Keynote and Plenary Panel Speakers (Will be held in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts)


The Internet: A Pervasive Global Nervous System
Monday 12 May, 7:30 – 8:20


Leonard Kleinrock
Chairman and Founder,
Nomadix, Inc.



Before the Internet began, I had a vision of what that network would eventually look like: it would be ubiquitous, always accessible, always on, anyone would be able to connect any device to it from any location, and it would be invisible. The Internet almost got it right; but the persistent protocols that evolved assumed a tightly coupled relationship between a given user with a given device at a given location with a given IP address, and this "locked" the user, device, location and address together. As a result, the last two parts of the vision have not been realized in a universal fashion. That locked model is an obsolete model as we find nomads traveling to new locations with new devices and with IP addresses and profiles that are not recognized.

In this talk, I will consider many aspects of Nomadic Computing and the natural evolution to Smart Spaces in which one can finally release cyberspace from the computer screen in which it has been trapped. There will be small pervasive devices ubiquitously embedded in the physical world. Intelligent software agents will be deployed across the network. We will see large collections of self-organizing systems controlling vast fast networks. Indeed, the Internet will essentially be a pervasive global nervous system.

Leonard Kleinrock is known as the Inventor of the Internet Technology, having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet.

Kleinrock received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles since then. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from City College, New York, NY (CCNY) in 1957 (also an Honorary Doctor of Science from CCNY in 1997, and an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000). He was first President and Co-founder of Linkabit. He is also Founder and Chairman of Nomadix, Inc., a high-tech firm located in Southern California. Kleinrock is also Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard, an advanced technology forum organization based in Santa Monica, California. He has published more than 225 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks and gigabit networks. Additionally, Kleinrock has recently launched the field of nomadic computing, the emerging technology to support users as soon as they leave their desktop environments; nomadic computing may well be the next major wave of the Internet.

Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE fellow, an ACM fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the CCNY Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the Marconi Award, the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Okawa Prize, the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the UCLA Outstanding Teacher Award, the Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award, the INFORMS Presidents Award, and the IEEE Harry Goode Award. More information is available at http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu..



Bringing it Together on One Wire: Experience in the Last Frontier

Tuesday 13 May, 8:00 – 8:50


Ronald Duncan
President and CEO, GCI, USA


 


Convergence—everyone talks about it, everyone wants it, but where can you find it? For years the telecommunications industry has regarded its Holy Grail as the successful design, engineering and delivery of communication products and services over a single wire. The theory incorporates open-architecture components connected to broadband pipes terminating to end users ubiquitously. Multi-national corporations with billions of dollars in assets have tried, and in most cases have retrenched to more traditional delivery modalities. So, where does the Holy Grail reside? Go west, young man, then head north to Alaska! In the Last Frontier, one company has successfully deployed this converged network and is reaping the benefits today. Ronald Duncan will offer a multifaceted perspective on how his company, GCI, has succeeded where so many have failed. His address will illustrate the geographic vastness and diversity found in Alaska, as well as the challenges of successfully provisioning an integrated network in a market greater in size than the combined landmass of France, Germany and Spain.

Duncan’s company, GCI, is the leading integrated communication provider in Alaska. The company provides voice, video and data services to residential, business and government users. Its distribution network incorporates satellite, fiber optic, hybrid-fiber coaxial, microwave and metropolitan area networks. The company offers local, wireless and long-distance telephone, cable television, Internet and data communications.

As the president and CEO of GCI, Duncan is responsible for creating the vision and setting the strategic goals of the company. He has been president and CEO since 1989. Prior to starting GCI, Duncan founded and was president of an Alaska-based cable television company and was a partner at a management and economic consulting firm. He also has served as an assistant project director at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research. Duncan is on the Board of Directors of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and is chairman of the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation. He is also past chairman of the Anchorage Economic Development Council. Duncan received a Bachelor’s degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s of Business Administration from The Harvard Business School.



PLENARY PANEL

An Executive Panel on Overcoming Challenges in Telecom

Wednesday 14 May, 8:00 – 9:30


Robert W. Lucky
Vice President of Research,
Telcordia Technologies Inc.

As we all know, the telecom industry has been going through perhaps its biggest crisis ever. It is affecting every region and every segment of the industry. Blames and excuses are many including mismanagement, short-term interest, and short-sighted visions, etc. It has been more than two years now, and yet, there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Looking at the past is only useful to draw lessons. We need to focus on the future. We need new visions and ideas to get us through these bad times. This plenary panel of international leaders from various segments and regions will discuss their visions of overcoming the challenges facing the global telecom industry. Executives representing service providers, suppliers, and academia from North America, Europe and Asia will share their views and answer your questions. The panel will be chaired by the world renown expert and author Robert W. Lucky, Vice President of Research at Telcordia Technologies.

