"To speak of culture, to exchange experiences and projects, to set up courses is no longer conceivable remaining confined to local environments." -- L. Ambrosi, President, Community of Mediterranean Universities
Just-in-Time I arrived in Lecce, Italy, on Sunday evening, October 20th, and spent the next three days setting up computer communication linkages and coordinating with overseas participants before the conference began.
The first surprise upon my arrival at the University of Lecce was to find no studio or control equipment installed for the "Global Lecture Hall" teleconference! However, construction people, electricians, janitors and others worked around the clock until the evening of the 23rd, just a night before the event. Suddenly, chairs, desks, control room equipment and antennas were brought in, as if they popped out from nowhere!! The crew seemed to follow the Japanese JUST-IN-TIME method! They amazed me! Telespazio brought two trucks. One carried the 2.5 meter antenna which was set up on the ground to receive the signal from PANAM satellite. Another, bigger antenna was mounted on the second truck and was used to receive/transmit to EUTELSAT.
Since the PANAM satellite offered only Ku-band transmission, quality could have been a problem in case of bad weather. Lloyd (Van Bylevelt), our GLOSAS member, called from Barry University in Florida very much worried about it.
When we began transmitting in the morning of the 24th, during the first session of the conference, only EUTELSAT was used to cover Western and Eastern European participants. Professor Branko Soucek of the University of Zagreb delivered a keynote speech on his project "Integrated Reasoning Information System (IRIS)" from the studio. IRIS will allow users to collect and analyze information on a massive scale, to do fuzzy reasoning and decision making, and to retrieve data from incomplete information. It will go beyond the current artificial intelligence capabilities.
Everything went very smoothly. Congratulations and thanks are particularly due to our Technical Director, Professor Ruggero Ferro, for his meticulous attention to every detail. He showed remarkable expertise in video conferencing, though he said that this was his first event!
The session, "Round Table on Satellites for Global Education," which I had the honour to chair and which took place the same afternoon (of the 24th), was equally successful thanks to Lloyd H. Van Bylevelt's great help.
His Barry University successfully uplinked to the GALAXY-II satellite over North America. The feed was then downlinked to an earth station of PANAM in Florida and uplinked to the PANAM satellite over the Atlantic. Next, it was received by the small (2.5 meter diameter) VSAT antenna in Lecce. At the University of Lecce, Florida's feed was mixed and uplinked to the EUTELSAT over Europe. From there, it was downlinked in Belgrade, uplinked to the PANAM satellite, downlinked to an earth station in Florida and uplinked to GALAXY-II for distribution to North American viewers. These included Barry University and Bell Laboratory in New Jersey. The coverage ranged from Eastern Europe to the West Coast of North America! It was a very complex scheme requiring the original signal to travel a round trip of about 250,000 miles. However, thanks to good, clear weather, we had very clear video from Florida. Participants and viewers were thousands of miles apart, yet they were in a single "Global Lecture Hall" and could learn from and interact with the panelists. During my opening remark, I emphasized the importance of education based on "understanding" which fosters "trust" and "cooperation" among fellow students around the globe.
The next day's (the 25th) morning and afternoon events on "Computer Architecture Curriculum" were also successful. Among others, Ege University in Izmir, Turkey; University of Zagreb, Croatia, and Bell Laboratory in New Jersey made interactive presentations and participated in a question-and-answer session while they viewed video from Lecce.
There were also view-only sites in Rome, Venice, Paris and Ohio, USA.
After giving my presentation I found some spare time to connect to SprintMail's node in New York and to Internet at Columbia University via direct overseas telephone lines, with help of Dr. Michele Linciano and his staff. This allowed me to coordinate participants with e-mail and fax capabilities. I also had to chair two panel discussion sessions, "International Distance Education via Satellite," and "Preparing, Realizing and Evaluating a GLH."
I was delighted to find that Mario DeBlasi's group used our "Global Lecture Hall" logo on their posters and promotional materials, including the front cover of "Education in Computing (EC)" Journal and WAUSE Newsletter. I was also flattered by an Italian newspaper which ran an article about the event and said that Utsumi is the indisputable father of the "Global Lecture Hall."
GLOSAS/USA is also planning several GLHs between Japan and North America, if funding materializes. Finally, we recently received an inquiry about organizing such an event between the University of La Plata, Argentina and a university in Boston, while Professor Leo Schapira, our GLOSAS member, would like to organize another between the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Maryland, next February. An additional request has been made to organize six GLHs at two-monthly intervals, covering Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, North and South America, and Far Eastern Asia, with internationally known speakers and world leaders.
We will be very, very busy next year!!!
Of course, I should not forget to mention that I loved Italian food, especially the sea food and the wine in Lecce. Also, the town of Lecce is full of baroque style, magnificent churches. Many of them are now under restoration, and beautiful indeed.
Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D.
President, Global University in the U.S.A. (GU/USA)
A Divisional Activity of GLOSAS/USA
(GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.)
43-23 Colden Street, Flushing, NY 11355-3998, U.S.A.
Phone: 718-939-0928; EIES: 492 or TAK;
WU EASYLINK: 62756570, WU TELEX 386131 (GIS USA)
SprintMail: TUTSUMI/GU.USA/ASSOCIATES.TNET
INTERNET: utsumi@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu
Editor's notes:
(Reference: Utsumi, T. and D.A. DeMaio (1991). "User Manual of 'GLOBAL LECTURE HALL' for Global (electronic) University and Global Environmental Peace Gaming." Edizioni Fratelli Laterza, Bari, Italy.)
"Global Lecture Hall" is a trade mark of GLOSAS/USA. Members of GLOSAS receive discounts on GLH participation costs.
Return to GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.
URL: http://fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/news11.html
November 1991 -- Presented via the World Wide Web March 1999 by
Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, and Mark Deavors, Library Instruction Assistant,
Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado
GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.