Departmental Colloquium

The Giants of Wireless

Dr. Bert Lundy
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, California

The news program Nightly Business Report recently selected the top thirty innovations of the past thirty years. The top three innovations selected were the Internet, the cell phone, and the personal computer. If we tried to choose the top innovations (or inventions) of the past two hundred years, surely the telegraph, the telephone, and wireless communications – collectively the foundation upon which the Internet and cellular networks were built – would be included.

What does it take to create a major invention, innovation, or breakthrough? In this talk we take a look at several of the early pioneers in wireless communications. The lives and careers of Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Marconi, De Forest, Fessenden, and Armstrong are reviewed, and their major contributions to wireless are discussed. By doing this, we can learn from their strengths and weaknesses, and infer important lessons which may help us in our quest to make major advances in our own work.

We also consider the major breakthroughs themselves. One critical lesson from all of these is very applicable today, and will be revealed.

The primary source for this talk is the author's new book: Telegraph, Telephone and Wireless: How Telecom Changed the World.

About the Speaker: Bert Lundy is with the Computer Science Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research interests span several different aspects of computer and telecom networks, such as formal models for protocol specification and analysis, protocol testing, and network economics and policies, and, recently, telecom history. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
Department Conference Room

-------------------

thanks!

yanqing zhang