Today 02 October is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. It was nice to see the Google home page honouring Gandhi ji.

It was otherwise a normal day at GHC 09 with a very enthusiastic and energetic crowd of computer engineers. There was a fantastic keynote presentation by Fran Berman, Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, called “Creating Technology for Social Good, A Prologue”.

Dr. Berman focused on the future of the information age and how we are going to keep and archive current information. We need to archive the information because “access tomorrow starts with preservation today.” Along with what to save, we also need to decide how to save it. Whatever archival mechanism we decide to use, we need to stick with it. The amount of data that we want to save is massive and it would take copious amounts of time to change the format of all the information. While no specific technology was called out, it was great to see some familiar archive/storage customers being called out. This included Shoah Collection, where SAMQ is being used. I spoke to Dr. Berman after the talk to point her to one of the posters I had seen “Designing for the 100+ year archive” by Cathleen Wharton, Sun Microsystems

I was part of a panel discussion later in the morning. More on this in another blogpost.

Later in the day, I attended a wonderful presentation by  Bernardine Dias’ on TechBridgeWorld and Computing Technology for Developing Communities. Dr Dias is a professor at the Robotics Institute at CMU. She was very impressive and inspiring. I had met her the previous evening at a VIP Reception where she was talking about her upcoming work in Chittagong in Bangladesh. She was very modest when we spoke. I am impressed by the impact she and her team at TechBridgeWorld are making to the community.