IBM, Northwestern Launch Research Project

    Tuesday, April 6, 1999

    Inter@ctive Week Online:
    By Joe McGarvey
    http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2237640,00.html

    Northwestern University and a group of corporate backers led by IBM today unveiled the International Center for Advanced Internet Research, a research project dedicated to the development of next-generation electronic business applications.

    The charter of the new project, which will be based at Northwestern's campus in Chicago and IBM's facility in Schaumburg, Ill., is to create a high-speed network for testing and developing applications that will enable corporations to leverage the Internet for conducting electronic business and communicating with branch offices, partners and customers.

    "This is not research for research's sake," said John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM. "This project is designed to enable electronic businesses in the future to rely on a much more responsive, reliable and robust network."

    Some of next-generation applications the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) researchers will be working on include global multiparty videoconferencing, virtual reality, collaborative engineering, telemedicine and full-screen, interactive distance learning.

    The idea behind the project is to develop these next-generation applications in a laboratory setting and then transfer the technology to the commercial sector as high-speed technology becomes more commonplace across the Internet. Although it is not clear how the technology will transfer from the labs to corporate entities, Patrick said IBM and iCAIR researchers will be working with Fortune 500 companies to adopt these new applications.

    In addition to IBM, Ameritech and Cisco Systems also contributed to the project. Ameritech is contributing a portion of its high-speed network in the Chicago area, and Cisco is supplying some of the infrastructure equipment, according to iCAIR officials. The combined contribution of all three companies is approximately $10 million.

    Much of the rationale behind the new research project, which Patrick said is more application-oriented than similar university-centered projects, such as Internet 2, is that the Internet is advancing at a rapid pace and extensive research is needed to harness future breakthroughs in bandwidth and speed.

    Stephen Wolff, executive director of advanced Internet initiatives at Cisco, said iCAIR will provide the commercial sector with a model for managing an Internet that will be radically different from the one that exists today. "The Internet of 10 years from now will not be anything like the Internet of today," he said. "We have no way of simulating or modeling an Internet of the size that it will become in a few years."

    In addition to transferring a team of about eight engineers to the iCAIR facilities to Northwestern's Chicago campus, IBM also announced that it will establish a similar facility in the Netherlands to serve the European business community.