Bill Gates sees a future in which technology manages all our information for us, with devices at work, at home and in our pockets all seamlessly linked. The hardware is already here or coming soon, he says, but the challenge is to create the software. And, he said in a campus visit Feb. 26, he needs today's college students to produce it.
Look, Professor, no wires! More and more colleges are installing wireless networking, so that a student sitting in a lecture hall, a classroom or even outside the building can pop open a laptop computer and connect to the Internet at high speed.
With support from major industrial partners, Cornell University has opened a state-of-the-art laboratory for the design and testing of radio-frequency integrated circuits, such as the transceivers in cellular phones and other wireless devices.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Physics and Media Group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and co-director of the Things That Think research consortium, will speak on "Things That Think" at noon, Oct 20. The event is the first in a new distinguished lecturer series sponsored by the Cornell Faculty of Computing and Information.
Computer programs that can adapt to changing conditions — both in the virtual worlds they are creating and the hardware on which they are running — will be developed under a $5 million project funded as part of the $90 million Information Technology Research initiative of the National Science Foundation.
We all know it's a small world: Any one of us is only about six acquaintances away from anyone else. Even in the vast confusion of the World Wide Web, on the average, one page is only about 16 to 20 clicks away from any other. But how, without being able to see the whole map, can we get a message to a person who is only "six degrees of separation" away?
Students in CS 502 were issued Dell laptops equipped with wireless networking cards, and Kennedy/Roberts is one of eight buildings on campus equipped with wireless transceivers linked to the campus network.
A gold mine of information collected by the U.S. Bureau of the Census but previously inaccessible to researchers could be used to tackle a range of social issues, according to John M. Abowd, professor of labor economics in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
