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![]() Interviews - Volume 9: Issue 10 (March 11, 2008 - March 17, 2008):
* In this week's Ubiquity, editor-in-chief John Gehl interviews the brilliant author, consultant, and speaker Michael Schrage on our favorite subject ubiquity. Don't miss it, or you'll be missing out, let us say, needlessly, shamelessly, and, let's say, ubiquitously.
* Ubiquity is proud to publish the inspirational remarks of Yi Pan, the head of the computer science department. Besides talking about computing, he talks about what it takes to have a happy, productive, worthwhile and successful life.
* In this Ubiquity interview, Robert Langer of MIT talks about failure and success, explains his work at the intersection of biotechnology and materials science, talks about how information technology touches on his work, and gives us a pretty good idea why he won the National Medal of Science in 2007 and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers.
* Vaughan Merlyn, a prominent management consultant, researcher, and author, has had as his primary focus for more than three decades now the use of information and information technology (IT) for business value creation. Read his interview with Ubiquity, and then explore his blogs.
* An interesting interview with Wei Zhao, whose distinguished career in information technology led him most recently to the position of Dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
* Richard A. DeMillo is the Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing. He previously was Hewlett-Packard's chief technology officer and served as director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center. Under DeMillo's leadership, Georgia Tech's College of Computing has replaced the core curriculum for undergraduates with an ambitious and innovative "Threads" program, as he explains in this interview with Ubiquity Editor in Chief John Gehl.
* Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he directs the program on human-computer interaction. His SHRDLU program done at the MIT AI Lab was one of the early explorations in natural language understanding by computers. His book with Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, critiqued the underlying assumptions of AI and much of computer system design, and led to completely new directions in those fields. He was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility. His remarks, made in 2002, are as relevant today as they were when first spoken.
* In this time of recession, innovation has jumped to the fore in many people's minds. How can we create new value through innovations and pull our individual companies out of the doldrums? In 2004, Frans Johansson published his book, "The Medici Effect," where he discussed how crossing community boundaries leads to innovations, and he said that the most effective way to create the crossing is to mix people from the communities in a common setting. Ubiquity editor John Gehl spoke with Johansson shortly after the book was published. Johansson's words are worth thinking about now as we reflect on what we all must do next.
* Before he became ill, Randy Pausch spoke with Ubiquity Editor John Gehl in 2005. The declining enrollments in computer science were already very much on his mind. At that time, they were down 23 percent. Pausch called this a "huge problem". He noted that, even for those committed to teaching programming from the outset, kids programming in Alice were far more engaged than those trying to find Fibonacci numbers. The enrollments have since declined another 25 percent and the problem is even "huger" than before. Randy's ideas about what turns kids on are even more important today.
* It is November 2008 and much of the globe is in the throes of recession. Innovation is on many minds. We need new products and new services generating new value for our customers and our companies. It is more important than ever to innovate. The problem is that our collective success rate is abysmal -- 4% according to Business Week in August 2005. As we set out on new innovation initiatives, it is a good time to reflect on the illusions that drag our success rates so low. One illusion is that is innovation is a novel ideal or product, another is that those who spend more on R&D get more innovation, and another is that innovation is about great inventions. Michael Schrage of MIT has been challenging these illusions for a long time. He discussed them with Ubiquity editor John Gehl in February 2006. Now is the perfect time to reflect again on what Michael has to say to us about innovation. |
Ubiquity welcomes the submissions of articles from everyone interested in the future of information technology. Everything published in Ubiquity is copyrighted ©2007 by the ACM and the individual authors. |