Information Storage: Foundation for Advancing Education

The pace of technology advancement in recent years is a wonder to behold. Examples abound in wireless communications, computing, biotech and data storage. It wasn’t that long ago that a GB was a massive amount of data storage. As astounding as these changes have been, we have come to expect faster gains in the future. Continuing self-education will likely be required for engineers and business leaders to remain competitive. This will make teaching students how to learn of the most valuable products of the education system. Even non science graduates will need to know how to identify problems, and separate facts from the assumptions.

Examples from my career will be used to examine this hypothesis. A particularly poignant example arises from my recent work on Chasm Analysis, which I created as a method for identifying the market potential for storage technologies, by examining the foundations from an economic perspective. The key insight comes from identifying an incorrect assumption made by technologists since the 1960s. It has proven quite useful in forecasting the future of solid state storage in the Information Technology (IT) space. It also provides support for the need to employ the scientific method to the business of technology, and the need to continually reeducate one's self.

Speaker: Steven R. Hetzler is an IBM Fellow at IBM's Almaden Research Center (San Jose, Calif.), where he manages the Storage Architecture Research group.

He is currently focusing on new architectures for creating highly fault tolerant storage systems, iSCSI data storage systems and markets and applications for nonvolatile memories. iSCSI is a protocol for managing storage over IP networks that he initiated within IBM Research and also named. His group wrote the first draft specification, developed the first working iSCSI demonstrations, including the first direct network-attached DVD movie multiplex, and was active in helping develop iSCSI into an industry standard. 

Registration: Please register; $2 donation helps cover food; Please bring your PDF ticket.

Silicon Valley chapter of IEEE.