Raytheon BBN Technologies

Cambridge, Mass., July 22, 2008 —The GENI Project Office, operated by BBN Technologies, an advanced technologies solutions firm, announced today that it has been awarded a three year grant worth approximately $4M a year from the US National Science Foundation to perform GENI design and risk-reduction prototyping. The funds will be used to contract with 29 university-industrial teams selected through an open, peer-reviewed process. The first year funding will be used to construct GENI Spiral 1, a set of early, functional prototypes of key elements of the GENI system.

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a suite of infrastructure, now in the design and planning phase, that will support network science and engineering experiments.

GENI will support a future, experimental network infrastructure that will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer and information science and engineering, as well as from economics and the social sciences, to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research environment. The GENI Project Office (GPO) issued a call for proposals to perform design and risk-reduction prototyping in December, 2007. Twenty-nine of the 74 submitted proposals were selected for the initial cycle of GENI's spiral development process.

GENI prototyping projects will construct and integrate key design elements of the GENI infrastructure suite. GPO system engineers will perform top-down integration planning and project guidance; and the community will also self-organize in a bottom-up fashion as equipment and substrate teams begin to integrate with evolving prototypes. Project progress and demonstrations will be evaluated at tri-annual GENI Engineering Conferences and detailed project information will be available on the GENI web site, www.geni.net.

"We have received many novel and exciting proposals and are eager to see GENI prototyping get underway. The GPO will be working intensely to establish contracts with the project teams as quickly as possible," said Chip Elliott, GENI Project Director.

The GPO plans to issue an additional solicitation of $3.5M a year in late 2008 or early 2009 for other prototyping projects to address more new and exciting technology areas.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced, repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs approximately 700 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park, Minnesota; and O'Fallon, Illinois. For more information, visit www.bbn.com.