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Introduction
 Ganapathy Chockalingam is a telematics expert and full-time researcher at Calit², working on projects in the lab of UCSD division director Ramesh Rao. He came to San Diego in 2000 when his then employer - Ford Motor - spun off its telematics division into a joint venture with QUALCOMM called Wingcast. Chockalingam, who goes by the first name "Ganz," worked on telematics applications at Ford Research Lab in Michigan, after earning his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa. "At Wingcast, I could envision my work directly touching end users," he says. "They were developing something like OnStar but using more advanced, location-based services. Sadly, though, the service was never launched, and the company went out of business."
Wingcast's loss was Calit²'s gain. Anticipating his current research at the institute, Chockalingam worked on a multi-modal prototype at Wingcast that allowed someone sitting in a car to request information by voice to a system, and the system would provide a text response on the car's display. A typical query would request the nearest McDonald's, he says. The system could also provide driving instructions on request, one step at a time as the driver needed it. For more on Chockalingam and his research, read on.
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