April 29, 2008 at 10:47 pm
· Filed under Conferences
In the late 1980’s, I had a work-study job as a computer operator in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (B.S.E.E. 1987, M.A. 1989). That meant keeping the systems operating and loading backup tapes. Lots of backup tapes. One of the projects I supported was a speech recognition effort led by a Carnegie Mellon PhD graduate and assistant professor named Kai-Fu Lee.
Shortly thereafter, I took a staff position there in the research documents group, which was tasked with telling the U.S. Government (primarily DARPA) what we accomplished by spending their money. Again, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s project was among those that I supported.
Twenty years later, I find myself in Beijing at the WWW2008 conference, in the audience at the opening keynote, delivered by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (now Vice President of Engineering at Google). I think it says something about my career that I’m now half-way around the world, attending a keynote by Dr. Lee. Exactly what it says, I’m not sure.
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April 27, 2008 at 9:53 pm
· Filed under Conferences, Standards
Last week I had the privilege of representing the Society for Technical Communication at the semi-annual meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Advisory Committee, this time in Beijing. As a W3C member, the STC participates in W3C governance. Perhaps more importantly, the STC can place members in W3C member-only roles, like participation in W3C working groups. There is substantial interest by the W3C in increasing the participation and support of the STC in its standards development and communication activities.
The W3C is working on standards in several important and exciting areas, including accessibility, mobile devices, the next generation of HTML, and the next generation of the Web itself, the Semantic Web. Leaders from each of these areas are interested in support for drafting specification documents (the W3C calls them Recommendations), and for writing and editing supporting documents to explain W3C Recommendations to appropriate audiences.
More on that later. Until then, a picture (me at the Great Wall, Mutianyu section):
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