Moving VoIP beyond the phone

September 29, 2005
Henning Schulzrinne | Columbia University

Most current commercial and research efforts focus on making VoIP work as well as the current landline and mobile phone, by improving aspects from QoS to security. As important as these are, it is important to move beyond functional parity with 125-year old technology.

Traditionally, the natural next step beyond telephony was adding video, despite a fifty year string of failures. However, what has proven to be far more successful is adding meta data and facilitating user control.

In this talk, I will describe our efforts in improving the functionality of interactive collaboration applications in a scalable manner, by facilitating the creation of new services by end users, by conveying improved information about the state of participants and by automating the diagnosis of faults in large-scale systems. The talk will also address the practical challenges of building a new global telecommunication infrastructure without users of the existing system becoming stranded. For example, work on facilitating emergency calling has only recently attracted attention, even though the ability to summon help is among the most important reasons users cite for having a landline or mobile phone.

Speaker Details

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne received his undergraduate degree in economics and electrical engineering from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, his MSEE degree as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at Columbia University, New York. He is currently chair of the Department of Computer Science.He is a division editor of the “Journal of Communications and Networks”, and an editor of the “IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking” and the “Surveys & Tutorials” and former editor of the “IEEE Internet Computing Magazine” and “IEEE Transactions on Image Processing”. He has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society and the ACM SIGCOMM Executive Committee, former chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committees on Computer Communications and the Internet and has been technical program chair of Global Internet, Infocom, NOSSDAV and IPtel and is General Chair of ACM Multimedia 2004. He also was a member of the IAB (Internet Architecture Board).Protocols co-developed by him are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. His research interests include Internet multimedia systems, quality of service, and performance evaluation.He serves as Chief Scientist for SIPquest Inc. and Chief Scientific Advisor for Ubiquity Software Corporation. He has received the New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology and the VON Pioneer Award.