MANUFACTURING

Williams College computer scientist to head one of 29 academic/industrial research teams: Jeannie Albrecht, assistant professor of computer science at Williams College, and other faculty from large research universities including University of Massachusetts, Duke, Princeton, and Stanford, are working on prototypes to expand the security, manageability, and versatility of networking systems. Albrecht is heading one of 29 academic/industrial research teams, funded with awards totaling $12 million, to build, integrate, and begin to operate the first prototypes. The work is being funded by BBN Technologies and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support experimental research in network science and engineering. Separately, these teams will build and operate the first prototypes of the GENI suite of network research infrastructure. GENI officials believe a "spiral development" approach – funding multiple research models simultaneously rather than a single, large experiment – will provide a greater volume of feedback to guide network designs and ultimately help create a more useful system. The first phase of development, Spiral 1, focuses on ways to discover, schedule, and control resources for large-scale research experiments. For her part, Albrecht plans to design an experiment control and management framework called Gush. "We expect this product," Albrecht explained, "to support experiment control through three user interfaces, including graphical, command line, and programmatic. "Our main goal in developing Gush is to provide GENI researchers and users of varying levels of expertise with a user-friendly and robust infrastructure for managing experiments." Gush is an extension of Plush, a framework for large-scale network management systems, which Albrecht developed in earlier research. She received her B.S. from Gettysburg College and her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.