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Visionary
James Morris
7/1/2008
Thus, there are a number of ways in which universities, simply as communities, end up being the first places to use some technologies. For one: Instant messaging, which now is very popular all over the world, was being used by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon 20 or 30 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 IM is a very congenial way to communicate.
A more recent example is Facebook. Years ago, a group of Harvard [MA] 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 millions of people-- and it originally came out of serving a simple university tradition.
So, I believe 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, it happens in higher ed first.
CMU-West always seems to very proactively take 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 Mobile Future conference is as much to help ourselves as it is to help academic attendees understand what's happening with industry. We think of these conferences as industry/academia dialogs, designed to give some academic perspective to what's going on, and to help industry explain its next directions. We're committed to being catalysts for discussion.
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