Internet2 Showcase
Internet2 regularly showcases our members' efforts on behalf of advanced research and education networking. We not only encourage Internet2 members to share their achievements with the community, but also the interesting people, events, developments and collaborations that make those achievements possible. If you have suggestions for news, events, projects or people that might be featured, please contact info@internet2.edu and include a brief description, appropriate links and images and contact information. Thanks for helping us spread the word.
The Internet2 applications Showcase will ring in the new year with a new applications Showcase feature on January 9, 2006. Until then, we invite you to visit the Showcase Archive to check out some of the accomplishments of our member community throughout 2005. We would also like to thank our members for their continuing curiosity and ingenuity--they are the foundation of the success of the Internet2 community.
We are always eager to feature advanced networking applications, events, people and projects in our weekly web page Showcases. If you have something you would like to suggest for the Internet2 applications web page, please contact the Internet2 Applications webmaster.
The Internet2 Commons Real Time Communications Service provides Internet2 members with access to a variety of real time communications tools. As part of this service, Marratech AB, an Internet2 corporate member, is providing free access to its cross- platform e-meeting solution that combines high quality voice, video, whiteboard and application sharing in an encrypted, secure Internet environment. The Marratech software enables multiple remote users to collaborate just as they would in the same room, and to interoperate with traditional videoconferencing systems, but from the comfort of their own computers. For more information about this opportunity for Internet2 members, click here.
Submissions are now being accepted for the first annual IDEA Awards, which seeks to recognize innovators in creating advanced network applications that have had a profound and positive impact within the research and education community. IDEA Award candidates will have applied advanced networking to enable substantial progress within research, teaching and learning by leveraging the unique capabilities of advanced network infrastructure. Entries may be submitted by an individual affiliated with an Internet2 member, an Abilene Sponsored Educational Group Participant, or an Abilene Sponsored Participant. Submissions must be received by 15 December 2005. Awards will be presented at the Spring 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting.
Internet2 and the New World Symphony are hosting a hands-on audio/video production workshop on 30 January--1 February 2006 on the campus of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. The workshop will emphasize real-time experience connecting with remote sites over Internet2 advanced networks, setting up incoming and outgoing audio, creating a multi-camera shoot, placing lights and projectors and operating codecs. This year's workshop will include demonstrations of state of the art codecs for producing events, will explore in depth the elements needed to do everything from simple one-on-one interactions to larger scale stage productions, and will highlight the latest network testing tools developed by Internet2. The workshop is designed for an audience of technologists responsible for setting up distance learning and remote interactive media events. Administrators, deans, CIOs, network and audio engineers, and other hands-on technicians are also invited to attend. Check the workshop page regularly for updated program details.
Workshop registration is now live!
Reserve your hotel room now; the room block cut-off date is Friday, December 30th.
Everyone in the world is invited to experience Megaconference VII on December 1, 2005. From the comfort of your own office, classroom, or conference room, you can tour a Christmas Market in Switzerland, look through a telescope in Australia, or hobnob with scientists in Egypt. This year's theme—Increasing Empathy Through Video Conferencing—focuses on improving understanding between individuals and cultures using videoconferencing tools. Presenters and audience members will gather from around the world using advanced networks and H.323 or SIP videoconferencing technology to discuss current projects and developments in order to further the use of videoconferencing in education and research.
This annual event, the largest, worldwide Internet videoconference, includes presentations by end-users who will discuss and demonstrate how groups use videoconferencing in real-world applications. All presentations will be fully interactive, engaging multiple sites and the audience. In addition to formal presentations, each Megaconference has fun and informal events like the Roll Call, where participants get a moment of fame to say hello to the world in their own unique and creative way. The Megaconference Cafe provides a forum for informal conversation between participants, and throughout the day there are several opportunities to win door prizes, donated by Internet2 corporate members Marratech, RADVISION, Polycom, and Codian.
The Megaconference is sponsored by the Internet2 Commons, and supported by many organizations, manufacturers, and vendors. Registration for interactive participation in the Megaconference is closed. However, anyone can watch the day-long Megaconference simulcast, courtesy of the Internet2 Commons, by visiting our streaming page from 8:00 am-11 pm EST (UTC -5) on December 1.
IBM, an Internet2 corporate partner since 1997, is working with Internet2 members and partners around the world to understand better how individuals and organizations can more quickly embrace and effectively use new technologies and applications. For IBM, Internet2 is much more than a testing ground for advanced technologies, it is also a "virtual playground" where thousands of very talented and creative people can experiment with new ways of working together in cyberspace. By doing so, the Internet2 community is demonstrating the vast potential of the Next Generation Internet, on-demand business, and collaborative innovation.
