CS855 Week 1 Introductions

1. Introduce yourself

Hi I'm Dave.

2. Identify your area of expertise or interest (real or desired)

I have a lengthy background in firmware and driver development, and managing the development of drivers. Since I've been managing driver development for graphics tablets, I've also developed a little expertise in human computer interaction. But if we're being desirous, I'd like to be a "generalist". Jack of all trades master of none. I like the concept of cross-discipline. I think that focusing on a single discipline can only go so far, before the really great ideas come for mixing things up a bit. I've enjoyed the areas of study during our time at CTU, since many of those areas are one's I've had little exposure to.

3. Describe your dreams for what will be needed in 10-15 years

Well, a couple of trends are people getting older, and the climate getting more extreme. The latter item has two interesting components - fixing the effects of the climate problem (flooding, drought, etc.) and fixing the reason it all happened - energy.

The old people will probably result in efforts in medicine, and I don't necessarily mean helping people get older still, but helping them in their old age. Things like curing Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, and other ways of improving quality of life, such a mobility.

Solving the effects of climate change will take some creative civil engineering (keeping water from where it shouldn't be and getting it to where it should). There will also be some biological efforts, such as dealing with disease moving to new locations, crops no longer growing in some locations and starting to in others, and species loss.

For the energy problem I'm all in favor of conservation and nuclear power. If a butterfly in South America can flutter and cause a hurricane in Africa, what the heck does a wind farm do (plus the chopped birds)? We can only dam so much water - plus that has decimated fish populations. We can only cover so much area with solar panels. So nuclear looks attractive (BTW - I worked for the EPA during Three Mile Island and was pressed into service to collect water samples - so I do understand some of the downsides of nuclear power).

4. List two cool new technologies that you would like to pioneer

Some cool new device for interacting with computers.

A way to parse requirements written in English and detect missing requirements.

5. Misc.

Since we're (I think) supposed to be blogging, this is also posted to blogger at:

http://davecs855.blogspot.com/

and I started a Twitter feed at

http://twitter.com/davecs855