Background

On January 19, 2011, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) hosted a roundtable discussion focused on how best to advance applications and services for next generation high bandwidth networks across America. National Science Foundation (NSF) staff from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) participated in the meeting along with representatives from industry, academia, broadband city/region/campus infrastructure projects and providers, and other agencies in the US government. As a result of this meeting:

1. Six city/regional broadband infrastructure providers agreed to open up their cities or regions for multidisciplinary experimentation and interconnection.
2. Staff from NSF's Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Project Office visited a number of cities and regions that already have broadband infrastructure (e.g., Chattanooga, TN; Cleveland, Ohio; Lafayette, LA; Philadelphia, PA; UTOPIA region in Utah; Washington, DC) to determine feasibility and costs in interconnecting these islands of broadband with GENI campuses.
3. NSF hosted a workshop on May 16, 2011, bringing together staff from these broadband cities with entrepreneurs and researchers to brainstorm novel gigabit applications in areas of national priority that benefit segments of society (e.g., at-risk school children, home-bound elderly, citizens caught up in disasters or emergencies). This workshop was followed by a second one on June 9-10, 2011 in Cleveland, Ohio, hosted by Case Western University. This workshop focused on Living the Future Today and showcased a number of innovative gigabit applications. A third workshop was held in conjunction with the 12th GENI Engineering Conference in Kansas City, MO, on November 3-4, 2011 (instruction: like above -- on the date, jump to the description of the workshop on the meetings page). The primary goal of this Ignite workshop was to help gigabit application development research teams refine their projects for submission to NSF in the next few months. The app teams presented posters to get feedback from the general community. They were also assigned "coaches" researchers from the community that had previously been successful at NSF and could help the teams better develop their ideas.
4. NSF plans to hold ideation contests and application developer challenges to reach out to developers and entrepreneurs who are not normally part of the NSF grantee community. More information on this will come soon. A Public-Private Partnership