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May 21, 2003
Visit to AT&T Labs
I spent Monday and Tuesday at the AT&T Labs in Middletown, NJ. I attended the AT&T Government Solutions Innovation Forum. AT&T Labs does a much larger Innovation Forum, but this is the first time they've done a smaller one specifically focused on Government.
We flew in early, took the JetBlue red-eye and arrived in New York at 6:00am Monday morning. That gave us most of Monday to walk around Manhattan. By that evening, I was ready to sit.
One of the highlights was meeting AT&T's Chief Scientist, David Belanger. I got several opportunities to talk to him about the future of The 'Net, and enjoyed talking to someone who has thought about the network as much as he has. I also got to spend time with several AT&T Researchers. These kinds of visits are somewhat dangerous for me, because they make me really want to pursue a research career direction.
I found an interesting phenomenon. The speakers who wore suits inevitably had presentations much less compelling than those who didn't. I got to the point where I would look for the sessions with suit-less speakers. Not a large enough sample to be representative, but I'll have to keep this rule-of-thumb in mind for future conferences.
The conference and side-bar discussions left me with a lot to think about, and write about in the next few weeks.
Posted by pete at May 21, 2003 02:17 PM
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