Mike Liebhold
Senior Researcher, Institute for the Future

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Mike Liebhold is currently a senior researcher for the Institute for the Future, IFTF, initially focusing on the implications and technologies of a geospatial web as a platform for pervasive and contextual computing. Most recently, Liebhold has been investigating the long-term futures of high-performance computing and broadband networks. Previously, Liebhold was a visiting researcher at Intel Labs, working on a pattern language for ubiquitious computing based on semantic web frameworks. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as a Senior Scientist at Apple’s Advanced Technology Labs, Liebhold lead broadband applications research and was responsible for many research partnerships with MIT, AT&T Bell Labs, Nynex, SBC, Cable Labs, and most of the Hollywood studios. He served as principal technology policy advisor for Apple Chairman John Sculley, and drafted principal recommendations on the Internet which were later incorporated directly in the Clinton-Gore Technology legislation. Liebhold served or lead many national task forces including as chair of the key industry task force on the National Information Infrastructure, and has testified twice before the U.S. congress as part of his leadership of a key FCC digital television advisory group.

Liebhold served for three years as chief technology officer for Times Mirror publishing, lauching dozens of very early .com web sites. Following Times Mirror, he worked for two years as a senior consulting architect at Netscape, and in the late 1990s, worked on startups building large scale international public IT services and IP networks for rural regions in the US, China, India, Europe, and Latin America.

Liebhold was a principal contributor to novel and effective software-based QoS technique, allowing network operators to dynamically change performance of individual subscribers’ IP services, and was a principal investigator for a National Science Foundation project to bring Internet2 broadband IP networks to seventy rural low income communities in the US.