[KL7AA] November's AARC General Membership meeting - The Dawn of Wi-Fi

[David Heimke]

Have you ever wondered just who did the hard work to design and get through
the bugs on the WI-FI systems that we are now all so accustomed to?  Would
you be surprised to learn that one of the chief architects is one of
Alaska's own, and a ham to boot?

 

Dr. Alex Hills (aka AL7K) led the team that built the world's first large
Wi-Fi network.  On November 6 Alex will tell us how his experience as a ham
helped him to overcome the challenges inherent in using low power radio (at
900 MHz and 2.4 GHz) to carry high-speed Internet traffic

 

Dr. Hills is an inventor and professor specializing in wireless systems,
communications networks and telecommunications policy.  He is Distinguished
Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he and his team built
that first large Wi-Fi network, and he has served as chief information
officer at two major universities, leading the universities' development and
use of information technology and networks.  He also holds faculty
appointments as Profesor Extraordinario at the Universidad Austral de Chile
and as Distinguished Affiliate Professor at the University of Alaska.  In
the past he has held visiting appointments as Cheng Tsang Man Professor at
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and as Erskine Fellow at the
University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

 

But he is also an old time Alaskan. He's spent many years helping to build
Alaska's radio and television stations, its telephone systems, and our
Alaska Internet. 

 

Alex has worked and lectured in almost thirty different nations, including
working with university students on projects in poor, developing nations.
His latest book, Geeks on a Mission, tells about his adventures working with
these students. 

 

Alex has been honored as Alaska's Engineer of the Year and as a member of
the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame. A year ago UAA gave him an Honorary
Doctor of Letters degree. He and his wife Meg live in Palmer, and they have
two grown children, Drs. Rebecca and Karen Hills, both graduates of West
Valley High School in Fairbanks.

 

Please join us as we welcome this excellent speaker on our Friday evening
meeting.  We meet, as always, at Alaska Pacific University at 7PM.  For
directions, visit www.kl7aa.net.