1.1 The University of Texas at Austin as a Significant Research Partner
Located in the country's second most populous state, The University of Texas at Austin serves widely diverse groups throughout the state, nation and world. As the state's flagship institution and the nation's largest graduate school, researchers and faculty are actively working to train the next generation of leaders for active citizenship and full participation in a global economy. This task is accomplished through significant research, innovative educational programs and an on-going commitment to digital and information sciences.
In the beginning of the 1990s, The University launched an aggressive and ambitious strategic plan for maintaining its position as a leading research and academic institution into the twenty-first century. This plan includes developing enabling technologies and strategic applications of digital technology that move beyond changing individual practices to becoming an integral part of creating a highly distributed research and teaching institution. By leveraging the institution's already considerable investments of resources and joining with major corporate partners, The University is rapidly moving away from functioning as an island of innovation and toward a new integrated model of collaborative creation of knowledge and learning practice. With its support for this proposed research program, Intel provides critical resources and intellectual investments that accelerate this transformation, and simultaneously showcase the capabilities of Intel products in this new environment.
The proposed research will develop a campus-wide imperative for distributed computing at The University of Texas at Austin that will simultaneously accelerate The University's strategic plan for leadership in the digital and information sciences and leverage considerable investments of resources and progress in this area. It promises to have the same impact as major cooperative projects undertaken by IBM in the 1970s and Apple in the 1980s. In each of those cases, the University and its partners collaborated on research and highly visible demonstration projects that resulted in a strengthened presence of those platforms across the campus.
Digital sciences, which include broad areas of the computational sciences, computational applied mathematics, digital libraries, telecommunications and multimedia, and related areas, have been identified by The University as the principal thrust area to be expanded over the next decade.
To date, significant progress has been made toward reaching the goals of The University's strategic plan. These include: