| | August - 20198IN MY OPINIONPoor Campus Connectivity? Try AIIn 1956, a small group of researchers came together for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, led by Professor John McCarthy. McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence," and the conference is widely known as the inception of AI as a field of research. In the following decades, AI evolved from a hypothetical field of research to a powerful tool that's making its mark on the world. From self-driving cars to intelligent home speakers, AI is already changing our lives--and it's only the beginning. But one place you may not expect to use AI is in your internet. The typical network on college campuses across the country is based on an architecture designed more than a decade ago, before the advent of ubiquitous wireless devices, social media, and streaming services that have drastically increased what users ask of and expect from the campus internet. Today, students and faculty expect Wi-Fi everywhere on campus, and they expect it to work seamlessly--in the classroom, the dorm, wherever they may be--whether it's to email a paper due the next day or stream Game of Thrones. Outstanding digital service has become a crucial factor in our students' learning experiences and their satisfaction. Dartmouth also envisions a highly automated campus where AI works in conjunction with other wireless technologies, like Bluetooth LE, to personalize the wireless experience across campus. Students, faculty, staff, and guests can interact with wireless beacons for location-based services, such as turn-by-turn directions in the student union, notifications for free flu shots when passing the clinic, or self-guided tours across campus. Such applications will only keep raising the stakes for wireless network quality.In addition, we see AI as being critical to troubleshooting problems across our whole IT infrastructure. Events can be correlated across wireless and wired domains, for example, and cross-referenced with By Felix Windt, Network Engineer, Dartmouth collegestates pulled from devices in real-time to troubleshoot problems quickly, rapidly identify anomalies, and predict issues before users even know they exist.Improving the campus Wi-Fi experienceDartmouth, like so many other universities, was saddled with an aging network infrastructure that practically guaranteed a lousy experience for students, faculty, staff, and guests.With thousands of users connecting multiple devices to the network, we struggled to provide easy access and fast internet that our students and faculty have come to expect using our outdated infrastructure. It couldn't provide visibility into the service levels that users were experiencing and forced administrators into the slow, painful task of manually sifting through a plethora of computer-generated logs scattered across the IT stack to determine where and why problems were occurring before they could fix it.A variety of vendor tools have become available through the years to try to attack the problem, but they tend to be hard to use, require a great deal of specialized knowledge and, in the end, still take too much time and effort to pinpoint the root cause of wireless issues. Being a network engineer, I want us to be able to know that it took eight seconds for the user to connect because the DHCP server had a problem, without jumping through four intermediate systems and a central log collector to figure it all out.How next-generation networks workWe've learned at Dartmouth that a new generation of a network--one powered by AI and the cloud--can help us diagnose issues across campus at a radically quicker pace and greater scale than was possible with our old manually-driven wired and wireless networks.
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