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USF Poly Participates in 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show

A group of six faculty and staff from the University of South Florida Polytechnic will attend the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to help attract high-tech companies to central Florida, promote education programs, and position the university to prepare today's graduates for tomorrow's jobs.

Held in Las Vegas Jan. 10-13, CES is the world's biggest platform for new technology. It attracts a range of educational representatives from more than 500 schools and universities from around the world. Past attendees have included Harvard, MIT, National Taiwan University, Osaka University, and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

In addition to manning USF Poly's booth, Polytechnic reps will attend conference sessions applicable to their respective fields and have pre-selected many of the exhibitors they intend to visit at the show. They will also do live tweeting from CES to share what they are learning and seeing. Afterward, they will assess what they learned at the show and say how they plan to take what they've learned and apply it at USF Poly.

Attending are Dr. Dave Armitage, director, division of information technology, and assistant professor of information technology; Travis Brown, executive director, office of experiential and applied learning; Robert Goodman, university partnership liaison; Dr. Rob Hooker, assistant professor of marketing; Dr. Richard Plank, director, division of business, and associate professor of marketing; and Dr. Ismail Uysal, associate professor, College of Technology and Innovation (CTI), and director of the CTI Research Lab.

They all play a key role in technology, curriculum development and high-tech business incubator programs. Attending CES will help them anticipate where technology is going and what type of graduates companies want to hire, thus helping the university make sure it has the necessary programs in place.

The trip has special significance for Armitage, who attended the first "Computermania" exposition in Boston in 1977. At that event, which later grew into CES, he met Steve Jobs, who demonstrated the Apple II computer.

"Most people are buying computers not to do something practical but to learn about computers," Jobs said at the time. "It will be a consumer product, but it isn't now. The programs aren't there yet."

Armitage, then an entrepreneur and president of Computer Power Inc. of Warwick, R.I., also saw the personal computer's potential. In The New York Times Aug. 26, 1977, Quotation of the Day he said, "Sometimes it is difficult to explain to somebody what they need it for just as it would have been difficult to explain to someone in 1850 what they needed an automobile for. The uses of a machine like this are limited only to the user's imagination."

Today, Armitage says, "Nobody in 1977 could have possibly foreseen that this little 'computer show' in Boston would someday grow into the monster in Las Vegas that CES has become. In fact, Las Vegas is the only city on earth with the capacity for hosting a show this large. The growth of the show reflects the degree to which the personal computer and other computer-enabled consumer technologies have become more important in our lives - beyond anyone's imagination."