It's mid-April; my boyfriend, Scott & I are headed out on a road trip to spend a month visiting colleges to talk with kids about technology. … I rent a roomy car; Scott stocks up on sunscreen, CDs, and Twizzlers. We throw on our college uniforms, comfy jeans, sweatshirts, sneakers, and prepare to blend in with the kids. One of the items we bring along in our car is an old Mac SE, sans hard drive, which I bought for $2,500 when I started college in 1989.

At a lot of high schools & colleges, kids call this kind of gathering a LAN party, because players get together in one room to connect their computers to the local area network. Hare insists that this particular game is not a LAN party, it's "just hanging out." Whatever you call it, the evening is more about being with friends than it is about the game. In the 2 hours they play, Tomczak, Hare, and Railing with 5 or 6 friends who pop in & out of the room, Kramer-style, catch up on a hallmate's test, a friend's fundraising efforts to fight MS, budding romances, and Invader Zim episodes they love.

All this playtime is a drain on the universities' information systems. Tech-support costs don't necessarily get out of whack; kids needing help can just go to a residential computing consultant (a school-sanctioned RA for the PCs) or, barring that, a friend. But the network itself takes a bruising. Charles Bartel at Carnegie Mellon estimates that 30% of the school's network traffic is e-mail, 40% is file transfers and Web downloads, and 30% is everything else, incl games, IM, and visits to sites like Kazaa & Morpheus. Administrators at UCSD don't seem to mind. UCSD is encouraging its students to run rampant over the network; it is handing out color-screen wireless PDAs, Jornadas, donated by Hewlett-Packard, which it hopes kids will use to IM one another, check e-mail, and surf the Web. The idea is to learn how kids use the things and then build educational tools that take advantage of the technology. The school has already written a couple of applications for the system. Neither has caught on like wildfire just yet. The first, ActiveClass, is among other things supposed to boost participation in class by giving shy students a way to send questions to the professor (wirelessly!) without having to raise a hand in class. This quarter UCSD is testing it out in CS30, a fundamentals of programming class that's required for computer science majors. CS30 is a healthy-sized lecture class, perfect environment for tuning out. From the back of the classroom, it seems the students are doing just that. Only about half even bring their Jornadas to class, and while the others do poke away at the gizmos, it's hard to tell whether they're participating in class, writing grocery lists, or playing Solitaire. One group of students spends 30 minutes passing notes (on paper!) and giggling. ("Hey! Are you looking at Internet porn on my PDA?"). The second Jornada application, ActiveCampus Explorer, is supposed to foster community on campus since many UCSD students commute about 20 minutes to school each day, they tend to treat the place more like an office than a home. "If this school is known for anything, it's for apathy," says senior Ben Shapiro. Shapiro & a few other students collaborated on Digital Graffiti, a part of ActiveCampus that uses radio-based location technology to let students post public electronic notes at campus locations. (For example, if I were in the Student Center and saw a piece of art I liked, I could write a little review of it on my Jornada, and then hit Tag to publish. If you then walked past the art, my note would pop up on your PDA. And if you liked it too, maybe you'd write me a note back, and we'd start talking.) It's hard to tell exactly what kids are doing with this. Junior Aliha Khan offers to let me read the virtual graffiti that's been posted at the Student Center, a single entry: "mwahahaha." At least one person, Larry Smarr, who heads up Cal-(IT)2, the state initiative funding the experiment, is thrilled by that. Smarr believes firmly that the "mwahahahas" of the world, the fruits of idle curiosity, are what generate the best new technologies. The really good stuff percolates up to popularity. He should know: He spent 15 years as the director of NCSA at the Univ. of Illinois when Marc Andreessen helped develop the Mosaic browser there, which percolated to eventually became the basis for Netscape. "The business community thinks startups are where innovation is. But startups are late-phase," Smarr says. "A lot of people in the business world don't understand how critical the university system is for sorting through all the possibilities for the future and homing in on the ones that are really cool." Much of what looks like clowning around with ActiveClass in CS 30 is actually a lively conversation about memory allocation in the computer language C. A group of students are writing to each other and to the TAs, answering each other's questions about the material which means that Prof. Rick Ord doesn't have to interrupt his lesson. Ord tells us that the kids have figured out how to do this all on their own, only 3 classes into the quarter.

