News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

Internet2 Announces Winners of the First Annual IDEA Awards 

Awards Recognize Innovative and Influential Advanced Network Applications 

ANN ARBOR, MI - April 21, 2006 - Internet2 today announced the first winners
of its Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Awards program which
seeks to recognize leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced
network applications which have applied advanced networking to enable
transformational progress in research, teaching and learning, and which hold
the promise to increase the impact of next-generation networks around the
world. 

The four winning submissions were chosen among several distinguished
nominations. Award submissions were judged on the depth of their positive
impact on their primary users, the technical merit of the application, and
the likelihood the application would be broadly adopted by its full natural
community of potential users.  

"The Internet2 IDEA awards recognize leaders of the Internet2 community who
have pushed the envelope of technology to enable a broad spectrum of the
research and education community to learn, collaborate, and advance their
missions in new and innovative ways," said David Lassner, CIO for the
University of Hawaii and Chair of the Internet2 Applications Strategy
Council. "In doing so, these applications and their collaborators serve as
models for the entire community by driving innovation to the edge and
creating new opportunities that just five years ago could not have been
imagined."

This year's awardees represent a vast range of disciplines, from advanced
radio astronomy to virtual master music classes; from remote global
collaboration to digital archiving. Awards will be presented at Internet2's
2006 Spring Member Meeting held in Washington D.C. on April 26, 2006.
Additional information about the IDEA Awards can be found at:
http://idea.internet2.edu

The inaugural 2006 IDEA Award Winners include:

"The Megaconferences and their Spinoffs"
Collaborators:
- Robert Dixon, The Ohio State University and OARnet (Nominating applicant)
- Jennifer Oxenford, Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2
(MAGPI) and the University of Pennsylvania 

"Interactive Music Education"
Collaborators: 
- Tom Snook, New World Symphony (Nominating applicant)
- Thomas Knab, Case Western Reserve University in partnership with the
Cleveland Institute of Music
- Christianne Orto, Manhattan School of Music
- Brian Shepard, University of Southern California Thornton School of Music 

"Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype"
Collaborators: 
- Robert Chadduck, Electronic Records Archives, National Archives and
Records Administration (Nominating applicant)
- Joseph JaJa, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies
- Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center

"Very High Speed Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI)"
Collaborators:
- Alan Whitney, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack
Observatory
- Yasuhiro Koyama, NICT Kashima Space Research Center, Japan
- Arpad Szomoru, Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in
Europe (JIVE)
- Hisao Uose, NTT Laboratories GEMnet2/GALAXY Project (Nominating applicant)

APPLICATION DETAILS:
"The Megaconferences and their Spinoffs"
The Megaconference programs use distributed networking - both people and
technology - to solve the fundamental problem of how to regularly bring
together hundreds of vastly distributed people in new ways each year. The
Megaconference application is a huge interconnection of hundreds of
interactive video conferencing endpoints throughout the world, using a
network of cascaded multipoint control units using the H.323 video
conferencing protocol, SIP, Access Grid, and 3G/H324 technologies. In 2005,
there were an estimated 7500 participants. 

The program seeks to provide participants a life-like environment to share
cultural, technological and educational experiences across traditional
geographic boundaries and time zones. Two spin-offs, Megaconference Jr and
Keystone were established in 2004. Megaconference Jr., now held annually,
brings together student presenters and audiences to share their life
experiences enabling all who participate the ability visit cultures around
the world without leaving the comfort of their classrooms. Three more
spin-offs began in 2005 including Texas Connects, the Holiday Conference,
and the Gigaconference.

Each year the Megaconference events attract novices to videoconferencing who
by the end of their "Mega experience" are more comfortable with the
technology and excited about the range of opportunities and applications it
can afford. These individuals then take back their knowledge, experience,
and enthusiasm for using the technology to their home institutions and
become evangelists to their administrators, colleagues, and students.

"The Megaconferences bring together people from all over the world,
inexpensively and from the comfort of their own classroom, office or
laboratory," said Robert Dixon, chief research engineer for Ohio Academic
Resources Network (OARNet) and the Ohio State University. "Creativity is
unleashed in wonderful ways that allow everyone to express themselves and
describe their work and experiences to an enthusiastic global audience.
Friendships and memories are created that will endure forever. The world
becomes a smaller and more friendly place when we can see and talk with one
another openly and freely, without political or cultural boundaries."

"Interactive Music Education"
These award winning collaborators and their affiliated organizations have
changed the face of music education in the U.S. through the use of advanced
Internet2 networks. Using advanced networks, this application has
dramatically expanded their educational resources through the use of live
interactive music master classes, symposiums, and coaching sessions with
music programs at Internet2 member universities. In doing so, these
institutions are building a virtual music community to enable the free
exchange of resources providing students access to coaches, teachers, and
guest artists normally not available within their own campus. 

