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Visionary
James Morris
7/1/2008
Mobilizing Higher Education-- and Industry
CMU-West Dean James Morris on higher education's role in the mobile revolution.
Morris: 'The future of computing and internet expansion is going to happen more on mobile devices like cell phones than on computers like laptops.'
This spring in Santa Clara, CA, Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus (CA) and UC-Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives". The unique conference brought together both academics and industry leaders to discuss technology and the evolving mobile marketplace. CT sat down with James Morris, dean of CMU-West and a professor of computer science, to discuss higher education's role in fostering mobile technology innovation.
What was the thinking behind the Mobile Future event? Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley are leading universities in engineering and technology, and it's become apparent to us, as well as to many people, that the future of computing and internet expansion is going to happen more on mobile devices like cell phones than on computers like laptops. This move to mobile devices will be a significant change for everybody, and we wanted to provide useful information for our friends in Silicon Valley-- for technical managers and professionals, academics, and investors-- who are trying to stay ahead of this fastmoving force, but may be so much in the middle of it that they haven't stepped back to understand where it's going to be in several years.
What types of technologies does the conference look at in particular? The technologies we're most interested in are the hardware and especially the software involved in handheld devices like the Apple iPhone; software like Google's Android system; and lots of infrastructure, such as the whole cell phone system as it's provided by the wireless carriers in this and other countries. It's a huge technological system that is evolving around us, aimed basically at providing communications facilities for the people of the world. We talk mostly about software-- Carnegie Mellon emphasizes software in computer technology-- but also about new product ideas that may be supported by that software.
Could you comment on CMU's role in fostering technology change, either within higher ed or in a more generalized marketplace? Many years ago, I was one of the participants in Carnegie Mellon's Andrew [distributed computing] system. The system exploited personal computers and networking to transform our university into a modern campus leading the way for computer systems that not only supported higher ed institutions, but became the model for a lot of computing systems everywhere. So, the interesting lesson from that is that Carnegie Mellon didn't invent the personal computer, and didn't really invent the local area network, but instead made the campus into a huge test bed for
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