A lot of people buy into Smarr's percolation idea. The schools milk it for all it's worth: "the next big thing" is big business at universities. Every campus we visit has some flashy, cutting-edge showpiece prepared and ready to impress. Professors trot visitors through cluttered labs strewn with robot parts; virtual-reality workshops; gigantic, next-generation display technologies. All the big tech companies swarm on campus, too, funding student projects and looking for talent to hire. At MIT, Microsoft has handed out $750,000 to fund student projects. Apple hires students to promote its products at Univ. of Chicago. Everyone is hovering, hoping to be the first to recognize the next breakthrough.
Scott & I never really find the next big thing, technologically speaking. Kids are rigging up all kinds of cool stuff in their spare time. One of the neatest ideas we see comes from a senior at Illinois who uses his computer at NCSA to write software that tracks "6 degrees of IM separation" (and inspires an impromptu popularity competition on campus). But there's no new, widespread killer app in the dorms, just different flavors of IM (like ICQ & Trillian) and assorted sons of Napster (like Kazaa & Morpheus).

There's some interesting stuff in the labs we visit at Carnegie Mellon & UCSD, but nothing that isn't related to technologies we've seen before. Same goes for the entrepreneurs we talk to at Illinois, Stanford, and MIT. What we can say definitively, by the end of our trip, is that technology is about to spawn a bunch of next big things in life.

After building the national center for supercomputers at Univ. of Illinois and helping create the Internet, Larry Smarr came to UCSD to resume the quiet life of an academic computer scientist. Instead, he has ended up leading a fast-moving institute with big ambitions to retain So.Calif. leadership position in telecommunications & information technology. For the past year, Smarr has served as the chief fund-raiser, visionary and diplomat at the California Inst. of Telecommunications & Information Technology. But don't call him an administrator.
"I don't run existing organizations; that's part of my deal," he said. Instead, Smarr is a creator, a rare academic with the skills & desire to build new organizations from the ground up, who can stay motivated without the promise of the millions that entrepreneurs earn in the private sector.
  [ Corporate shills co-opting public institutions & community infrastructure are not "creating". ]

Smarr has used his low-key Midwestern manner to get territorial, lone-wolf academics and profit-seeking business leaders to work together on projects that could change the way we live. Smarr has also taken the institute global, signing exchange agreements with Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Italy, Sweden and Germany."He's a dynamic leader with a fast-moving agenda," said UCSD colleague Mohan Trivedi.
Venture capitalist Franz Birkner attended a 6 hour meeting in which Smarr persuaded operators of So.Calif. universities' fiber-optic networks to work together to better use their experimental networks. Talking these territorial academics into teaming up, he said, was a "minor miracle." "His genius is as a collaborationist," Birkner said. "He uses his aw-shucks Missouri manner to get independent-minded people to work together." Son of a Missouri florist who still counts gardening among his favorite hobbies, Smarr was trained as an astrophysicist. Along the way, he also became a computer scientist.

In the early 1980s, as a professor at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Smarr helped persuade the National Science Fdtn to fund a supercomputing applications ctr. At the time, supercomputers were located mainly at weapons labs. Smarr wanted to use supercomputers to speed his research on astrophysics & black holes, but found he had to get security clearance and persuade scientists at the weapons labs to give him access to their powerful technology.
As director of the center for supercomputer applications, Smarr worked on ways to open the technology to broad areas of research. The center helped form the backbone of the Internet. One student was Marc Andreessen, who developed the Netscape browser that revolutionized Web access and turned Andreessen into a tycoon. As director of the supercomputing center, Smarr gained experience as an "entrepreneur" but with a twist; he built the equivalent of a start-up within the university. He's what management guru Peter Drucker calls an "intrepreneur."

