The Research Triangle Area
The Research Triangle of North Carolina is named for the triangle formed by the area's three major research universities: the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Duke University in Durham, and North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The universities have a combined enrollment of more than 63,000 students; have libraries with more than twelve million volumes with interconnected catalogs; and have national prominence in a variety of disciplines. Collectively, they conduct more than $600 million in research each year.
At the center of the Triangle lies Research Triangle Park (RTP), set in 7,000 acres of North Carolina pinelands. It is located within 20 minutes of each of the Triangle universities, and five miles from Raleigh-Durham International Airport. RTP is the largest research park in the United States, and includes more than 140 organizations--corporations, government agencies, and institutes--that employ approximately 45,000 people. Organizations such as Cisco Systems Inc., Ericsson Inc., GlaxoSmithKline Inc., IBM Corp., the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Nortel Networks, the Research Triangle Institute, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conduct research and development in various areas, including biotechnology, computing, electronics, environmental science, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications.
The collaboration between the academic and corporate communities creates a synergy unsurpassed in the scientific arena. Many of the education and research affiliated institutions in the Triangle area and across the state are connected to each other via a broadband digital wide area network supporting data communications and video services, run by the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN), a private telecommunications network.
The growth of the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill is a consequence of the region's economic development. Our department sees its task as contributing to the research and educational needs of a growing regional concentration of high technology, and to the national and international computer science communities.