Northwestern opens Internet research center

    Tuesday, April 6, 1999

    Associated press:
    By: Don Babawin

    CHICAGO (AP) - Imagine you have a rare disease and the one doctor who knows how to cure you is on the other side of the planet.

    If this is the kind of news that might keep you from buying that rod and reel for next year's fishing season, take heart. On Tuesday, Northwestern University and several corporate partners launched a project that could save the life of anyone in just such a spot.

    Located on Northwestern 's Evanston campus, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research will be the receiving point for computer-based research going on all over the world. The center, which participants call the first of its kind, cost $10 million to open and will be manned by about two dozen people, including IBM engineers, Northwestern researchers and students.
    "There is very interesting cutting-edge work taking place all over the world," said Andy Schmidt, a senior product manager with Ameritech, which is providing equipment and services to the center. "What Northwestern has done is create an institute that focuses this work and provides resources to collaborate on all sorts of projects."

    As a result, the center "will accelerate the pace with which advanced Internet applications are brought to market," said the center's director, Joel Mambretti.

    One field that Northwestern and its corporate partners hope to affect dramatically is medicine.

    "If you have a rare kind of cancer and the expert is in Shanghai, it's not going to do you a lot of good if he can't view X-rays, mammograms and so forth in real time," said Tim Blair, an IBM spokesman.

    Through the center, participants hope, physicians would be able to transmit images via the Internet instantaneously that today might take several hours to process. A high-speed network available to all those working on a specific case would transform the practice of medicine, Schmidt said.

    Such high-speed networks already exist, but the center will allow researchers from all over the world to tap into them and collaborate on projects in telecommunications, health care, education, financial services, manufacturing and more, Blair said.

    Right now, researchers from Northwestern and Allied Signal are using such a network to collaborate on the design and development of new airline braking systems, said Susan Andrews, a Northwestern spokeswoman.