 28, 2004.
- Examining Voting Systems, 2004 Center for Education and Research
in Information Assurance and Security, Expert Security Seminar Series -- Filtering
Out the Noise, Indianapolis, IN, April 22, 2004
- Voting in an e-Democracy, Symposium sponsored by the Yale University
Faculty of Engineering and the Yale Office of New Haven and State Affairs,
New Haven, CT, April 2, 2004.
- Haverford League of Women Voters, Haverford, PA, May 25, 2004.
- Keynote, Il Votobit, Leon, Spain, October 7, 2004.
- Princeton University School of Engineering, Princeton, NJ, October
14, 2004.
- West Chester University, West Chester, PA, October 21, 2004.
- W.M. Keck Foundation, Interdisciplinary Science Lecture, Lewis &
Clark College, Portland, OR, October 25, 2004.
- Pushing Forward: Voting System Standards
- Co-organizer and Panelist, “New Standards for Elections: A forum
on technical and non-technical requirements for voting systems,” Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, February
12, 2005.
- Panelist, “The Machinery of Electronic Voting,” 31st Asilomar Microcomputer
Workshop, Asilomar, CA, April 20, 2005.
- The
Electronic Voting Enigma -- Hard Problems in Computer Science
- University of Cambridge, Security Seminar Series, Cambridge, England,
October 18, 2002.
- Williams College, Class of 1960’s Scholar’s Colloquium, Computer
Science Department, Williamstown, MA, November 21, 2003.
- Connecticut-Trinity-Wesleyan Computer Science Consortium, Spring
2004 Joint Colloquium Series, Hartford, CT, April 21, 2004.
- Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security,
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, April 23, 2004.
- Department of Mathematical & Natural Sciences, Lewis & Clark
College, Portland, OR, Oct. 26, 2004.
- Computers, Public Policy and You
- Math Options, Pennsylvania State University, Abington, PA, October
24, 2003.
- Villanova University, guest lecture, CSC 2500 – A Survey of Information
Science, Villanova, PA, March 11, 2004.
- 29th Trenton Computer Festival, Keynote Address, New Jersey Convention
Center, Raritan Center, Edison NJ, May 1, 2004.
- Transparency and Trust in Computational Systems
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA, November
29, 2004.
- Marshall D. Abrams Invited Essay, 20th Annual Computer Security
Applications Conference, Tucson, AZ, December 9, 2004.
- History
and Architecture of the RCA Synthesizer
- electro-music 2005, Cheltenham, PA, June 5, 2005.
- Co-organizer and panelist, Princeton ACM/IEEE-CS, Philadelphia AES,
Delaware Valley Acoustical Society of America, Sarnoff Center, Princeton,
NJ, April 20, 2005.
- A Brief History of Multiphonic Recording and Playback
- electro-music 2006, Cheltenham, PA, June 6, 2006.
Check this page again! Other speaker bios to
be added soon!