The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) is a multi-state metaPoP consortium founded by Internet2 members Georgetown University, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Virginia Tech. The proximity of the MAX to Washington, D.C. places it in an advantageous location to partner with federal agencies as well as the business community and post-secondary institutions of DC, Maryland and Virginia. MAX has provided leadership position in providing advanced research network services for a large base of public sector organizations.
Internet2 and Internet2 members are participating in the annual Supercomputing conference, SC|05, 12-18 November 2005 in Seattle, Washington. The conference theme, "Gateway to Discovery," showcases how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis have lead to advances in research, education and commerce. The Internet2 booth, #2435, in the SC|05 exhibit area will feature several demonstrations on topics such as network performance tools, security, digital video, and more. Demonstration highlights include:
- End-to-End Performance tool demonstrations, including real-time SCinet measurement
- Interdomain lightpath provisioning across HOPI and DRAGON, using UltraGrid as the example application
- Next-generation globally distributed physics analysis tools for Particle Physics and eScience research
- 3-D visual immersion in an anatomical data set
- Live e-VLBI radio astronomy demonstrations
The Arts Technology Group at NYU has been an advocate and technical integrator for Internet2 applications in the arts since the inception of Internet2. Highlights have included the first Internet2 distributed musical "The Technophobe and The Madman," international collaboration in educational theater, a series of dance/video art/music performances with UC Irvine including "Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope" in response to the events of 9/11, and some of the first uses of Internet2 for performance art.
"Trespassing Boundaries" is a collaborative performance that will be take place simultaneously in New York and in Tel Aviv on November 10, 2005, with Internet2 technology serving as a site-less location in which artists from different locations and cultural backgrounds can collaborate and exchange their various cultural histories, memories and gestures of renewal. This performance, part of Barbara Rose-Haum's "Torn Texts" series, originates in the two biblical portions that are read during the week of November 10 (Kristallnacht). Relying on the story of the tower of Babylon and the conflict between Sarah and Hagar, Trespassing Boundaries aims to recode and re-perform their mythical, and therefore limiting, systems of signification. On a set that resembles a deserted archaeological site of Jerusalem, the performance deals with concepts of longing for and destroying a home, construction and loss of national and personal identities, language as a barrier, holy texts as markers of sameness and difference, the relations between gendered territory and conquering the land, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Click here to watch during the live broadcast on 10 November 2005, 12:30-2:00 pm EST (UTC -4).
Internet2 together with members NYSERNet and New York University have demonstrated production use of native IPv6 multicast networking on the Internet2 Abilene network, the first time this has been accomplished on a nationwide North American network. As a next-generation Internet protocol, native IPv6 multicast shares the advantages of IPv4 multicast, allowing a single source to provide content to an unlimited number of receivers without duplicating bandwidth and also allows higher bandwidth applications, such as the 40 mega-bit-per-second, better than DVD-quality video which was used in the demonstration. Over 240 research and education institutions and 34 state education networks within the Internet2 community have access to Abilene, and can now use IPv6 with peer networks in Asia and Europe, where IPv6 deployment is progressing rapidly.
The University of New Hampshire will host an Internet2 Day on 3 November 2005. Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Granite State Distance Learning Network, this full-day program will include demonstrations, examples and presentations intended to demystify access to Internet2 and help stimulate new use. The event will feature opening remarks by Dr Lyonel B. Tracy, Commissioner, Department of Education, and a letter from New Hampshire Governor John Lynch. Internet2 Arts and Humanities program manager Ann Doyle will provide an overview of Internet2 initiatives and applications, and James Werle of Internet2's K20 Initiative will speak about the uses of Internet2 in the K-12 community.
Internet2 Day attendees will have the opportunity to explore the wealth of learning experiences available through innovative applications that include interactive videoconferencing, remote instrumentation, and shared work environments—including a virtual trip to the Cincinnati Zoo.
Internet2 affiliate member NYSERNet, the New York State Education and Research Network, has accomplished a transformation from dependence on carrier circuits to control of transport, beginning with a fiber deployment for the research and education, medical, and cultural communities in New York City, and then building a statewide dense wavelength division multiplexing optical infrastructure. NYSERNet has also created a carrier-neutral collocation facility in Manhattan, home of the Manhattan Landing (MAN LAN) high-performance exchange point for U.S. and international research and education networks, and a node of the National LambdaRail infrastructure. NYSERNet and New York's nine Public Broadcasting Service stations have established a partnership and plan to use a statewide lambda as a station interconnect to enable the development and delivery of educational content.
