Martin Dawson on Location Services

The late Martin Dawson (+ March 7, 2012) and author of IP Location. Here he speaks with Dr Katina Michael in 2006 about location services. This interview still stands as one of the most informative discussions on the topic.

I met Martin in 1996 when I was interviewed for a graduate engineering position at Nortel Networks in Wollongong. We later developed curricula together for special topics (e.g. IACT422/922 "Location Based Services") at the University of Wollongong, and co-supervised software projects related to the Mobile Location Centre (MLC) product range at Nortel, and administered university-wide grants on the same.

Martin always offered his time to lecture and mentor university students and even held small group lecture sessions for academics at UOW to come up to speed with industry changes, for the love of it. This softly spoken man was Australia's leading guru in the field of location services between 1997 and 2012 and dedicated much of his adult life to advancing protocols, standards and paying particular attention to emergency management/services. He spent time in the USA implementing the US requirement for automatic location determination in emergency services, and came back to Australia to further champion the cause of IP Location Services.

His book published by McGraw-Hill and co-authored by James Winterbottom and Martin Thomson, still stands as an important contribution to the field at large. After Nortel spun off its location service arm to Andrew Corporation, Martin quickly took the lead role of director of a vibrant technical community in Wollongong, which later became known as CommScope.

One of my proudest moments as an academic was being asked by Martin to launch his book at the University of Wollongong. There was such a buzz about the room, and we all celebrated at this magnificent achievement spearheaded by Martin. We will never forget his kind spirit, smile, gentleness, precision, brainpower, dedication, and love of learning and sharing. I have used this video for courses since its creation. I recently decided that I would share it publicly, to share this man's brilliance.

Citation: Martin Dawson with Katina Michael, 2006, “Location Services”, IACT422/922 Interview, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85hC0VsOs6M