Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


US Ignite & GigU Workshops: “Living the Future Today”

June 11th, 2011 / in research horizons, workshop reports / by Erwin Gianchandani

I’m just back from a great workshop on US Ignite and GigU, held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland this week.

Lev Gonick MC'ing the demo session Thursday evening.I sat in on the US Ignite track — and got to hear many excellent presentations from folks with exciting ideas (and teams at the ready!) for developing gigabit applications. Each team summarized the novelty of their idea(s), how ultra-broadband connectivity is key to success, feasibility, benefits, and metrics for evaluation. In many cases, the ideas and teams emerged from a brainstorming session that took place during the first US Ignite workshop held in Washington, DC, on May 16 — just under a month ago. Areas of particular emphasis (or so it seemed) among the participants at the Case Western meeting were public services, healthcare, and transportation.

A "distance dancing" performance (one of the two performers is virtually present) during Thursday evening's demo session.Many kudos also to Lev Gonick (CWRU’s CIO) and his team for putting together an absolutely amazing demo session on Thursday evening. Calling it “Living the Future Today” and setting it in a university athletic gym, the show featured 13 teams of researchers illustrating all different kinds of uses of ultra-broadband — streaming in folks from around the country and the world (all the way to the Down Under!) to tell the stories. A sampling of the demos:

  • a “collaborative surgery theater” (akin to a flight simulator, but for surgeons simulating operating on patients, and from many remote locations at that);
  • a live musical performance — fed in from the University of Southern California — illustrating the difference in sound quality between today’s residential networks and the full-fidelity audio available on high-performance networks;
  • “distance dancing,” or the inclusion of network, multimedia, and projection technologies into a dance performance to expand the range of artistic expression; and
  • HD/3D videoconferencing for telemedicine or learning, etc.

We’ll have more here soon.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

US Ignite & GigU Workshops: “Living the Future Today”