Individuals from more than two dozen Internet2 members were part of teams that demonstrated cutting-edge networked applications and middleware at the iGrid 2005 workshop held in San Diego, California. Planned and hosted by UCSD, Calit2, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC, iGrid 2005 showcased more than four dozen real-time application demonstrations from 20 countries. iGrid 2005 was a coordinated effort aimed at accelerating the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks to advance scientific research. At its core, this burgeoning cyberinfrastructure has new architectural approaches to next-generation internet design and development using optical networking. Biennial/triennial iGrid collaborative events showcase ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks.
GridChem: An Application Oriented Computational Grid, will be held on 10 October 2005, from 1-5 pm EDT (UTC-4), at the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus, Ohio. With the computational chemistry community's growing demand for grid computing, the GridChem project is responding to the needs of these researchers by enhancing the cyber-infrastructure. An easy-to-use interface now lowers the usage barrier far beyond anything imagined to date and provides that interface to the entire community. "We are pleased to have the opportunity to showcase the Computational Chemistry Grid (CCG) during our Access Grid event, as well as in our various activities at Supercomputing 2005 (SC05)." said John Connolly, GridChem principal investigator. "We invite researchers from all disciplines to see how CCG makes grid computing more accessible." In addition to the AG event, GridChem will host a "Birds of a Feather" meeting on 15 November and a workshop on 18 November at SCI05 in Seattle. The GridChem partners with SC booths will display posters and give demonstrations of the GridChem client. GridChem partners include the Center for Computational Sciences/University of Kentucky, Center for Computation and Technology/Louisiana State University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ohio Supercomputer Center, and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)/University of Texas. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation NMI Program under Award #04-38312.
The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) is a cooperative effort of institutions and organizations of higher education in Texas to provide high-speed connectivity among their institutions as well as to research networks around the world in support of the research, teaching, health care, and public service missions of its members. LEARN has acquired dark fiber through FiberCo® which, once lit, will facilitate a new level of collaboration, advanced communication, and research among Texas schools.This regional optical network will also give LEARN member institutions the ability to directly connect to a wide range of leading domestic and international research networks, including Internet2's Abilene Network and National LambdaRail, of which LEARN is a member.
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) promotes advances in biomedical and health care research through the development and support of a cyberinfrastructure that enables data sharing and multi-institutional collaboration. Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, BIRN facilitates sharing, analysis, visualization, and data comparisons across geographically distributed virtual communities. The growing BIRN consortium currently includes more than forty research groups from more than twenty-five universities and hospitals interconnected by Internet2's Abilene Network, which provides the backbone for all of BIRN’s distributed data and computational resources.
BIRN collaborators participate in one of three initial testbed projects or associated collaborative projects, all of which require advanced networking capabilities. BIRN's initial testbed projects center on structural and functional brain imaging of neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease, depression, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit disorder, brain cancer, and Parkinson's disease. The advanced applications that process the massive quantities of images generated by these brain imaging studies require the high-performance Abilene Network.
BIRN's initial testbed studies are driving the construction and daily use of a federated data-sharing environment that aggregates and presents data held at geographically-separate sites as a single virtual data resource. The BIRN program is rapidly producing tools and technologies to enable the aggregation of data from any laboratory's research program to the BIRN data federation system. Lessons learned and best practices are continuously collected and made available to help new collaborative efforts make use of this infrastructure.
The BIRN infrastructure is also used by the National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing, a multi-institutional team of computer scientists, software engineers, and medical investigators developing computational tools for the analysis and visualization of medical image data. In addition, BIRN researchers use advanced networks and applications to work with collaborators in the United Kingdom.
Sponsorship from eleven Internet2 corporate members made possible a variety of receptions, refreshment breaks, meetings, and networking capabilities during the Fall 2005 Internet2 Member Meeting. Internet2 gratefully acknowledges the generous support provided by Force10 Networks, Juniper Networks, Microsoft Research, Sun Microsystems, Qwest Communications, Movaz Networks, RADVISION, Ciena, LifeSize Communications, Meriton Networks, and PAETEC Communications. Event sponsors play a critically important role in the success of Internet2 meetings and workshops. For information about future event sponsorship opportunities, please contact us.
More than 700 leaders in advanced networking gathered from 19-22 September 2005 for the Fall 2005 Internet2 Member Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thanks to dedicated effort on the part of the Fall 2005 Program Committee the outstanding meeting program included general session presentations by Richard Bendis, President and CEO of Innovation Philadelphia, and Larry L. Peterson, Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Princeton University. Over 100 formal program presentations and panels, as well as working and interest group meetings, covered a variety of topic areas including advanced applications and technologies, real-time collaborations, middleware, network planning and engineering, security for advanced networks, as well as teaching and learning. Presentation slides and Archived netcast sessions are available online.
