Steve Crandall
Type of Fellow: Research Fellow
Description: Steve grew up in North Central Montana acquiring an interest in the night sky, the back side of TV sets and amateur radio. This led to physics and math resulting in a Ph.D. in particle physics from SUNY at Stony Brook and a postdoc spent scattering quarks.
Bell Laboratories took an interest and Steve became part of the institution for two decades. The first was spent doing lithography and applied physics research. Printing really small lines and measuring them. He made fundamental contributions to photomask inspection and metrology, deep UV optics, automatic defect classification, off axis lithography and near field microscopy.
Changing from small lines to fast networks, he moved to high bandwidth networks. Getting net to people and businesses in a variety of ways ranging from MMDS, to low power TV, to free-space optics as well as very early work in cable modems.
It became clear that social issues were going to be as important, if not more important, than technical issues and he partnered with groups of social and computer scientists in the labs working on community networks, educational MOOs, data mining and music. He formed a team that was multicasting live concerts over the Internet in 1994 and built an early voice over IP telephone system a year earlier.
The AT&T-Lucent breakup saw Steve move to the new AT&T Research Labs where he continued his mixed mode of work into next generation network access and human computer interaction. He became particularly interested in digital music and was involved in several music projects ranging from a system that tried to name the tune you sang to it, to AAC music compression and sound field reconstruction, to an early online music store for independent musicians. He became associated with Oberlin College and initiated a long term study of the use of music by students that ran from 1995 to 2004 that spans the pre-Napster to current iPod periods.
After 2000 he shifted his focus to geo-aware messaging systems and very low bandwidth, very low power communications, sound field reconstruction for conference rooms and technology for the elderly and handicapped.
In 2002 he and three others left AT&T Research to found Omenti Research - a company that brings technical and social expertise together to understand at a deep level how people use technology specializing in how people communicate with people, organizations and machines. Technical and social-technical due diligence, design, testing, prototyping and modeling working with folks from VCs to DARPA to mature firms.
Steve and his wife Sukie live in New Jersey with their ferrets. Steve builds things like cosmic ray telescopes, attempts art and music with limited success, and mentors students with greater success.