During Smarr's tenure, he got the community involved in the research by inventing the concept of living laboratories, getting people in the university & the community to try new technologies. "It was a backdoor guerrilla thing," he said. Smarr persuaded Ameritech to use Champaign County as a pilot project for some of its advanced telecommunication services. At the same time, he hooked up some county offices to the university's sophisticated computer networks.
Together, these steps put the county govt on the electronic frontier. For his efforts, Smarr was named Most Valuable Citizen of Champaign County in 1997, an award he keeps in his UCSD office. At the institute, living laboratories, ranging from wildlife preserves to most of the UCSD campus, will play a central role. The new buildings of the institute will serve as living laboratories, testing the latest building software & sensors to monitor energy use & air quality.

To succeed in bringing together the university & the community, Smarr said he believed that the institute couldn't be confined to a traditional lab. "It had to be populated with real people, real sensors and real diagnostics," he said. By focusing on community problems, Smarr said, the public as well as the private sector will benefit from the research.
Smarr thought his days as an intrepreneur were over when he decided to come out to UCSD. He & his wife, UCSD theater professor Janet Smarr, reared their two children in Illinois and were lured to San Diego by professional opportunities & the weather. Smarr was looking forward to going back to the intense research of a professor. But the chance to direct the new institute was too appealing. "I finally decided I would do it because I thought there was an unparalleled opportunity here to create a new kind of institution that would put Southern California in a leadership position for decades to come," said Smarr, whose annual salary is $240,000.

"This corridor from Tijuana to L.A. is going to be the high-growth corridor for the next decade, not only for California, but probably the U.S.," he said. Now, as director of the institute, Smarr spends hours sifting through proposals and connecting researchers in different disciplines. "My job," he said, "is to find these creative people and free them up so they can make the magic happen."

Academic & business worlds converge on new innovation frontier at UCSD institute
5.5.02   Bill Ainsworth SD UT pA1

It's as whimsical as giving personal digital assistants to UCSD students and seeing how they play with them. It's as serious as helping the nation guard against a bioterrorism attack. But mostly, Cal(IT)2 at UCSD & UCIrvine is an investment in the economic future of the region and possibly the nation. By investing tens of millions of dollars in this institute, the state & its corporate partners
  [ When this was done with I.G.Farben in 1939, it was called national socialism & left the entire world at war. When the Chinese govt does this, it is called communism and justifies prison factories in the name of idealogical rehabilitation. ]
want to unleash the same forces that created scores of successful companies, from Palo Alto's Hewlett-Packard to San Diego's Qualcomm. It's something that has never been done in this state, or, on this scale. And it is being closely watched by business groups & academia nationwide.

State, Univ. of California and business leaders expect technology discoveries to produce billions of dollars in new economic activity in the San Diego area, increasing jobs and wealth for established giants and start-ups still unborn.
  [ Long live the Chamber of Commerce South Sea Bubble. Pass the tulips. ]
They've chosen a director with experience finding gold at the confluence of academia & business. Former Univ. of Illinois supercomputing research ctr dir. Larry Smarr helped create the Internet. For his next act, Smarr will focus on a wireless version. "It will be as critical to our society & our economy as the building of the highway system was to the last century," Smarr said. "The Internet is the infrastructure that will define the 21st century."

Smarr has moved the San Diego institute along rapidly by signing up industry partners, connecting researchers and launching innovative experiments. The 261 researchers are trying out technology the public won't see for 3 to 10 years, everything from the latest personal digital assistants, commonly referred to as PDAs, to sophisticated sensors that detect stress in drivers. They're applying these new devices & technologies to a wide variety of problems, incl speeding the cure for Alzheimer's, building safer airbags and safeguarding the water supply.
UCSD & UC Irvine institute is one of 4 UC centers for science & innovation created by Gov. Gray Davis, with backing from the Legislature, to keep the state on the cutting edge of technology.The one at UCLA focuses on nanotechnology, while the center at UCSF concentrates on biomedical research. The UCBerkeley ctr applies information technology to a variety of problems.

