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Keynote Speakers
Frederick L. Kitson, Ph.D.Vice President and Senior Director - Motorola LabsDr. Kitson is the Vice President and Senior Director at Motorola Labs leading the Applications Research Center of Excellence. Dr. Kitson leads a worldwide team of researchers to develop high-value future technologies enabling Motorola to maintain its leadership in applications and content solutions for seamless mobility. His focus includes user- centered solutions, multimedia, pervasive platforms and architectures and personalization and knowledge. Recent successes of the Applications Research Center of Excellence include the creation of the seamless mobility architecture that has had a major impact on the corporate agenda, messaging and technological roadmaps of Motorola and creation of Push-to-X concepts and technologies including the recent Push-to-See capability. Equally successful have been the development of the highly resilient MPEG4 encoder/decoder for use on Motorola cell phones which has been essential for todays media competitive products, the development of the liquid media concept and demonstrators to facilitate seamless media across different devices, locations, time and connectivity and the development of meta-data middleware for phones and home media servers to enable enhanced communications with auxiliary data for ease of use. Dr. Kitson joins Motorola from HP, where he had global responsibility for mobile and media systems research for the corporate research labs. He led and contributed to such projects as the HP Precision Architecture world wide team that ultimately led to the Intel IA-64 architecture. He also contributed to technology developments for such products as workstations, servers and mobile devices. Dr. Kitsons expertise includes mobile systems, computer systems, consumer appliances and specific technologies such as multimedia digital signal processing, communications and computer graphics. In addition to serving as lab director, Dr. Kitson was responsible for HPs participation in MITs Oxygen ubiquitous computing project as well as strategic research collaborations, particularly in Asia, such as with NTT DoCoMo on fourth-generation mobile systems. Dr. Kitson is an adjunct faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni in 2001. He was the 1991-92 Clyde Chair visiting associate professor at the University of Utah's computer science department and also has taught at the University of California- Berkeley and Colorado State University. He serves on the engineering advisory boards of the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California-Davis and the University of Colorado. He also serves on the board of the wireless center at the University of California-San Diego, the telecommunications board of the University of San Francisco the board of counselors at the University of Southern California's integrated media systems and the UCLA-WINMEC carrier advisory board. Dr. Kitson received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware, a Master of Science in electrical engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Colorado. Shannon MaherUK Engineering Site Director - GoogleShannon Maher is Google's Engineering Site Director for London, where he is responsible for starting and leading a new engineering and product development site focused on mobile technologies for Google. In addition, Mr. Maher is responsible for several other mobile engineering sites, and for the coordination of all Google engineering efforts with external mobile carrier, OEM, and ISV partners. Prior to Google, Shannon has been working in software development for over 25 years; for nearly nine years in mobile technologies. Mr. Maher was CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering for Telesym, a company focused on mobile VoIP technologies targeted to small and medium businesses. Before that, he served for 6 years in a number of leadership positions at AOL, including VP/GM of AOL Mobile Services and VP/Engineering of AOL Anywhere. He came to AOL through the acquisition of Tegic Communications, the creators of the T9 text input technology (perhaps the most widely distributed commercial software package ever), where he was Senior VP, Engineering and Product Development. Shannon has held VP and leadership positions in software companies engaged in a number of other areas, including geophysical analysis, imaging and machine vision, and process monitoring. He has been through 3 acquisitions by public companies, and is proud that every company he has been with for more than 1 year has won externally judged awards for the products he has been involved with (6 companies, 7 different awards). Mr. Maher holds a BS in EE/CS from MIT, a MS in Geology/ Geophysics (ABD) from the University of Colorado. He is married and has 2 daughters, who combine to dwarf anything above in importance to him. |