To: Campus and WNY Regional IT Support and Planning Staff Subject: Invitation to a Breakthrough Internet Technologies Experiment Capsule: An open observable experiment with strategic high-performance near-term Internet technologies suitable for high-grade instructional content delivery, global scholarly collaboration, and multi-site administrative collaboration. July 27th in UB's Clemens Hall, Room 120, from 6:15 PM to 7:15 PM EDT. On-line discussions, if possible, at 10:00, 12:00, 2:00 and 4:00. Please pass this announcement along to any potentially interested faculty or staff in your organizational unit. From: James O. Whitlock Associate Director of Computing Services University at Buffalo whitlock@buffalo.edu See Also: On July 27th a breakthrough experimental demonstration of advanced Internet technology will be attempted by the UB Advanced Educational Technology Skunkworks, the UB School of Nursing, the Erie County Medical Center, Ohio State University, Jackson Laboratories, and a number of other supporting institutions and businesses. The experiment will revolve around a conference presentation by the UB School of Nursing at Syllabus Web99 in California concluded by Nursing faculty on the UB Amherst campus demonstrating remote preceptoring of clinical students at the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, NY. This three-way demonstration will be supported by state-of-the-art H.323 384 Kbps professional/medical-grade multipoint Internet video conferencing on a multipoint control unit at Ohio State University. The existing North American public Internet infrastructure will be used for this experiment; I2 will be incorporated soon and is expected to dramatically improve what is already excellent performance. In addition to supporting the high-performance multipoint Internet conference component, we will be transcoding the interactive session on the conference bridge with a donated Cisco IP/TV broadcast server and will be using both IP-tunneling and multicasting to efficiently and economically send 1 Mbps high-quality MPEG-1 audio/video streams to desktop viewers located on the UB campuses and throughout the Erie County Medical Center. In the near future, we expect to add support for a small number of dial-in H.320 observers and participants. All of this will be observable by any interested parties in Room 120, Clemens Hall, on the UB Amherst Campus with a projected IP/TV stream. Several other auditoriums in the region may also be available for more convenient viewing at locations yet to be determined. Details will follow as soon as they become available. The entire experiment will be coordinated by Senior Skunkworks staff, on vacation, with the same high performance video conferencing technology and extensive remote control capabilities from an island off the coast of Maine, thanks to the generous support of The Jackson Laboratory. This is an experiment; by definition, it may fail completely. You are all invited, however, to watch the proceedings and we believe that there will be a lot of strategically important technology available for your examination in its emergent form. There will be no formal presentations about the technologies and technical support staff are likely to have their hands full simply keeping it all working. Questions will be accommodated on a second-priority as- time-permits basis only. An effort will be made to allow on-line discussions with available principals every even hour on the hour throughout the day. We believe that this will be worth a look and invite you all to attend and observe at your convenience. If there is sufficient interest, follow-on presentations to interested groups will be provided in the Fall. As well, a similar event will be staged for Erie-1 BOCES on October 1 with, we presume, more problems sorted out. The precise schedule is still being refined but we want to give you a scheduling alert. We expect to be running final general confidence tests throughout the day on July 27th. These will be observable at least in Clemens 120 and/or alternate sites to be announced. We hope that the entire day will not be consumed with such tests and that you will be able to talk with local support staff, the event architect at The Jackson Laboratory, and other event participants via Internet video conference links but expect that you will be patient if problem resolution prevails. Principals will make a point of trying to be available on-line for questions at even hours on the hour. It should be interesting to watch and we invite you to stop by at any time. The Syllabus Web99 conference event will take place from 6:15 PM to 7:15 PM EDT and will require absolutely first priority attention of all active participants and support staff, but again, should be worth observing. We expect to record the complete conference event and make it available via IP/TV for subsequent on-demand desktop viewing as well as via video-tape and CDROM where such needs exist. Please join us for some part of this experiment. More announcements will follow as details are refined. While preliminary trials to date have been exceptionally positive, there are some critical factors that will not be known until the time of the event; please keep this in mind and bear with us. You are assured of seeing some exciting strategic technology in any case. In many ways this experiment, with its inherent public accessibility and multi-institutional collaboration, represents the first view of the Skunkworks' gestating vision of integrated high-quality multimedia content delivery and collaboration support systems. I believe that it also embraces much of the spirit of the early Internet and its shared and exciting development. If this experiment is successful, next summer we'll try a collaborative real-time astronomical observing session, with remote expert commentary and guidance, from a pristine Maine island site using an RF wireless LAN link (another near-term winner) on I2 facilities and infrastructure. Please contact Peter Jorgensen, for last minute details. Stay tuned. Jim