For Davis, knocked by critics as a short-sighted politician who can't see past the next election, these are visionary projects. They represent the state's attempt to greatly expand upon previous, sometimes controversial, links between universities & private companies that have put the state at the top of the high technology world. Officials from Wall St. to the top echelon of academia are monitoring the progress at the 4 UC centers.
  [ Beta testing & mkt research are ubiquitous. Calling it "innovative" is puffery. ]

The governor predicted that the centers will produce breakthrough products that will improve health care and make daily living more convenient. "I believe that 25 or 50 years from now, they'll say this is the best thing the Davis administration did," Davis said. Scripps Research Inst. president Richard Lerner first pitched the idea to the governor. Early in his first year in office, Davis decided to provide $100 million for each of the institutes during a critical conference call with Lerner & a group of San Diegans, Padres owner John Moores, now interim Univ. of California Board of Regents chair, and Davis' chief of staff, Lynn Schenk.
  [ convergence of policy & profit in secret. ]

As a condition for winning state funding, each of the 4 centers had to collect pledges from other sources, incl companies. So far the UCSD ctr has collected $210 million in contributions &aamp; pledges, mostly from such companies as Cox Communications, SAIC, Ericsson Wireless, Sun Microsystems, SBC Communications and Silicon Graphics.
"I can think of no more sincere private sector support than giving money," said independent San Diego venture capitalist firm FXB Ventures owner Franz Birkner.

San Diego Telecom Council pres. Marco Thompson said San Diego already is home to a huge telecommunications industry, but he expects the institute to "accelerate our embarrassment of riches" by helping to create better products & new jobs.
A leader at Orincon Information Assurance said his company has already seen the benefits. It just completed a joint project with the institute to help develop software safe from attacks by terrorists or hackers. "They have relevant & deep experience. That's a golden opportunity for us," said Orincon president Allen Ott.

Some worry that too much private-sector backing could put companies in charge of research, encouraging academics to choose projects that are commercially viable, rather than those that have the greatest public benefit. "There could be a skewing of the research agenda overall," said Stanford Univ. Ctr for Biomedical Ethics researcher Mildred Cho. At least one study shows that professors engaged in privately sponsored research tend to be more secretive about their results than those involved in strictly govt funded projects. Past links between UC research and private businesses have raised ethical questions.

Smarr, however, said academics will remain in charge of the research and it will be public. Further, all sponsored research projects will have what amount to prenuptial agreements that spell out and limit each sponsors rights. Under long-standing UC policy, the university & the researcher share patent rights for new products. Companies typically pay the university for licensing.

One of the institute's most high-profile experiments turns UCSD into a kind of wireless wonderland, where large amounts of information can pass through the air in fractions of seconds, connecting students, faculty and staff. The ActiveCampus project, supported by Hewlett-Packard & Qualcomm, tests whether technology, which often isolates people, can help students connect with each other & their professors.
Computer science prof. Bill Griswold who developed ActiveCampus said he wants to try to make UCSD friendlier and more connected. "We're trying to use technology to enhance community and culture," he said. Tests began this spring for the most ambitious part of the project. It's called The Explorer, and it opens up a digital window on UCSD. Selected freshmen & computer science students begin the experiment by getting up-to-date personal digital assistants.

Once students sign on to their PDA, geo-locators find where they are and provide a map with Internet links to activities, professors, lectures and even friends in nearby buildings. The students can customize their programs to receive information about activities they like, say, chess or yoga classes, and sign up to keep track of friends' whereabouts.

Already students have used their PDAs in a classroom setting that allows them to type in questions during a lecture. "No student has to feel they're asking a dumb question. It gives you that feeling of security," said UCSD sophomore James Heffron enrolled in the ActiveClass experiment last quarter. Besides tapping on the tiny keyboard to ask questions, Heffron used his PDA to plug into his own unfinished programs during a computer science lecture so he could respond to his professor's instructions immediately.

