Steven Gallow

Ira Fuchs holds up an IBM punchcard, a relic of the way computer programs were stored years ago. Fuchs and Ken King, right, reviewed the early history of computer networking at the 2015 IT@Cornell conference.

Sean Taylor

Discussing the future of informatioin technology and computer science at the 2015 IT@Cornell conference were Irene Qualters, left, division director of advanced cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation, and Cornell faculty members Éva Tardos, Perrine Pepiot and Marjolein van der Meulen.

The growth of computer networking since the 1980s has had a profound impact on academic research and scholarship. What’s coming next may not be so much a breakthrough in information technology as a change in who develops and runs it.

That might be the takeaway from two panel discussions that opened the fourth annual IT@Cornell Conference, June 25 in Bailey Hall.

The conference, which brought together several hundred IT workers from across campus and a few visitors from neighboring institutions, was subtitled “Connecting the Past, Present and Future,” and opened with a history lesson from Ken King, vice president for computer services at Cornell 1980-87, and Ira Fuchs, a co-founder of BITNET, a precursor to the Internet. They recalled working together in several organizations to help computer networking grow from a few primitive connections between universities until they became lobbyists (or technically, “educators”) helping Al Gore pass legislation to finance Internet infrastructure.

Before all that, Fuchs explained, scholars communicated by long distance phone calls, mail and fax. If you wanted to send someone a computer program, you encoded it on a few hundred IBM punch cards and sent them in a cardboard box. When King worked for the City University of New York (CUNY) he helped to pioneer wired networking by connecting CUNY’s separate campuses. The idea spread, leading eventually to the BITNET educational network. When an institution wanted to connect, it had to lease a dedicated phone line and hook up a 9600 baud modem (a breakthrough in speed back then, a snail’s pace today) about the size of two breadboxes. It was Cornell joining in that helped persuade other schools to become part of BITNET. In his tenure as a Cornell vice president, King pushed to wire the campus so that scholars could tap into the intercollegiate network as well as communicate with one another. The goal throughout, the panelists said, was “to connect every scholar in the world with every other.”

A second panel was to examine “The Future of Technology in Education and Research,” with Irene Qualters, division director of advanced cyber infrastructure at the National Science Foundation, and computer scientist Maria Klawe, the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College and previously dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University.

Klawe was unable to attend due to illness, so organizers recruited a panel of Cornell faculty to join Qualters: Éva Tardos, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science; Marjolein van der Meulen, the Swanson Professor and the James M. and Marsha McCormick Chair of Biomedical Engineering; and Perrine Pepiot, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

After some mention of big data, data mining and visualization, questions from the audience inevitably led the all-female panel to a discussion of the role of women in computer science and IT, and why they are still in the minority. The conclusion: Women need to help other women, men need to get on board, and employers need to expand their “comfort zone,” recognizing that diverse voices can bring in new ways of thinking. “We need more people to do this,” Tardos said, “and we should not exclude people who can.”

Van der Meulen said that men and women must educate themselves about racial and gender unconscious bias in selection processes in every level of the STEM pipeline. She highlighted current social science research on the subject that can help people be aware of their biases. More women will be attracted to STEM majors and professions, she added, if we can show that engineering makes things that help people. “The way to get diversity in engineering is not to market it as ‘cool,’ but to show how impactful it is,” she said.

Coming full circle, Qualters concluded, “IT should help us stay connected and help us collaborate.”

Attendees spent the afternoon in technical workshops, wrapping up with an ice cream social.