Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Sadowsky - Casting a Wider Net

ACM: Ubiquity - Casting a Wider Net.  This interview with George Sadowsky looks at major threads in his career, including work to encourage economic development around the world. One interesting tid-bit applies to urban Wireless in the US:

"In India, for example, Michael Best and the MIT labs are experimenting with an inexpensive network that doesn't use any existing standard but instead essentially uses a mesh of computers and antennae to transmit messages on a store-and-forward basis until they get to where they're going. That's a nice model for many areas in rural India because those parts of rural India don't look rural compared to, say, North Dakota, or anyplace that we would consider really rural in the US."

There's quite a bit more. Because he joined the Association for Computing Machinery the same time I did (and I was at that conference, too), I'll end with George's observation about that:

"I joined ACM in 1961 when I attended the ACM annual conference in Los Angeles, and I've been a member ever since. It was there that I first realized that I would have a long-term association with this profession and that I had better make sure that I keep up with the field as best I could. That has paid off in some spectacular ways, both in terms of reading articles that changed the way I understood certain fields, and in terms of meeting people who were helpful, some of whom are good colleagues to this day. In 1968 a group of us started SICCOC, a Special Interest Committee for the Social Sciences, which became a SIG, but then due to lack of binding with the relevant academic disciplines, transmuted itself in the early 1980s into SIGCHI."

posted by Dennis at 5/18/2004 11:42:30 AM