The collaborating institutions regularly connect to living composers and
conductors whose schedules do not permit them to attend rehearsals of their
music and allows unique opportunities for musicians to hear first-hand from
the composers themselves. The collaborating institutions leverage Internet2
networks for master classes, teaching, sectionals, symposiums, performances,
community outreach and live auditions. Using this network for auditions
enables music students in remote locations who would normally have
difficulty in going to major cities the opportunity to audition for world
class symphonies. To accomplish these programs, the sites involved use
multi-casting capabilities as well as multiple interactive DV and MPEG2
streams. The high bandwidth of the connection and the Internet2 backbone
allows for realistic high-definition video and realistic, better-than-CD
quality surround sound while supporting low latency and minimum packet loss
to create a true life-like learning environment for both teacher and
student.

"What we have been able to accomplish through the experience of Internet2
networks for music education, collaboration and performance is just a first
step in how this technology will be used for those purposes in the future,"
said Tom Snook, CTO of the New World Symphony. "It is unique, not only
because it is building relationships between institutions and among music
educators, professionals and students, but it is building bridges between
engineering, science, technology and the arts and humanities. It reinforces
the very real relationship between science, art and humanities and how
critical it is that they work together for the future of education,
learning, science and the very future and growth of humanity itself."

"Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype"
This application is an innovative research test bed used to address the
Nation's challenge of safeguarding, preserving, and providing access to
demonstrably authentic electronic records - to ensure continuing access to
essential evidence that documents the rights of American citizens, the
actions of federal officials, and the national experience. The prototype is
a federation of different, and independently administered, computing
platforms which interact as a single virtual repository. The system is
distributed between NARA, the University of Maryland, and the San Diego
Supercomputer Center. The persistent archives prototype is based on the
Storage Resource Broker data management technology. The prototype has been
used to demonstrate the management of technology evolution, the preservation
of electronic records, and the automated extraction of authenticity
metadata. The prototype showcases new levels of data virtualization -
demonstrating the ability to manage the properties of electronic records
collection across multiple sites independent of the underlying storage
environments. The transcontinental persistent archives prototype is the
product of a seven year research effort that includes the contributions of
the National Science Foundation's Office of CyberInfrastructure, the San
Diego Supercomputer Center, and the University of Maryland. 

"The Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype represents advanced
collaborative research. This technology demonstrates how shared knowledge
can be managed and distributed across multiple institutions and platforms.
The prototype is the Nation's window onto the electronic records archives of
the future," said Robert Chadduck, director of Research, Electronic Records
Archives (ERA) Program National Archives and Records Administration

"Very High Speed Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI)"
In the past several years, advanced scientific research has increasingly
benefited from the rapid improvements in ultra high speed Research and
Education (R&E) networks. One of the most innovative applications is
real-time very long baseline Interferometry, dubbed "e VLBI," which creates
a large-scale virtual radio telescope that is used for generating ultra-high
resolution images of distant radio sources for astronomy as well as
measuring the earth's orientation and motion in space with unprecedented
precision.

Prior to the use of R&E networks, all VLBI relied on magnetic tapes or disk
packs at each site to collect continuous data at Gbps per telescope from a
radio source such as a distant quasar. These magnetic media are physically
shipped to a central correlator for processing. Internet2 and other advanced
networks are now making real-time electronic transmission of VLBI data, or e
VLBI, a reality on a global scale. The network-based e VLBI approach allows
scientists to have immediate access to correlation results, even while
experiments are in progress, which allows them to make adjustments or
changes in strategy to maximize the science output, or to identify and fix
problems at telescopes.

"The international nature of e-VLBI is one of the most exciting aspects of
the project.  E-VLBI now links radio telescope facilities in Japan,
Australia, Europe and the U.S., and is rapidly displacing the traditional
record-and-ship paradigm of the past 30 years. Advanced high-speed data
networks stream simultaneous observation data to correlators in the U.S.,
Europe and Japan, thereby creating a virtual radio telescope with a diameter
nearly the size of the earth," said Alan Whitney, principal research
scientist and associate director at the MIT Haystack Observatory. "VLBI is
uniquely suited to advanced global networks since the instrument is
fundamentally dispersed on a global scale and requires that high-speed data
streams be brought together from spatially-diverse telescopes for
processing. The ultimate payoff for science will be higher sensitivity,
which increases with increasing data rate, as well as rapid turnaround of
processed data for increased productivity."

About Internet2(R)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government,
Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and
technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of
tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia,
industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy.
For more information, visit: www.internet2.edu.

###