Milton Chen is the Chief Technical Officer of VSee Lab. The title of his talk is Visual Communication and Collaboration Software for Afghanistan. He will present VSee, a videoconferencing platform designed for austere environments. VSee is unique in that it allows communication during emergency response when cell phone, telephone and the Internet are not available. VSee was selected as the real-time communication system for the recent Navy humanitarian exercise, Strong Angel. Lastly, he describes the deployment of VSee in Afghanistan.

Jeremy Bailenson is Director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab as well as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. The title of his presentation is Collaborative Virtual Environments and Transformed Social Interaction. Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences. Similarly, online collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the nature of interaction. CVEs are systems which track verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared digital space. Implications for communications systems, marketing strategies, and behavioral science research will be discussed.

Dewayne Hendricks is a Wireless Activist, CEO of Dandin Group and Director of the Wireless Task Force, GBOB Initiative. The title of his talk is One Gigabit or Bust Initiative -- A Broadband Vision for California. It has been generally accepted that the United States has fallen behind other industrialized countries with regards to the adoption of broadband services. Recent estimates show penetration rates of only 35%, comparing poorly to countries such as South Korea, which has adoption rates exceeding 95%, with far greater average bandwidth rates delivered at much lower costs. Other countries, including Canada, have adopted national broadband initiatives to bring high speed broadband connectivity to all its citizens. The United States has no such initiative in place at the present time. The State of California has decided to move ahead with its own broadband initiative. This talk will outline the goals and objectives of the GBOB initiative and report on its progress to date. The Initiative is in the process of implementing a number of pilot projects throughout the state, which will help to provide a concise roadmap as to how the goals of the initiative will be achieved, with an emphasis on the role of wireless technologies.

This presentation was recorded at Accelerating Change 2004, November 5-7, 2004. Check here for the complete Accelerating Change archives.