BayouBuzz.com
By: Staff Bayoubuzz
Louisiana Tech University will host the state’s first regional Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) Symposium today and tomorrow at the university’s Institute for Micromanufacturing. The event will bring together university faculty researchers, internationally-respected network computing experts and representatives of technology-oriented corporations to explore the research and economic possibilities of LONI, a statewide fiber-optics network expected to revolutionize collaborative university research by allowing computing speeds 1000 times faster than previously possible. Governor Kathleen Blanco has committed $40 million over the next ten years to the initiative.
“This is the first symposium we’ve had to bring university faculty together to explore new research and education opportunities that can be pursued once LONI is operational,” said Les Guice, Chairman of the Board of Regents’s LONI Management Council and Vice President for Research and Development at Louisiana Tech. “LONI has attracted the attention of major funding agencies, as well as industry. We believe that LONI positions Louisiana well to enhance its competitiveness for research and in expanding economic development throughout the state.”
The Tech LONI Symposium, the first of several such symposia planned for campuses across the state, will showcase a wide variety of exciting research applications LONI will both facilitate and make possible at Louisiana research universities. Among potential LONI research applications to be highlighted through presentations, demonstrations and displays at the event are bioinformatics, biocomputing, computer modeling and simulation, interactive visualization and applications in creative arts and technologies (such as video games and digital animation).
“The LONI Symposium is Louisiana’s version of the product created when you cross the new Star Wars movie with the popular Stargate SG-1 television program, and a concrete example of the “culture of creativity” being nurtured in our state,” said Mike Abbiatti, Board of Regents Associate Commissioner for Learning and Technology and Regents LONI liaison. “LONI Symposia are designed to be like small, regional “time warps” that open on our research campuses, and give the citizens of Louisiana a quick glimpse of what is to come. We see the exciting results that can be attained when research is linked to economic development. The “time warps” close as rapidly as they appear, leaving us with the vision and confidence to take the next step toward a new era in the history of the Bayou State.”
“Major innovations are frequently born from novel research by university faculty and students,” said Les Guice. “Our goal is to get those faculty and students together from different universities and different disciplines to spur new research possibilities for LONI. This new resource will provide us wonderful opportunities to develop things that we could not even conceive before.”
Keynote speaker for the Symposium is Dr. Ed Seidel, director of the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University. Seidel has headed the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Numerical Relativity group at the University of Illinois and has been a professor at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institute) in Golm, Germany. Among other internationally-known network computing experts slated to make presentations are Parvati Dev, Director of Summit Lab at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Henry Neeman, Director of the Oklahoma University Supercomputing Center for Education and Research.
The symposium opens at 1:15 p.m. on May 4. A 5:30 p.m. mixer with demonstrations and displays wraps up the first day. On May 5, the symposium opens at 8:30 a.m. and concludes shortly before noon. Along with lectures, the two-day event includes a workshop and breakout sessions. A detailed event agenda is available at http://mycenit.latech.edu/LONI2005/agenda.php. Media are cordially invited to attend.
Publish Date:
05-04-2005
