"The Internet or Something Better"

Abstract:
My Georgia Tech colleague, Professor Michael Best, recently made a trip to Africa.  Mike and others met with a group of chiefs of the Acholi people in Northern Uganda.  This is an area that has suffered through profound conflict and lacks for essentially any communication technology.  Mike and his team wanted to engage in participatory design to understand the communication needs and requirements.

They were very cautious not to influence the conversation towards modern communication technologies so they did not mention specific systems. But after about thirty minutes of this exercise one of the chiefs finally stated, "We want the internet. Unless you have something better."

I have spent my career working on the Internet.  Over the last nine months I have led the Network Science and Engineering Council charting an agenda for the what, how, when, and why of something better.  In this talk I will discuss the problems, challenges and opportunities of a better Internet.

Bio:
Ellen W. Zegura is Professor and Chair of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.  Her primary research interests are in wide-area (Internet) networking services and, more recently, mobile wireless networking.  She is a past Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and a current member of the NSF CISE Advisory Committee.  She chairs the Network Science and Engineering Council, a research community group that is developing a comprehensive agenda for future networking. 

Prior to serving as Chair of the School of Computer Science, she was an Associate Dean in the College of Computing with responsibilities including Research, Graduate Programs and Facilities.  She served a six month stint as Interim Dean in 2002.  She holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science (1987), the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (1987), the M.S. degree in Computer Science (1990) and the D.Sc. in Computer Science (1993) all from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.  She is the proud mom of two girls, Carmen (born in August 1998) and Bethany (born in May 2001) whose pictures never made it onto the web until the advent of photo-sharing web sites.