Clinton Names a Committee to Advise Federal Agencies About the Internet
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 1997
By Lisa Guernsey
PRESIDENT CLINTON has appointed 19 people to a new committee that
will advise federal agencies on developing the Next Generation Internet,
which is intended to expand the present Internet's capacity for research
and education projects.
Ken Kennedy, director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation at
Rice University, was named one of two co-chairmen of the panel, the
Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications,
Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet. President Clinton
has not yet selected the second co-chairman.
THE NEXT GENERATION
Dr. Kennedy said in an interview that one of the panel's first tasks would
be to provide guidance on the Next Generation Internet, a federal project
to build a network that will allow faster connections than on the current
Internet. The relationship between that project and Internet 2, a
consortium of universities that plans to develop a high-speed network to
stimulate research, is unclear, he said.
The committee will consider how to pay for the Next Generation Internet and
probably will ask leaders of the Internet 2 project to become involved, Dr.
Kennedy said.
"In the long term," he said, "the big issue is, How should the government
invest its funds in a way to maximize the investment to the taxpayer and
the groups involved?"
Leaders of another university project to develop an advanced Intenet,
called the Very High Speed Backbone Network Service, or VBNS, will also be
asked to participate, Dr. Kennedy said. Eventually, he said, he wants to
arrive at a "stable state," with a long-term financing plan for some
combination of the three projects.
The panel will also look at how to make the Next Generation Internet secure
and reliable, Dr. Kennedy said. "But we will stay away from regulatory
issues like encryption-export policy."
Other members of the new panel who work in academe are:
CHING-CHIH CHEN, professor of library science at Simmons College.
DAVID COOPER, associate director of computation at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.
DAVID J. FARBER, professor of telecommunications at the University
of Pennsylvania.
SHERRILYNNE S. FULLER, director of the Health Science Libraries and
Information Center at the University of Washington.
HECTOR GARCIA-MOLINA, professor of computer science and engineering
at Stanford University.
SUSAN GRAHAM, professor of computer science at the University of
California at Berkeley.
RAJ REDDY, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
EDWARD H. SHORTLIFFE, professor of medicine and computer science at
Stanford University.
LARRY SMARR, director of the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The panel's other members are leaders of telecommunications and
computer-engineering businesses, including senior administrators and board
members of AT&T Labs, Intel Corporation, MCI Communications, Microsoft, and Silicon Graphics.
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