Keynote Speaker:
John Gage

Connectivity Magician

About the Speaker

John really did pull a rabbit out of a hat when he spearheaded the NetDay initiative. NetDay was a project to get as many schools connected to the Internet as possible in a day. Of course, the work preceding the day was tremendous, and was structured around the invention of a community of parent volunteers bringing their resources to bear on the problem. Once they figured it out, the day that made the connectivity was a simple closing to an amazing effort.

John Gage is responsible for Sun's relationships with the world scientific and public policy communities, international scientific institutions and groups developing new forms of scientific research involving computing.

He is on scientific and advisory panels of the United States National Science Foundation, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the European Institute of Technology and the United States National Academy of Sciences. He has recently been appointed to the US National Research Council Mathematical Sciences Education Board.

He is a member of ACM, IEEE, SIAM, AMS, AAAS, and SMPTE.

He attended the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Public Policy. He did doctoral work in economics and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley at the same time as Bill Joy. Gage subsequently left Berkeley with Joy to start Sun in 1982.

Gage is on the Board of Directors of Unicode, an industry consortium of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Novell, and others to provide multilingual capability in all world scripts for all documents and applications.

Abstract of Talk

Making the Invisible Visible: Global Connectivity, Privacy, and the Creation of New Neighborhoods

New neighborhoods are emerging all over the world, limited not by geography but spanning the globe, linking people by unique areas of interest.

John Gage will highlight new forms of intellectual technology and their impact on creating new groups to share ideas, and discuss related issues.


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