Academic, Industrial Researchers Form Communications Institute

LONDON — A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University and University College, London will collaborate on developing and implementing a range of emerging communications technologies in collaboration with industrial partners.

The academics are coming together under the auspices of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) to form the Communications Innovation Institute (CII) that aims to foster multi-disciplinary research into emerging technologies such as third-generation peer-to-peer communications systems, wireless on optical technology and Internet privacy technologies.

The first industrial partner to join is British Telecom, but David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT, said many potential partners are already on board. He hopes several more will formally join after an initial workshop being held this week in the U.K. that will outline the initiative's benefits. CII officials argue that communications research and the industry it serves have been separated into different "silos" and plagued by a lack of effective communications.

"Classical academic research is portioned into different labs and departments, and separate from industrial technology labs, business schools, government departments. We felt we needed to change this and provide a new structure that ties these different disciplines together," said David Clark, an MIT senior research scientist.

Clark said the problem with the communications industry is clearly not a lack of innovation but lack of agreement on what the future should look like and the path forward. The initiative is intended for find the way by overcoming some of the bottlenecks that stifle coordinated research."A major aim here is participation with industry and government, and not just as funders. We need industry to sharpen our thinking, to help us sort out what the deeper issues really are and to make sure we are relevant."

Jon Crowcroft, Marconi professor of Networked Systems at Cambridge, said another major target is to better understand how economic, regulatory and technical organizations interact. "We can't consider each of these things in isolation any more. Some things are not solved by the market or by government, or by Microsoft, Intel and Cisco," he said.

Crowcroft said a key theme would be developing a road map for wireless and spectrum usage and an examination of viral communications.

Andrew Lippman, a senior researcher at MIT's Media Lab and a long-time proponent of "viral systems," added: "The magic is not in the tech alone. It is in how it meshes with society. The measure of any invention is not how good it is but how quickly people pull that off you and run with it. SMS wasn't developed for schoolgirls in Japan to chat with each other, it was invented for telcos to send you advertising."

The CII is just one of the research initiatives being established by the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which was formed to bring academia and industry together to improve the competitiveness of various industrial sectors.Earlier this year, it launched a program looking into pervasive computing, and some of the topics to be addressed under that initiative, such as energy-efficient processors, security and peer-to-peer networking, will dovetail with the CII work.

The CMI is funded by the U.K. government through a five-year grant of £65.1 million (about $119.5 million) that runs through mid-2005. It is also raising funds from the private sector.