The Fall 2005 Internet2 Member Meeting, taking place 19-22 September 2005 in Philadelphia, PA, will feature many exciting applications-related activities, including live demonstrations. Internet2 member collaborators will be demonstrating their advanced network applications on Tuesday afternoon, 20 September and for much of the day on 21 September. These exciting demos include a preview of the Internet2 Commons Real Time Collaboration Service, a live video to the Aquarius Underwater Medical Research Habitat which simulates the space environment for training astronauts, and the PerfSonar project interface, which will gather and manage the storage and retrieval of network performance information.
The Member Meeting track session program encompasses a rich variety of advanced application offerings. Some of the topics that will be covered include pervasive computing, video grids, surgical tele-robotics, high-end video, remote instrumentation, and several examples of using advanced networks for teaching and learning. There will be presentations on successful partnerships with public television as well as a presentation on an exciting new content management system called Black Squirrel, which was developed by an Internet2 student "netern." The program also features updates on the Internet2 Commons, emphasizing new desktop collaboration technologies now available through the Commons.
In addition to attending sessions and demos, meeting attendees will be able to participate in a wide variety of Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussions, Special Interest Group (SIG), and Working Group meetings. Several new BoFs and SIGs have formed since the Internet2 member community last gathered at a member meeting. These new groups include the Game Technology and Advanced Networking BoF, Science and Engineering Applications Coordination BoF, Content Delivery BoF, Collaboration SIG, Lecture Objects BoF, an Open Source Initiative for Affordable Webcast Technology BoF, and Archaeology SIG—and all are scheduled to meet during the Fall Member Meeting.
A gala evening reception will be held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Wednesday, 21 September and will feature a program entitled "Bridging the Ancient and Modern: New Ways of Thinking about Archaeology and Anthropology Using Internet2." The program will include an introduction by the Museum Director, Dr. Richard Leventhal who will guide attendees through the new and exciting ways that advanced networks are being used in the study of ancient cultures. Dr Leventhal will be talking live with two Tlingit artists in Anchorage and with faculty from a number of different Internet2 member schools who are involved with an archaeological dig in Cairo, Egypt. There will also be two exciting demonstration stations in the museum where mummies will be scanned using modern-day CT equipment and 3D archaeological structures will be presented. Internet2 Member Meeting attendees will have full access to the museum and all of the museum exhibits for the entire evening.
If you plan on attending the Member Meeting, we hope you will participate in many of these activities. If you cannot join us in Philadelphia, you can watch the netcasts of several sessions.
On 21 September 2005, in conjunction with the Fall 2005 Internet2 Member Meeting, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will host a gala reception and present a program highlighting new ways of thinking about Archaeology and Anthropology in a network-rich world. At 7:00 pm and again at 8:00 pm, museum Director, Dr. Richard Leventhal, will welcome attendees. Leventhal, along with Greg Palmer of MAGPI, also co-chairs the newly-formed Internet2 Archaeology Special Interest Group (SIG). The Archaelogy SIG will hold its inaugural meeting on 21 September 2005 and is open to all Internet2 members who want to participate.
The gala evening will continue as Leventhal presents live discussion with Museum experts Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, and Dr. Janet Monge; and Karen Rosenberg, University of Delaware; Shelly Laws and Teri Rofkar, Tlingit Artists, Anchorage; and faculty from Cairo, Egypt.
Two demonstration stations, located in the galleries, will welcome guests all evening. In the Upper Egyptian Gallery, CT Scanning of Mummies, will be hosted by Dr. Janet Monge. Here, a virtual archive of major skeletal collections will be presented. The massive amount of data generated by these collections will use of Internet2 advanced networking capabilities powered regionally by MAGPI, to make these valuable images available to researchers and faculty at institutions around the world. In the Chinese Rotunda, 3D Archaeological Structures from Subsurface Surveying will be presented by Dr. Kostas Danilidis, and Dr. Alexei Vranich. This demo highlights work investigating and developing methods for the recovery of underground structures. The results will not only provide hints for further excavation but also 3D models that can be studied as if they were already excavated.
Snacks and beverages will be offered to attendees in the majestic Chinese Rotunda throughout the evening. The Rotunda is one of the largest unsupported masonry domes in the United States. It houses one of the finest collections of monumental Chinese art in the country. Member meeting attendees at the gala are invited to explore all the galleries of the Museum which will remain open during the event.
