May 2004 - Special Edition


Ontario R&E Summit Briefs


Birds of a feather – flocking to collaborate over ORION
Connecting virtually every university, college, teaching hospital, public sector research lab, and many others together for the first time can bring some revolutionary changes in the way education and learning are designed and deployed. For instance, a number of institutions are looking at ways to collaborate over the new ORION network. York University’s CIO Bob Gagne, who is presenting at the Ontario R&E Summit’s Birds of a Feather session on June 15, will be discussing the possibility of new disaster recover project with other partners, over ORION. This session is expected to draw participants who want to hear directly from their peers on how they can make full use of this new connectivity and how others are planning to roll-out new and innovative partnerships with other connected institutions. Barry Brock, Director of IT Services at Ottawa’s Algonquin College, will present plans for an alternate data centre, shared among a number of regional institutions, enabled by the area’s regional advanced network and ORION.

Also presenting is Lakehead University’s Bob Angell, Director of Lakehead’s Communications Technology Resource Centre. Bob and Lakehead made headlines recently with an Ontario education success story on how the university overcame its physical distance from the rest of Ontario with "smart classrooms" and an Advanced Technology and Academic Centre, made possible, in part, through ORION network connectivity. “I am able to IP videoconference around the private IP network Lakehead has fostered in northern Ontario, and the advent of ORION has just made that go all the way from Barrie to the Manitoba border," Angell said, in a recent interview with ITBusiness. Lakehead can now deliver very high-quality video with a minimum 512k transmission rate. “We usually go at 1 MB and there’s no time delay. It’s very impressive, he said."

Digital Resources – Changing the Face of Learning
Gale Moore, Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto knows a thing or two about digital resources. As chair of a special Ontario R&E Summit session on June 14, devoted entirely to digital resources and how they are changing the face of learning throughout the world, Gale will lead a discussion with organizations that are right on the cusp of expanding their reach through new technology and advanced networks. The digital age has transformed the way learning resources are created, stored and shared. This session will explore how digital resources, and creating new and more innovative ways of sharing them through advanced R&E networks, is changing the face of learning in our country. Participants will hear directly from the Chair of the Ontario Digital Library project Peter Rogers, as well as Janice Hayes, Executive Director of the Ontario Colleges Bibliocentre, an organization that expects to connect to ORION in the near future and dramatically enhance its capability to serve colleges and other educational organizations.

The session will also hear from Rea Devakos, Service Coordinator of the new T-Space project at the University of Toronto. Gale Moore, who just wrapped up KMDI’s own international Open Source Conference May 9 to 11, will also share findings and highlights from the event.

Corbato – Chief Architect of Internet2
Dr. Steve Corbato, chief architect of Internet2 and one of the stars of the international R&E networking community, is one of the panel members who will join the Ontario R&E Summit on June 15, along with colleagues from the US and abroad. Dr. Corbato is participating in the Local is Global – Reaching Across Borders” session, where the discussion will focus on how advanced networks are leading to new and innovative cross-border partnerships in science and education. As Director of Backbone Network Infrastructure for Internet2, Dr. Corbato has primary responsibility for the Abilene network, the United States’ critical backbone R&E network. Abilene recently announced the completion of its upgrade from 2.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to 10 Gbps, which quadrupled its capacity to more than 15,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

Acknowledged among his peers as one of the pioneers of advanced R&E networking, Dr. Corbato holds an affiliate faculty position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He was actively involved with Internet2 from its very beginnings. As member of the initial architecture committee, he chaired the Internet2 Routing Working Group and served on the Abilene Technical Advisory Committee. With a background in experimental astrophysics, Dr. Corbato was also part of a University of Utah research that detected the highest energy cosmic ray observed to date. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dr. Ted Sargent - Top 40 under 40
Prof. Ted Sargent, 30, one of Canada’s most celebrated young scientists, has just been named as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Nortel Networks-Canada Research Chair in Emerging Technologies at the University of Toronto, Prof. Sargent is one of the featured presenters at the Ontario R&E Summit. He will be will be presenting highlights of his work at the Summit’s R&E Showcase, on June 15. The Top 40 Under 40 is an annual survey presented by Canadian Business Magazine. Sargent was also named one of the Top 100 Young Innovators in MIT's Technology Review Magazine last year. The subject of a previous feature article in the ORION Research and Discovery News, Prof. Sargent leads cutting edge research in the use of “buckyballs” in new materials for fibre optic communications. Using molecules resembling 60-sided soccer balls, Prof. Sargent and Carleton University chemistry professor Wayne Wang led a team of researchers that succeeded in creating a new material for processing information using light.


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