Jon Mark Wei, 69, is one of Canada's leading computer scientists and multimedia experts. He is in Hong Kong to attend a University of Science and Technology workshop on networking.
Professor Mark emigrated to Canada from Taishan, southern China, when he was 14.
Since 1970 he has been a faculty member and chairman of the University of Waterloo's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in Ontario, Canada's top engineering school.
What's on your mind? I'm working on information technology for wireless networking. Wireless has primarily been about voice and the challenge is to turn it into a multimedia.
The idea is to provide a wide range of information on multimedia for subscribers anywhere, anytime. What we're interested in is a hybrid wireless network that allows mobility, enabling the user to move from his home base to anywhere else. This will not be ready in the next year or two, but sometime in the next century.
Will the new technology free us or enslave us? Technology should enhance society. Multimedia will allow us to move information at a faster rate. But if the individual or the mass population becomes hooked, I don't think it's a good thing.