This month, we sat down with Diego Remolina, IT Director – System Administrator for the School of Aerospace Engineering
Interview conducted by Tanya Roy
Q. How long have you been working in IT at Georgia Tech? What about before coming to Tech?
A. I’ve been working in IT at Georgia Tech since 2000, first as a student worker in the math department, and then in December 2001, I joined the Georgia Tech staff. I finished my masters at Georgia Tech in Aerospace Engineering in December 2000.
Q. What’s it like working in IT in aerospace engineering?
A. It is challenging because there are always a lot of things to do, and we have limited personnel and more new demands every day. In terms of how it is day-to-day, it can be very different. Every day, we are trying to make progress and keep up with our projects. There is a wide range of things we do from more simple tasks like resetting passwords to trying to do more complex things like setting up GPU servers for our faculty to run simulations.
Q. What technological changes have you seen over the years you have been at Tech? These can be IT specific or just general technology?
A. There have been so many changes over time; for example, email has progressed so much, departments used to run their own mail servers because the OIT provided offering had so little storage (100MB), now we do not even run mail servers on campus anymore. Computing resources used to be very restricted and expensive in the past, now in your phone you have a faster computer than a desktop from the early 2000s. Throughout the years, things have become much more centrally managed, which is good because it allows us to focus more on the needs of our users. More recently, in the past two to five years, I think we have worked towards more collaboration and sharing, not only within the College but within the whole campus. It has sped up the process of automating the installation and maintenance of computers other important tasks.
Q. Is there an area where you would like to see more innovation?
A. In terms of Georgia Tech specifically, some of the places where I think we are a little behind are the conference and presentation rooms; things don’t always work well there, and we could fix that. One more thing is more effective communication and collaboration to understand Georgia Tech policies. We need to work better as a team to understand and implement these policies, in a way that it still allows our users to do what they need to do, being within the guidelines. This is a responsibility that falls on all of us. One of the reasons these policies are in place is to protect us and the Institute. This reflection is a little bit less about the technology and more about the culture.
Q. As we look to the new decade, do you have any predictions for what’s to come in the technology sphere for IT or otherwise?
A. In terms of computers, we are all expectant of what quantum computing is going to do. It has a great potential because of how much faster things can be done instead of the regular computers we have nowadays. Hopefully, within the next ten years, Google, IBM or any of the other startups working on this will be able to make progress on making these machines much simpler and available to us, which will be interesting. Maybe we will have the return of the “PC” from the 1980s in the form of the “QPC” in the 2030s. Another computer related technology which is interesting to see is cars and personal air vehicles. The prospect of having drone-type vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles is amazing. Ten years may be a little too short for that, but imagine in the future, cars being able to coordinate with one another at intersections or one day having flying transportation that can cut down on our driving commutes each way daily. It will revolutionize the way we do things.