Wireless Center: Leveraging Resources For Innovation, Growth and Security

In his recent State of the State Message, NYS Governor George Pataki, shown at left with Stony Brook President Shirley Strum Kenny on campus, pointed with pride to the Centers of Excellence program to create an Empire State High Tech Corridor of high-tech research and economic development centers from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, introducing Stony Brook Vice President for Economic Development and Dean of Engineering Yacov Shamash, who leads development of the State's Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology at Stony Brook.

The growth in industry commitments to the program - which now exceed $160 million - prompted the State raise its obligation from $30 million to $50 million; Federal opportunities to bring more than $40 million in cyber-security and related R&D support to New York has leveraged these investments, making the Center a quarter of a billion dollar effort to capture a leadership position in the next epoch of the ongoing information revolution. The vision of the Center of Excellence program, said the Governor, is to "combine the power of New York's high-tech industry with the strengths of our top-flight academic institutions -- add active State government support" - and produce new technologies, lead new industry sectors and create new high-paying jobs.

The new building will provide substantially enlarged quarters for the University's Center for Cyber-Security, whose resources include the Secure and Reliable Systems Laboratory, Applied Logic Laboratory, Concurrency and Verification Laboratory, Design and Analysis Research Laboratory, Experimental Computer Systems Laboratory, and File Systems and Storage Laboratory. Center research programs seek to create defenses against potential threats to the country's critical information infrastructure, which underpins most key sectors of the national economy, through trusted computing projects including critical software for concurrent distributed open secure systems, mobile code security, and automated adaptive intrusion response; its efforts will also help protect the software, networking and wireless protocols developed at the Center. The National Security Agency has recognized Stony Brook as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education.

The Center facility, on which design will start this spring, will be a demonstration site for the technologies it will be developing, with a wireless communications infrastructure complementing a flexible hardwired network. In addition to programs for pioneering research in IT and wireless, including 3-D visualization, networking, data mining, mobile code security, signal processing, and information handling, the 100,000 s.f. building will contain a cooperative industry R&D facility, where industry researchers will work side by side with university faculty and students to perfect commercializable new technologies. In addition, industry partners Computer Associates and Symbol Technologies will be creating allied facilities at their own sites for Center-related research.

Studies of technology-based economic growth, including a recent report by the Milken Institute, continue to demonstrate that the long-term well-being of the U.S. economy depends on university-spawned innovations that fuel the formation and expansion of leading-edge industry clusters. A distinguished researcher with industry experience is being sought to guide the development of Center programs to foster novel collaborative relationships between industry and the academy. Applications research will focus on the two largest sectors of the U.S. economy, health care and transportation, along with E-business and M-commerce. Industry partners also include IBM and many of the 1,000 young IT companies that have developed on Long Island since the mid-1990s.

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