I’m currently in Dallas, Texas, attending the annual Educause conference. Educause bills the conference as “the premier information technology event in higher education”. It’s certainly the largest, with approximately 7000 attendees from all types and sizes of colleges and universities.
On Thursday, I’ll give a presentation titled How Much Infrastructure is Enough, along with colleagues Jeff Overholtzer from Washington and Lee University and David Smallen from Hamilton College. I’ll post more about this after our talk.
The highlight of the conference so far was today’s keynote address, by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Often referred to as one of the “founding fathers” of the Internet, Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocol and the architecture of the Internet.
Cerf’s talk was titled Uncovering the Science in Computer Science: Challenges for the 21st Century. He spoke of the tremendous progress in the past several decades on the hardware side of computer engineering (a terabyte of disk storage, available now for around $1000, would have cost $100 million in 1979). But over the same timeframe, software gains have been less impressive, with security concerns, bugs, and other issues still pervasive. He called for a national focus on computer science, believing that improvements in this area the key to unlocking solutions to complex problems such as global warming and our dependence on foreign oil.
Besides the keynote, I attended an interesting session on podcasting at Mississippi State University, and saw several cool software programs and hardware devices in the exhibition hall. More on that tomorrow.
