Talk to examine IT’s impact on society, universities

Talk to examine IT’s impact on society, universities
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BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff

How information technology is changing society and universities is the topic of a talk to be held at Rice Nov. 1 by the president of the National Academy of Engineering.

Bill Wulf will present the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture at 4 p.m. in McMurtry Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall. His talk, titled “Information Technology Impacts: On Society in General and On the University in Particular,” is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Engineering.

Due to the events that transpired Sept. 11, Wulf also plans to talk about what he sees as “the technological opportunities to respond to these events” and what the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science are doing on a broad front in terms of coordinating the research-and-development community’s response.

Information technology, the convergence of computing and communications technologies, has had an enormous impact on all aspects of life in the developed world, Wulf said. Thanks to unprecedented and continuing advances in microelectronics and photonics, the power and capacity of the expanding information infrastructure has risen exponentially while simultaneously its cost has fallen, also exponentially. At least for the foreseeable future, Wulf pointed out, the exponential pace of technology improvement is likely to continue.

How society handles these rapid changes and deals with the challenges they present is of concern.

Advances in technology have resulted in the globalization of commerce, better forms of customer service in traditional businesses, new business models for Internet-based enterprises, new forms of social interactions in Internet “chat rooms” and multi-user dimensions, or “MUDs,” and new legal and ethical challenges.

Wulf’s lecture will explore some of the nontechnical, societal challenges and specifically challenges to research universities posed by information technology in the 21st century. Issues such as privacy and the structure of higher education are two examples.

“Universities are extremely important institutions in society because of the functions they perform,” he said. “Whether they will be preserved in precisely the same way in the cyberworld as in the physical world is not clear.”

Wulf says he does not plan to provide answers for these challenges, but hopes that asking some of the right questions will provoke serious thought about future possibilities, resulting in a more prepared society.

Wulf received the first computer science Ph.D. ever awarded at the University of Virginia in 1968. He then served on the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University, as chairman of Tartan Laboratories and assistant director of the National Science Foundation. In 1990 he returned to the University of Virginia and became university professor. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 he was elected president of the National Academy of Engineering. He has directed more than 25 Ph.D. theses and is the author or co-author of three books and more than 40 papers.