[geni-announce] GENI Project Office Announces $12M for Community-Based GENI Prototype Development

[Aaron Falk]

GENI Project Office Announces $12M for Community-Based GENI Prototype  
Development

Cambridge, Mass., July 22, 2008 —The GENI Project Office, operated by  
BBN Technologies, an advanced technologies solutions firm, announced  
today that it has been awarded a three year grant worth approximately  
$4M a year from the US National Science Foundation to perform GENI  
design and risk-reduction prototyping. The funds will be used to  
contract with 29 university-industrial teams selected through an open,  
peer-reviewed process. The first year funding will be used to  
construct GENI Spiral 1, a set of early, functional prototypes of key  
elements of the GENI system.

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a suite of  
infrastructure, now in the design and planning phase, that will  
support network science and engineering experiments.

GENI will support a future, experimental network infrastructure that  
will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer and  
information science and engineering, as well as from economics and the  
social sciences, to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research  
environment. The GENI Project Office (GPO) issued a call for proposals  
to perform design and risk-reduction prototyping in December, 2007.  
Twenty-nine of the 74 submitted proposals were selected for the  
initial cycle of GENI's spiral development process.

GENI prototyping projects will construct and integrate key design  
elements of the GENI infrastructure suite. GPO system engineers will  
perform top-down integration planning and project guidance; and the  
community will also self-organize in a bottom-up fashion as equipment  
and substrate teams begin to integrate with evolving prototypes.  
Project progress and demonstrations will be evaluated at tri-annual  
GENI Engineering Conferences and detailed project information will be  
available on the GENI web site, www.geni.net.

"We have received many novel and exciting proposals and are eager to  
see GENI prototyping get underway. The GPO will be working intensely  
to establish contracts with the project teams as quickly as possible,"  
said Chip Elliott, GENI Project Director.

The GPO plans to issue an additional solicitation of $3.5M a year in  
late 2008 or early 2009 for other prototyping projects to address more  
new and exciting technology areas.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its  
substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced,  
repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system.  
With expertise spanning information security, speech and language  
processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control  
systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial  
collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs  
approximately 700 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge,  
Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland;  
Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park,  
Minnesota; and O'Fallon, Illinois. For more information, visit www.bbn.com 
.