Northwestern University and Internet2

Six years ago, some 30 major university CIOs, including Northwestern's, gathered in Chicago and created the Internet2 project to help develop the next generation Internet and new advanced applications to serve the nation and higher education. To promote Internet2, they created the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). The founding Board of the UCAID was composed of six university presidents. I have just completed my tour of service on this Board.

UCAID now consists of 190 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop advanced network applications and technologies. The many successful projects of UCAID and its member universities are featured on its Web site, www.internet2.edu. The Internet2 project has created exceptionally valuable resources for higher education in the United States.

The UCAID encourages member universities to provide advanced networking to faculty and students, develop collaborative projects with industry, and become ready to take advantage of new technological developments. Northwestern University did not need much encouragement. We created one of the most advanced campus networks in the world, with high quality connections to the rest of the world. We have become a major player in regional, national and International networking, advanced network-based media, and instructional applications.

We run a network for a consortium of smaller colleges and museums in Chicago. We lead the Metropolitan Research and Educational Network, a Midwest high-performance network. We participate in engineering and planning for the Illinois Century Network and Chicago's CivicNet. We partner in I-WIRE, an Illinois state funded advanced research network, which is part of the TeraGrid designed to eventually perform over 11 trillion mathematical operations per second. TheTeraGrid is a national research facility funded by the NSF and operated by Illinois and California. Finally, on our Chicago campus, we host both STAR TAP and StarLight, the present and next generation NSF supported transit points for advanced United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and South American education and research networks.

On the application front, we now use IP-based live video and video archiving in support of instruction on campus and for support of conferences around the world. We provide instruction and instruction management online. We participate with other major universities in the development of next generation course management and multimedia presentation software and standards. Our scientists have ready access to the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne in the United States, to particle accelerators at CERN in Switzerland, and to telescopes atop the Andes Mountains in Chile.

We are indeed ready and prepared to participate in research or teaching initiatives using these capabilities around the world.