Teaching assistants monitored the questions during the class and gave them to the instructor. They even held polls among the 200 students to find the most urgent queries. "It's a little bit more work," said asst Nobuhiro Makida who helped with the class, "but we don't mind because we're computer nerds." Apparently, not all students are. One tried to use the interactive classroom network to set up an after-class party.

In some cases, researchers can study themselves, or at least how they use their new research tools. That's what they're planning to do with a new fiber-optic link between SDSU & Scripps Inst. of Oceanography at UCSD. A new line hooks up 2 visualization centers that allow researchers to simultaneously examine a wealth of real-time data in user-friendly 3-D form.
Now 2 rooms full of researchers can look at the same virtual environment at the same time to advance their own studies on oceans, earthquakes and the fault lines at Lake Tahoe. They'll also look at the best uses for visualization centers.
  [ Which way to the CAVE? ]
"We'll see how to use these in a way that best benefits people," said SDSU's Eric Frost. Eventually, Frost said, these centers could be used as emergency command posts that allow the governor & local officials to look at fires, earthquakes or other disasters as soon as they happen.

Smarr said the institute's outreach to technology co. is an updated version of the way Midwestern agricultural, land- grant colleges used to work with the dominant industry in their area: farming.
  [ This resulted in monolithic corporate farming & genetically modified food stuffs whose corporate patent holders successfully sued neighboring farmers for damages when their own Frankenfood pollen inseminated neighboring crops. ]
When they found solutions that helped farmers prosper, the universities fared well because of higher tax revenues from the increased economic activity. Smarr hopes the institute can help create a similar spiral. "The more the university can think about problems in the economy & the community, the more it can help make them stronger and make the economic base bigger," he said. "And the bigger the economic base, the more tax money to make the university grow."
  [ Superstitious myths of the free enterprise religion which ignore realities that research funding corporations lobbied tax exemptions for themselves in advance and receive cut-rate licensing rights skewing the balance of laissez-faire as a result of exclusive privilege. ]

Stalker tech   ¹
UCSD students track friends' locations with PDAs
6.11.02   Randy Dotinga Salon

"I don't necessarily want even my friends knowing where I am," says 22-year-old senior Ben Shapiro who is designing the project's privacy rules. "Maybe students aren't out of the closet and don't want people to know they're going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Ctr. Maybe you're cheating on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's dorm room. It's creepy Big Brother."

Shapiro is no stranger to speaking his mind. In his freshman year, he & the ACLU successfully sued UCSD after he got in trouble for posting a handwritten sign that said "Fuck Netanyahu & Pinochet" on his dorm room window.
But Shapiro actually likes the location-tracking software despite his misgivings. "If the system has enough protections for people's privacy and enough people use it, it could be really great," he says. The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling & rapidly growing campus. "What used to feel like a small town is starting to feel like a big city," said computer science prof. Wm Griswold who is overseeing the project.

The PDAs detect each other through the university's Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) network, the same radio wave-based system that allows lap-toppers to go online from coffeehouses & airports. The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.
The software only allows a person to track the location of another user if both agree. If Shapiro doesn't want his best friend to track him, he can leave him off his PDA's equivalent of an America Online "buddy list." According to Griswold, the location data is protected by the standard SSL Internet encryption technology.

But critics are skeptical. "They have created a security risk for every single student who uses the software," says 25-year-old senior Nick Van Borst majoring in world literature who criticized the tracker system in a university magazine. "People are hacking things on campus all the time, and there's always these crazy viruses going around. Somebody's going to want to (hack) it just for the hell of it to see if they can."
Hackers don't even need to be on the campus to invade the PDA location tracker system. Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are. The system offers both a zoomable map of the campus, with moving dots representing their friends, and a text list of where people are. If students program their PDAs properly, their buddies can also track their locations around the world whenever they log into a Wi-Fi network.

System administrators can gain access to the locations of students or employees equipped with the PDAs, although designers hope to eventually make that impossible. Law enforcement officers could also conceivably try to track someone without their knowledge, but "it's not our intention to be a party to activities like that," Griswold says.
The PDA project will get bigger. UCSD has a few dozen more donated PDAs to give away to students, and it hopes to equip 330 freshmen with them this fall when it opens a sixth mini-college on campus. Hewlett-Packard, which has provided the PDAs for free, wants to know what college students do with the devices, Griswold says. "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."

