Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'

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Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'

An interview with James Morris

4/23/2008

By Mary Grush

We’re trying to do the same thing with mobility. We’re not planning to invent new handsets, or even do research on how to invent new handsets. We have some people who work on new communications protocols, but in fact, many companies with research divisions or development divisions are already creating a lot of this infrastructure. One of the things we would hope to do is look deeply into the uses of technology by normal people, understand those technologies and how they come together into systems that are useful for people. That’s what we’ve done in the past. As you may or may not be aware, Carnegie Mellon isn’t just an engineering school; it has a serious business school and a college of humanities and social science, which have been studying not how to build computers, but how computers should be used. I’d say Carnegie Mellon’s distinctive brand as a school that’s interested in computing is that we’ve always been interested in the phenomena and the uses of computing as much as the actual construction of these things.

Is there a role for higher education institutions in general to play in fostering revolutionary technologies as they appear?

Oh, sure! Aside from studying phenomena, which is actually a very important thing to do, and aside from building internets, social scientists at Carnegie Mellon and other institutions can tell society what the Internet is doing for us or to us. And you would expect the same sort of thing to be happening with mobile computing. There are many reasons why universities might be innovators in this area.

For example, universities are full of young people, who typically own cell phones more than automobiles. And a discussion we just had was: How would cell phones that are aware of where you are all the time help you get along without an automobile? If you look at 18 year olds today, they generally don’t own cars, and they have been told incessantly about global warming and might not want to own cars. And they love using technology to communicate with each other. They might figure out whole new ways to conduct their lives using mobile devices and mobile communications.

And since a university represents a community of people who trust each other, a lot of social networking activity can happen. So one of the things we discuss is whether Carnegie Mellon or another university could greatly improve the quality of its carpooling and ride sharing systems using technology. The crucial components are that you have a location that people are trying to get to, and you also have a community of trust -- people who will get into cars with each other.

So, there are lots of ways in which universities, simply as communities, end up being the first places for the use of some technologies.

And instant messaging, which is very popular now all over the world, was being used by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon twenty or thirty years ago. They weren’t walking around with cell phones at the time, they were sitting in front of computers, but they were chatting with each other, and from the very beginning they discovered that that’s a very congenial way to communicate.