(September 28, 2011) The "Internet of
everything" has arrived, and according to a panel of prominent experts who
assembled at the University of California, San Diego earlier this month for the
2011 Marconi Society Symposium, surfboards, dog collars and even tube socks
will one day cross the digital divide and make for an increasingly
Internet-enabled world.
This year's symposium, which was
co-sponsored by the Center for Magnetic Recording Research and the UC San Diego
division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information
Technology (Calit2), explored the role that hardware (infrastructure) and
software (applications) will play as the Internet evolves over the next several
decades. The Marconi Society hosted the symposium in advance of its awards
ceremony to recognize two scientists who–like radio inventor Guglielmo
Marconi–pursued advances in communications and information technology for the
social, economic and cultural development of all humanity. This year's winners
of the Marconi Prize were former UCSD professors of electrical and computer
engineering Jack Wolf and Irwin Mark Jacobs (Jacobs is also the co-founder of
Qualcomm, Inc.). Speakers at this year's symposium included Jacobs and Google's
Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, as well as Calit2 Senior Research
Scientist Thomas A. DeFanti, Calit2 Research Scientist Albert Yu-Min Lin and
several representatives from Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent and the University of
Texas at Austin.