Infrastructure for Research in Collaboration Systems

Principal Investigator: Stephen F. Weiss
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Agency Number: N/A

Abstract
This proposal describes the computer and communications infrastructure we plan to install in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It will support an established, on-going research program in collaboration technology, communication systems, and digital libraries. It will enable research that will contribute to the distributed storage, operating, and communications systems that will be required by the digital libraries and other applications that will constitute the information superhighway of the future. This research can not be done now without the requested infrastructure.

The infrastructure includes three key components. First, our basic data communications network will be upgraded to ATM for the research projects described here and for selected collaborators. Second, project workstations will be upgraded to provide additional computing power and integral video and audio I/O. Third, the upgraded communications network will be linked with the North Carolina Information Highway, a state-wide ATM network being built to explore and exploit the information superhighway concept. This link will provide our research project with a testbed of actual users.