FOR RELEASE THURSDAY, OCT. 8, 1998
AT&T Labs, ICSI establish Internet research center
Effort in association with UC Berkeley is first to bring together
scientists, industry to help develop future Internet architecture
BERKELEY, CALIF. - AT&T and the International Computer Science Institute
today announced an agreement to form the AT&T Center for Internet Research
(ACIR), in association with the University of California at Berkeley. The
goal of this unique center will be to perform basic research on Internet
architectures and related networking issues, thereby bridging the gap
between the Internet research community and the interests of commercial
industry.
The agreement calls for AT&T to fund the multimillion-dollar ICSI center for
at least three years and to work with ICSI researchers in close
collaboration with staff from the UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences department and the School of Information and Management
Sciences. In addition to the researchers at ICSI, AT&T is also forming a new
Internet research group at AT&T Labs in nearby Menlo Park, Calif., along
with an expanded group at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J. headed by Hamid
Ahmadi, vice president of Networking and Distributed Systems Research, who
will oversee the effort.
"While the Internet has enormous potential, it faces a problem something
like we do on the roads here in the San Francisco Bay Area: The usage is
outgrowing the original infrastructure," said David C. Nagel, AT&T Labs
President and AT&T Chief Technology Officer. "By bringing in top-notch
researchers and focusing on commercial interests related to AT&T's network,
we intend to address some of the fundamental underlying architectural
issues, and to become widely recognized as the foremost Internet research
center in the world."
As more applications such as multimedia, telephony and electronic commerce
move to the Internet, issues such as scaling, security, global access and
network management could adversely affect its growth and performance. ACIR
will be a focal point for discussions with other commercial Internet service
and equipment providers, as well as with standards bodies such as the
Internet Engineering Task Force, in order to help create a future Internet
architecture that addresses these issues.
"This center will place leading industrial researchers in the Internet
engineering community alongside Berkeley's highly respected groups in
Internet-scale systems research," said Randy Katz, Chair of the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of
California, Berkeley and United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished
Professor. "We expect that the close and productive collaboration between
the ACIR staff and the faculty and students on campus will make Berkeley the
epicenter of Internet-based engineering research for the 21st Century."
The Berkeley center will be led by ICSI Director Merrick Furst, and will
benefit from contributions by the university's Internet-Scale Systems
research group - led by Professors Katz, Steve McCanne, Eric Brewer, David
Culler and Anthony Joseph - which works on Internet protocol design; local-
and wide-area access technologies such as mobile and wireless networking;
and highly scalable processing and storage infrastructure based on cluster
technology.
"The combined resources of AT&T Research, UC Berkeley, and ICSI are coming
together to create overnight the world's best Internet research group," said
Furst. "By locating a new group at ICSI, AT&T is enabling the kind of
academic, industrial, and international research advances that are required
for practical improvements to the Internet in the areas of network
architecture, electronic commerce, communities-of-practice and security."
ICSI is an independent, non-profit basic research institute affiliated with
the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif.
AT&T's funding of the center is complementary to its corporate participation
in the Internet2 project, a consortium of over 170 universities (including
UC Berkeley) and industry leaders working together to further U.S.
leadership in research and higher education and accelerate the availability
of new services and applications on the Internet.
AT&T Labs, the research and development unit of AT&T, is working to create
the information services and communications network of tomorrow. AT&T Labs
is a leader in the development of technologies and standards for audio,
speech, video and image compression; electronic commerce and digital
copyright management; search and directory services; speech processing and
coding of all sorts; network architecture, design, engineering and
operations; and other areas critical to the advancement of new
communications and Internet offerings.