Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'
Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's
Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a
conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H.
Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the
unique conference that brings together both academics and industry
leaders.
CT: Why have CMU West and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT
Center at the Haas School of Business decided to hold a conference
event on “The Mobile Future”?
JM: As you know,
Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley are leading universities in engineering
and technology, and it’s become apparent to us, as well as many people,
that the future of computing and Internet expansion is actually going
to be happening more on mobile devices like cell phones than on
computers like laptops. So, we think that this will be a significant
change for everybody and we wanted to provide useful information for
our friends in Silicon Valley -- for technical managers and
professionals, academics, and investors -- who are trying to stay ahead
of this fast-moving force but in fact in some ways are so much in the
middle of it that they don’t have time to step back for a day and
understand where it’s going to be in several years. (Photo: Jim Morris at The Mobile Future conference)
What types of technologies will the conference be looking at in particular?
The
technologies we’re most interested in are the hardware and especially
the software involved with handheld devices, like the Apple iPhone,
software like Google’s Android system, and lots of infrastructure, such
as the whole cell phone system as it’s provided by the wireless
carriers in this country and other countries. It’s a huge technological
system that is evolving around us, aimed basically at providing
communications facilities for the people of the world.
We are
probably going to be talking mostly about software -- Carnegie Mellon
emphasizes software in computer technology -- but also about new
product ideas that may be supported by that software.
CMU has
always informed industry about new technologies. Could you comment on
your own institution’s role -- both CMU and CMU West – in fostering
technology change or even technology revolution, either within higher
education or in a more generalized marketplace?
Many years
ago I was one of the participants in Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew system,
which exploited personal computers and networking to transform our
campus into a modern campus that led the way for computer systems that
not only supported campuses, but became the model for a lot of
computing systems everywhere. So, the interesting lesson from that is
that Carnegie Mellon didn’t invent the personal computer, and didn’t
really invent the local area network, but made the campus into a huge
test bed for showing a new basis for computing based on those
technologies. And of course, we got wonderful support from IBM and
other companies, including Apple and Digital Equipment, to show how
these new products could be used to make computing at the time a much
more dynamic and useful utility for a group of people.
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.
And
a more recent example is FaceBook. A group of Harvard students said,
“Let’s just automate the old freshman face book. And suddenly they had
created a social networking site that’s being used by maybe a million
people -- and it just sort of came out of serving a simple university
tradition.
So, I think universities certainly will lead. They
can’t run the wireless infrastructure of the country -- there are many
things they can’t do -- but in terms of understanding and having
imagination about how new technologies can be applied, I think it
happens there first.
CMU seems to be taking, very proactively, the initiative to get out there and talk to industry. Could you comment on that?
It’s
part of the mission of our CMU West campus here in Silicon Valley to be
close to industry. We see it as our role to help industry. But the
conference that we are having this week is as much to help ourselves
and to help the academics who are going to attend, to understand what’s
happening with industry. We think of these conferences as
industry-academic dialogs, to try to give some academic perspective to
what’s going on, and to have industry explain what direction they are
headed in. We’re committed to being catalysts for discussion.
(Photo: A "dean duo" -- Jim Morris, dean of CMU West, at left, and Len
Waverman, dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of
Calgary, at right -- discussing the day's sessions at the close of The
Mobile Future conference.)