Calit2 Proposal

Proposal for California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. (2000).

Major changes in the structure and scale of Internet telecommunications will occur over the next decade as large numbers of mobile endpoints—information appliances, sensor arrays, and embedded processors—are added to digital wireless extensions of the current Internet. At the same time, tens of millions of households and businesses will move from modems to broadband connections. This combination implies huge increases in the Internet’s backbone capacity, leading to an all-optical core architecture. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] will team UCSD and UCI faculty, students, and research professionals with leading California telecommunications, computer, and software companies to research the scientific and technological components required to bring this “new Internet” into being. We will focus on extending the current wired Internet into the physical world, efficiently gathering critical data and making it easily available for interpretation. Institute applications researchers will “live in the future” on leading-edge testbeds to investigate how this new Internet will accelerate advances in environmental science and energy, transportation, medicine, entertainment, policy, industrial management, and education. The organization of our institute is farsighted: It is not a loose collection of faculty research projects, but a well-considered strategic plan to conduct an interdisciplinary, integrated study of the impact of the new Internet telecommunications infrastructure on California.