Robert Horvitz
Robert Horvitz (1947, New Bedford, Massachusetts) studied art at Yale University. Upon completion of his B.A. degree he was hired by Yale to teach drawing. From there he went on to teach courses in contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studio art at Phillips and Abbott Academies. In the 1970s he was a regular contributor of feature articles to Artforum magazine, writing about artists like Chris Burden, Alan Sonfist and Alan Sondheim. He was Art Editor of the Whole Earth publications from 1977 until 1991 when he moved to Prague. He is Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences in Prague. Horvitz has exhibited his drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, the Akron Art Institute and elsewhere.
In 2004, he launched the Open Spectrum International whose first goal was to survey radio regulations around the world, to identify countries where WiFi was not license-exempt, in the belief that some of those countries might be persuaded to change their policies with the right kind of intervention. To support such work, Horvitz established the Open Spectrum Foundation. Registered in the Netherlands, Stichting Open Spectrum operated until 2014 when it became clear that license exempt open spectrum had finally been accepted as a "best practice" by most countries, and not only for WiFi.
In 2009 Horvitz began producing studies on radio spectrum policy for the European Commission. He went on to advise the Republic of Georgia on reform of their radio laws (a project funded by the EBRD). More recently he has been advising the Government of Thailand on radio spectrum license auctions and the World Bank on 5G in developing countries.
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