Palmer man elected to National Academy of Inventors

PALMER — Dr. Alex Hills calls Alaska home because he likes it here, and because he was one of the innovators that brought the Internet to the world, without wires. Hills was named a Senior Member on the National Academy of Inventors, largely for his work in improving Wireless Fiber or Wifi.

Hills worked for seven years in rural Alaska establishing modern telecommunications. Using small satellite earth stations that had never been employed on such a large scale anywhere in the world, HIlls was able to get his first taste of success in technological advancements.

“I knew that I wanted to be out in the field working in far off places and that’s probably the part that has really carried through,” Hills said.

In the 1990’s while teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, HIlls helped establish the first Wi-Fi network dubbed ‘Wireless Andrew’ that was able to reach campus wide. Hills holds 19 patents, well over the required amount, and teaches wireless communications, technology, and policy, and continues to explore how wireless communication can aid the developed world.

“I led the team that built the first large WiFi network at CMU with inventions that came out of that that made WiFi service better, faster, more capable. I would say that Alaska has benefitted from those just in the same way that other places have,” Hills said. “I try to encourage and help young inventors to have the same kind of success that I did. There’s a lot of interest in this in Alaska right now.

Hills is currently working with Iridium Satellite Communications to help find ways to make wireless telecommunication a viable option worldwide.

“A lot of outdoorsmen, fisherman, guides, hunters they take satellite phones with them as an emergency precaution. Other problems unique to the kind of emergency responders people that need to be working out there that are some problems that they have that are maybe not necessarily experienced by more casual users,” HIlls said.

Iridium functions on a network of Low Earth Orbiting Satellites or LEO’s and allows for sat phones to work in conditions even as extreme as the North and South Poles. While Hills has been on the forefront of telecommunications development since the 1970’s, it was his work in the 1990’s that earned him the award.

“Internet has just changed the way we live our lives,” Hills said. “There’s some pretty big economic challenges there. The cost of bringing the high speed service that you and I take for granted, it’s a pretty big challenge up there.”

Hills has published three books and was awarded an honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Hills’ work in developing WiFi can be further researched in his book WiFi and the Bad Boys of Radio, and Hills also published titles called Geeks on a Mission and Finding Alaska’s Villages: And Connecting Them. Hills received his Bachelor’s Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and went on to study at Arizona State and Carnegie Mellon, where he earned his Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy in 1979. While being at the forefront of inventions changing the way we live our everyday lives, Hills is more concerned with the next generation of innovators.

“At some point I realized what I really liked better than technology was students,” Hills said. “That’s where I take more pride than anything else is in what my students have done. I have university students who have gone on started their own companies, become well known professors in their own right, that’s much more satisfying to me.”

Hills is involved in the Valley community as a member of the Palmer Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Board of Directors for the Mat-Su Miners and a member of the Palmer Rotary Club. Hills served as the Deputy Commissioner of Administration for the state in the 1980’s and served as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at UA, among a plethora of other titles while working at UA and helping to establish Internet in the Last Frontier.

Contact Frontiersman reporter Tim Rockey at tim.rockey@frontiersman.com.