How do some technologies get adopted and go on to become an infrastructure that the “community” depends on? What are some of the hallmarks of technologies that have gone on to widespread adoption and conversely, some that have fallen by the wayside despite technical brilliance. I will do a quick tour through the ages of cell phone, The Internet, and now Internet of Things or IoT.
Technology in Education, or Technology vs. Education
Citation Teaching at a research university, I see a slew of high-tech gadgets, or even low-tech ones, that we are asked to consider to enhance the educational experience of our students. As a broader theme, some technologies have been put up as disrupting the “traditional” college mode of education dating way back to the turn […]
The Internet of Insecure Things
Citation We are moving into a world of internet connected things. This is the world where your aging grandmother’s medicine cabinet reminds her when her medication has become due, when the irregular heart beat of your father triggers the scheduling of a cardio checkup, and when the home automation device decides that lowering the temperature […]
Where is my Flying Car, or Why we miss Technology Deadlines
Citation The flying car has become a cliche in how a technology promise was not kept. Flying cars were quite a common prop in movies in the 1950’s and 60’s with the implicit promise that they were around the corner. And if you are the kind that follows tech news obsessively and have a great […]
7 Habits of Highly Effective Graduate Students
As a professor I know how much of the fun I have in my work and the success of my efforts depends on super human graduate students who do research in my group. And that is a rhetorical question. The answer is a lot, perhaps the single most important factor. So doubtless I, and all my faculty colleagues, spend a lot of cycles thinking about which graduate students to select and then observing how they work on their research tasks and then working with them so that they are even more effective. So here is my distillation of the qualities that I see among the successful graduate students. Like the original list of 7 habits of effective people, this one too does not apply to all successful graduate students. But I would hazard a guess that if you do not have a good many of these 7 habits, you are unlikely to succeed as a graduate researcher. Also I want to stay away from “motherhood and apple pie” kind of generic golden qualities, which we all instinctively know are good, but want to be more specific.
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Hype Cycle in Research
Citation We all know that some technical topics become hot, stay hot for some length of time, and then fade away from attention in academia, and the research world more generally. And then there are some topics that stay more stable for extended periods of time, for say one career span of years. This post […]
What’s Multitasking Doing to Me?
Citation We believe that multitasking is the essential ingredient to being healthy, wealthy, and happy. We do it incessantly in our work lives and even in our personal lives. While conversing with the person across the dinner table, our Google Glass, or if you have upgraded, the VR goggle, keeps telling you of the latest […]
The Power of the Crowd
Citation “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke When diktats come down from the high up, i.e., the corridors of administrative power, and these are not helpful to society at large, does the crowd, i.e., a mass of people, mobilized through technology have the […]
Datacenter outages and stranded passengers
Datacenters – these distant, idealized instantiations of our digital present – do fail at times. When they do, they affect our physical present. Here is one (of several) reason why this happens and this one is only too human.
The Lazy Hacker
Citation The latest crippling ransomware to hit our digital world has been Wanna Cry, which raised its head around May 12. Ransomware is a kind of software used by bad actors (or simply put “bad guys”) to make data in computer systems unavailable, such as, by encrypting the data. The bad actors promise to make […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 