| Recent Auburn alumnus Mark Spencer spoke on his role as Asterisk Open Source Private Branch Exchange (PBX) Developer and Digium President at this month’s Computer Society meeting on August 15th. (See related article at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/091206-von-sam-houston.html?t5&twht=091106thisweek2) | |
Mark Spencer originally created Asterisk, the industry’s first open source PBX, to serve as a PBX for his own company. Now a worldwide phenomenon, Asterisk is quickly reinventing the way corporations and telecommunications companies purchase telecom solutions. Mark discussed how companies and technology innovators can leverage open source solutions to save money, increase efficiencies, benefit from more flexibility and roll-out advanced solutions for their customers.
Mark addressed the critical issues surrounding open source VoIP in the telecom market, including how companies can get started leveraging Asterisk and building solutions for the community at large with Asterisk-based distributors and training partners.
Mark Spencer founded Linux Support Services in 1999 while still a Computer Engineering student at Auburn University. When faced with the high cost of buying a PBX, Mark simply used his Linux PC and C code knowledge to write his own. This was the beginning of the world-wide Asterisk phenomenon, the open source PBX, and caused Mark to shift his business focus from Linux support to supporting Asterisk and opening up a telecom market. Linux Support Services is now Digium, and is bringing open source to the telecom market while gaining a foothold in the telecom industry.
Mark strongly believes that every technology he creates should be given back to the community. This is why Asterisk is fully open source. Today that model has allowed Asterisk to remain available free of charge, while it has become as robust as the leading and most-expensive PBXs.
The Asterisk community has ambassadors and contributors worldwide. Recently Network World named Mark as one of the 50 Most Powerful People in Networking, next to Cisco’s John Chambers, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. He was also recognized in Inc.com’s "30 Under 30: America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs".
A renowned speaker, Mark has presented and delivered keynotes at industry conferences including Internet Telephony, SuperComm, and the VON shows, among others.
Mark Spencer holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Auburn University, and is now president of Digium, Inc. He has also led the creation of several Linux-based open source applications, most notably Asterisk, the Open Source PBX, and Gaim Instant Messenger. Digium earns $10 million in annual revenue and delivers a highly-regarded PBX capable of scaling to any size enterprise deployments and handling carrier-grade applications.
Huntsville Computer Society also collaborated with a research seminar, where Chris Otto, Lewis Innovative Technologies (LIT), spoke on "Wireless body area networks for ambulatory health monitoring" and demonstrated a prototype. That meeting took place on August 25th, 2006 (Friday), noon until 1 p.m. in UAH Engineering Building Conference Room 258.
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a promising trend in wearable health monitoring systems with the potential to revolutionize health monitoring and increase a user’s quality of life by offering continuous and ubiquitous ambulatory health monitoring with minimal obtrusiveness. To explore practicality and identify implementation issues and challenges, Chris Otto's team built a working health monitoring prototype system. The prototype consists of multiple intelligent physiological sensor nodes, a personal health monitoring server, and a network coordinator. The sensor platforms and network coordinator are built from off-the-shelf wireless sensor platforms and feature custom-designed sensor boards for ECG monitoring and motion sensing.
Our chapter meetings charge no admission and are open to the public. If you have any questions about the Computer Society or planned meeting, please contact Daniel Chang at 963-8620 or daniel.chang@adtran.com or email Bob Robinson at robert.a.robinson5@ieee.org. We look forward to seeing you there!
