ENGINEERING

CUPERTINO, CA -- CommerceNet, a global, not-for-profit organization leading the advancement of eCommerce worldwide, has chosen world-renowned academic institutions to host its two Next-Generation Internet (NGI) Application Centers. The University of California, Berkeley will host the Northern California NGI Center. The Southern California NGI Center will be located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego. Both NGI Centers will collaborate with the California Institutes for Innovation that have been established on their campuses: the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, known as Cal-(IT)2, at UC San Diego. The UC Berkeley NGI Center also will collaborate with the Fisher Center for Information Technology and Marketplace Transformation (CITM) in the Haas School of Business. "California's Next Generation Internet Application Centers will be a unique enabler for NGI application development," said Mark Resch, President and CEO of CommerceNet. "The Centers will showcase innovative technologies and serve as a testbed where companies from across the state -- both Northern and Southern California -- can access the Next Generation Internet, benchmark their applications and test interoperability. By supporting the NGI Centers and NGI Application development, the CommerceNet Consortium will not only have a lasting impact on the Next Generation Internet, but also on the California economy." CommerceNet, in conjunction with the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency's Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation, selected the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley to host the NGI Application Centers after reviewing numerous proposals from technology leaders in the private sector, universities, municipalities, and non-profit organizations. "The selection of the two Application Centers shows our commitment to keep California at the forefront in the effort to convert research and development into commercially viable high technology," said Governor Davis. "The Next Generation Internet program will help companies be more productive, innovative and create jobs in the Golden State." The Application Centers will house the development, testing, incubation and demonstration of new business and consumer applications that will take advantage of the evolving and expanding Internet. Within these Centers, NGI Application developers will find a collaborative environment designed to accelerate the development of eBusiness applications, encourage new Internet-related start-up businesses, and test new infrastructure services for NGI applications. CommerceNet expects that between 25 and 40 small businesses will use the Application Centers during the next year, and that each Center will work with a minimum of eight to ten development projects annually. CommerceNet has a two-part initiative within its NGI Application Program to further the development of the Next Generation Internet. In addition to funding the NGI Application Centers, CommerceNet is awarding grants ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 to companies and individuals developing NGI applications. The grant recipients will use the Northern California Center and Southern California Center to develop, test and showcase their NGI applications. By funding application development, locating appropriate sites to host the applications, and providing the necessary support resources, CommerceNet is ensuring the growth and success of the Next Generation Internet. Research at the Northern California NGI Center will focus on applications in the areas of multi-party collaboration using multicast, collaborative design and engineering, data mining, and video-on-demand, as well as supply chain management, eCoordination, eNegotiation, eProcurement, brokering and virtual reality "space planning" in the context of extended Internet malls or expanded Internet sales environments. "By allowing entrepreneurial California companies, faculty, and students to 'live in the future,' this center will help promote the development of exciting new applications of the Next Generation Internet," said James Demmel, Principal Investigator for the Northern California NGI Center and chief scientist of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. "These new applications will help take the Internet to the next level by driving demand for high-speed access." At the Southern California NGI Center, researchers will focus on applications in the areas of telemedicine, telemanufacturing, wireless, network and application performance measurement, distance learning, Web marketing, peer-to-peer-networking, and high-performance distributed computing. "This new center will allow us to provide Californians access to advanced computational resources previously available only through federal programs to national user communities," said Mike Vildibill, Director of the Southern California NGI Center (CalNGI) and Deputy Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "These activities will complement SDSC's mission to deploy leading-edge information technologies for bioinformatics, environmental sciences, and other data-driven application areas." For further information about the NGI Application Centers or the NGI Program, please visit: www.commerce.net/projects/NGI/