That's what worries privacy advocates who are already monitoring the growing use of location-tracking GPS microchips in cellphones. Trouble looms around the corner "even if there's a rock-solid privacy policy, even if certain safeguards are built in," says San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse dir. Beth Givens. "Whenever someone develops a new service that uses personally identifiable information, there will be in the future other uses found for that information. You can count on it."

UCSD officials contend that students know what they're getting into. The PDA project is an experiment so users must sign waivers before using the devices, Griswold said. "The approach we've taken is to put control into the hands of the user and explain to them what it means. The students at this university are very bright, and we expect them to all be able to understand the things we say to them."

Some students don't even bother looking at the waiver. They turn down the new technology for a very old- fashioned reason. "They're afraid that if they break them, we'll charge them for it," Griswold said. For now, at least, both their pocketbooks & their privacy will remain intact.

Hillsboro OR   Genevieve Bell was finishing up her doctorate in anthropology and a dissertation on American Indian ethnography at Stanford University when a brief conversation with a stranger in a Palo Alto bar changed her life. It was 1998, a year in which Bay Area taverns were packed with technology entrepreneurs.
Bell made quite an impression on the stranger, a techie who tracked her down the next day and implored her to call his Intel contacts who were looking for anthropologists. She did and hasn't regretted it.

An outspoken, saucy Australian, Bell, 38, stands out in the drab, Dilbert-esque office park outside Portland, one of several that house 15,500 Intel employees. It seems an unusual fit, this Ph.D. in anthropology and a manufacturer of semiconductor chips. After all, Bell had been groomed for academia; a Macintosh user, she knew little about technology.
Intel was a place where people went around saying things like "We've got to make killer apps that will suck MIPs," Bell recalls. (Translation: Intel wants to make products that will use a lot of processing power.) "I already knew how to be a professor," says Bell. "I thought if I don't try this, I'll never know what it was like."

Anthropologists have historically had an important role in corporate America, whether it's helping Procter & Gamble understand how consumers use dishwashing liquid or teaching Xerox that copiers need a big green "start" button. Cultural anthropologists are also on staff at most large technology companies, including Microsoft and British Telecom. At IBM, the research group that includes anthropologists and other social scientists has grown from eight in 2003 to 60 today.
At Intel, which wasn't used to having a direct relationship with its end users, the challenges for an anthropologist were not simple. In 1998, Bell joined the People and Practices research group, which then had one anthropologist, 4 psychologists, and a couple of computer experts.

Their objective was to make the global company think about people.
"It's not just about making chips for chips' sake," she says. "It's about understanding the products they will power, and you need to know what a machine will do not only technically, but culturally and socially as well."
The first task was to convince Intel that technology is used in dramatically different ways around the world. That quest ultimately led Bell to Asia for the better part of 2 years, where she observed middle-class families at home to understand how they used technology and how they might benefit from it if they didn't.

Her research influenced the creation of the China Home Learning PC. She helped create a mock-up of a Chinese living room so Intel engineers could observe how the Chinese lived in small quarters and which parts of their homes were most important. The computer is smaller than a typical desktop, with English and Mandarin characters, and it includes a lock so parents can make sure their children can only access educational content while studying.
While she is proud of her contributions to the Chinese PC, Bell concedes that it is rare her research leads to product development. But she says she adds value in indirect ways.

The Asia research, for example, was also presented to Intel's venture-capital team to help it choose investments, and it is used by the sales & marketing team to localize marketing messages. Engineers also use it to guide research and development efforts.

Intel recently restructured its departments by platform rather than product line, and Bell has landed in the new Digital Home Group. She plans to hire about 10 social scientists and designers to help determine which products might make life easier inside homes.
"20 years ago, Intel was all about building a better chip," says Don MacDonald, vice president of Intel's Digital Home Group and Bell's boss.