Robert W. Lucky was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., and attended Purdue University, where he received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1957, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1959 and 1961. After graduation he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, where he was initially involved in studying ways of sending digital information over telephone lines. The best known outcome of this work was his invention of the adaptive equalizer - a technique for correcting distortion in telephone signals which is used in all high speed data transmission today. The textbook on data communications which he co-authored became the most cited reference in the communications field over the period
of a decade.

At Bell Labs he moved through a number of levels to become Executive Director of the Communications Sciences Research Division in 1982, where he was responsible for research on the methods and technologies for future communication systems. In 1992 he left Bell Labs to assume his present position at Telcordia Technologies. He has been active in professional activities, and has served as President of the Communications Society of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and as Vice President and Executive Vice President of the parent IEEE itself. He has been editor of several technical journals, including the Proceedings of the IEEE, and since 1982 he has written the bimonthly "Reflections" column of personalized observations about the engineering profession in Spectrum magazine. In 1993 these "Reflections" columns were collected in the IEEE Press book Lucky Strikes... Again.

Lucky is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a consulting editor for a series of books on communications through Plenum Press. He has been on the advisory boards or committees of many universities and government organizations, and was Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Air Force from 1986-1989. He was the 1987 recipient of the prestigious Marconi Prize for his contributions to data communications, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from four universities. He has also been awarded the Edison Medal of the IEEE and the Exceptional Civilian Contributions Medal of the U.S. Air Force.

Lucky is a frequent speaker before both scientific and general audiences. He has been an invited lecturer at about one hundred different universities, and has been the guest on a number of network television shows, including Bill Moyers' "A World of Ideas," where he has discussed the impacts of future technological advances. He is the author of the book Silicon Dreams, which is a semi-technical and philosophical discussion of the ways in which both humans and computers deal with information.
   




Michio Fujisaki received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1961 and then joined Fujitsu Limited. Initially he worked on analog coaxial transmission systems developing high performance variable equalizers for long-distance applications. After managing the development of various transport systems he became General Manager of Transmission Division in 1984. In this role Mr. Fujisaki led the development and manufacture of optical fiber cable transmission as well as SDH/SONET systems - products which have made a major contribution to the infrastructure of today’s modern telecom networks.
Mr. Fujisaki was appointed a Board Member of Fujitsu Limited in 1989 and Executive Vice President in charge of telecommunication business in 1997. Since June 2000, Mr. Fujisaki has been President of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd, the R&D arm of Fujitsu Limited with 1600 staff developing the latest information and communication technologies as well as new devices and materials.

 


Lawrence Rabiner


 


Lawrence Rabiner was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 28, 1943. He received the S.B., and S.M. degrees simultaneously in June 1964, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in June 1967, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts.
From 1962 through 1964, Dr. Rabiner participated in the cooperative program in Electrical Engineering at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany and Murray Hill, New Jersey. During this period Dr. Rabiner worked on designing digital circuitry, issues in military communications problems, and problems in binaural hearing. Dr. Rabiner joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1967 as a Member of the Technical Staff. He was promoted to Supervisor in 1972, Department Head in 1985, Director in 1990, and Functional Vice President in 1995. He joined the newly created AT&T Labs in 1996 as Director of the Speech and Image Processing Services Research Lab, and was promoted to Vice President of Research in 1998 where he managed a broad research program in communications, computing, and information sciences technologies. Dr. Rabiner retired from AT&T at the end of March 2002 and is now a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, and the Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers. He also has a joint appointment as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Dr. Rabiner is co-author of the books "Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing" (Prentice-Hall, 1975), "Digital Processing of Speech Signals" (Prentice-Hall, 1978), "Multirate Digital Signal Processing" (Prentice-Hall, 1983), and "Fundamentals of Speech Recognition" (Prentice-Hall, 1993).
Dr. Rabiner is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, Bell Laboratories, and AT&T. He is a former President of the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society, a former Vice-President of the Acoustical Society of America, a former editor of the ASSP Transactions, and a former member of the IEEE Proceedings Editorial Board.

 


Bruce Yeager


Bruce Yeager is a former Senior Vice President and Co-Head of Credit Lyonnais’ Global Media and Communications Group, with specific responsibility for the Americas. The Media and Communications Group was responsible for overseeing all of Credit Lyonnais’ banking (investment and commercial) activity within the media and communications industries. Yeager received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the South and an MBA from Tulane University. A native of Alexandria, Louisiana, Yeager joined Credit Lyonnais in 1982 and founded the Media & Communications Group in 1988 (as a compliment to the Bank’s similar focus in Europe.) During his tenure the Media & Communications Group in the Americas exceeded $3.0 billion.
Yeager acted as lead agent for several billion dollars of credit facilities to companies such as Liberty Media, Charter Communications, Discovery Communications, Cingular Wireless and General Communication, Inc. (GCI.)
Yeager is currently a financial consultant.