HLAA 2009 Access Award and Keynote Address - Part One

By Cheryl Heppner

June 2009

Editor: It's that time of year again! The start of Hearing Loss Convention Season! As is normally the case, HLAA kicks off the activity in June. Char and I didn't attend this year, but super reporters extraordinaire Cheryl Heppner and Bonnie O'Leary from NVRC will be providing detailed coverage of the activities. Here's Cheryl's coverage of the Vint Cerf's Keynote Address. This is part one of two parts.

More coverage of this great convention is at: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/res/hlorg/shhh/cn/2009/2009.htm

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Award Presentation

HLAA Executive Director Brenda Battat presented the 2009 Access Award to Vinton Cerf, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. As noted in the convention program book, Dr. Cerf is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. He is the co-designer, with Robert Kahn, Ph.D., of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, they received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Remarks by Dr. Cerf

In accepting his award, Vint said that Nashville is a city he is becoming fond of, and that he wondered if it is just possible to navigate the hotel without GPS. It did not escape his notice that the Gaylord Opryland Resort had four parts with different colors just like Oz.

Vint congratulated HLAA on its 30 years of great work and its building on the work of Rocky Stone.

"There is nothing more powerful than people with a common objective willing to work together," he said, noting that the Internet we have today would not exist without collaboration on a global scale with hundreds of millions of people.

Birth and Growth of the Internet

A slide with the diagram of the original Arpanet in December 1969 was Vint's Exhibit #1. He'd developed that concept while a graduate student at Stanford. It was an experiment in packet switching that was considered ridiculous by AT&T, yet they provided support. The success of packet switching led to other experiments. Thirty years later in 1999, many different entities had built on it.

In January 2009 there were 62,226,456 computers connected to the Internet, not counting computers behind firewalls and devices like PDAs. Those computers are in the hands of 1,596 million users around the world. Six hundred million of them in Asia and content on the Internet is now in hundreds of languages.

The Access Issue

Vint said that he and his colleagues are very aware that people with disabilities in every country lack access to the Internet. Google wants to organize the world's information to make it accessible and usable by everyone. Vint, who has hearing loss himself, has observed that the American public generally doesn't appreciate the nuances of hearing loss over a broad spectrum.

Email was created in 1971 and Vint has used it for over 35 years. He's found that it results in more precise communication and believes it has allowed him to be more effective. An application he considers of some significance is Google Mail, which is free to everyone.

Another is iChat, which allows communication in realtime. Vint has used this application since the 1980s, and while it he found it "terrible" at first, its increased speed for video transport has improved tremendously. He has found the additional speed a great boost for more accurate speechreading.

The Power of the Internet

Vint believes that one of the most powerful things about the Internet is how any application can be placed on it without changing the Internet itself. The Internet doesn't recognize whether the application is in text, video, voice or something else. Twitter, in his opinion, could be incredibly powerful if there is an emergency.

Google Wave could spur new developments. Imagine, Vint said, if all applications such as blogs, email, and Twitter were combined in one application and sent. Already Google has announced an early version to see what people will do with it.

WebEx allows people to see the same thing at the same time, including realtime texting and realtime documents. It could become a powerful way of working together.

Google Maps provides text directions to all kinds of locations. Google Earth imagery to view the earth is all from public sources. Google Ocean lets you explore beneath the earth's surface; its undersea topography is useful for things like working with undersea cables.

Google Mobile can help you locate places such as the nearest ATM, restaurant or hospital.

Finding the Saffron

Vint recounted an experience that led him to value geographically-indexed information. While on a family vacation in Arizona, the Cerfs decided to make paella for dinner. There was just one problem: an authentic, flavorful paella demands saffron. As they were in an unfamiliar and more rural location, the Cerfs had no idea where they might find it.

Turning to his BlackBerry, Vint did a Google search for saffron. He was able to locate several sources with phone numbers and narrow it down to one that was not unreasonably far. Peals of laughter rang across the room when Vint described reaching the store by phone and asking for the spice department. The ending was a happy one as he was able to purchase .06 ounce of saffron for $12.99 and the meal was delicious.

Here's Part Two

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