By Julieta González

Take five colleges, add approximately $21 million dollars over five years and you get the Internet Technology, Commerce and Design Institute (ITCDI), the University of Arizona and the state’s economic formula for research, development and outreach that will help promote the growth of Internet-related technologies.

The initial ITCDI participants include a multi-disciplinary composite of faculty members from the Colleges of Science, Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business and Public Administration and Fine Arts. These academic leaders hop to expand their efforts to include strategic partnerships that will allow ITCDI to meet its research, development and outreach goals. The University’s Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT) has also committed to the integration of state-of-the-art infrastructure to prepare for the teaching and research needs of the immediate future in Internet technology.

Eventually, Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF) monies, awarded to public education in Arizona by the voters in a 2000 initiative known as Proposition 301, will be phased out as ITCDI moves toward self-sufficiency by obtaining grants programs, sponsored research, affiliate organization sponsorships and expanded funding for workforce training. Proposition 301 established a .6 percent state sales tax devoted to public education. While most of the money goes to K- 12 education, the remainder is allotted to the three state universities. The UA received about $16 million per year in the first two years with additional amounts, depending on revenue, through 2006.

Tom Peterson, Dean of the College of Engineering and Mines and chair of the ITCDI management team, says that the multi-disciplinary nature of the team is not just about partnerships between an electrical engineer and a systems engineer. “It’s also a partnership between an electrical engineer and someone in music or between someone in computer science and someone in linguistics,” says Peterson.

This opportunity for collaboration among such diverse faculty members and their students to work on creative Internet technology proposals has, as Peterson says, “begun to bear fruits of success.” The seed grants, most no larger than $15,000, have already produced research and development opportunities that have helped bring in additional funding partnerships for everything from more class offerings in various departments to actual software development.

Michael Hammond, head of the linguistics department in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, says that this new source of funds has allowed that department to share a new faculty position with the computer sciences department. The new faculty member, who joined the UA in fall 2003, will develop a specific applied Master’s of Science degree in Human Language
Technology.

“The basic goal of this program is to train people in the computational and linguistic skills to work with language on the Internet,” says Hammond. Using a Web search as an example, he explains that “information and Internet technology is all about the collection of information, the transmission of information, the analysis and use of information with computational tools. There’s a language side to this. When you conduct a Web search, a large part of information and Internet technology involves extracting information from text. When you have an electronic text, figuring out the language of an electronic document and extracting the information is a key part of the technology.”

 According to Hammond, since linguists understand language, part of the goal of the new master’s program is to train people and send them out to work in companies where they are going to develop the next generation of search engines, text summarization or topic identification. The bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in linguistics have been in place since the mid 1970s. Part of that curriculum has been a course in computational linguistics. The master’s program, Hammond believes, also will help bring computational business to Tucson. This will help build local internships for highly skilled UA students.

“In these bleak financial times,” says Hammond, “the enthusiasm and excitement generated by the support of these funds has given the faculty team involved with the program a greater push toward creativity and productivity.”

Working on the infrastructure of the Internet to make it faster and more efficient for expanded use is among the tasks taken up by the department of computer science. Department head Peter Downey says that “our students know that their career path will be Internet-influenced. The Internet has had a huge effect on our own undergraduate and graduate students in that virtually everything that one now does in computer science is in some way impacted by and has an impact on the Internet.”       

Downey says that TRIF funds have allowed his department to increase the capacity of existing courses and to add new ones to the curriculum, primarily in the information technology area. “The increase in class availability in programming languages, such as Java, has doubled the department’s ability to provide courses within the past two years. Java is the language used in beginning courses here for anyone who wants to become a computer scientist.”

One of the goals of ITCDI is workforce development and the expanded course offerings could not have come at a more critical time in the computer sciences department. Downey states that within the past two years, the number of bachelor of science graduates in computer sciences has increased 27 percent and the number of master of science degrees in the field has increased 61 percent. The funds also allowed for additional faculty and hardware resources in the areas of Web computing, e-commerce, mobile computing technologies, mobile networks and wireless technologies. “Our students will know how to implement these things,” says Downey.

Among the various seed-grant research projects presently underway is one to develop codes to optimize the power of a very small battery so programs on hand-held devices will run more efficiently. Downey explains that “graphics programs, as an obvious example, burn more power to run faster and the trick is to optimize to find a nice balance so that you conserve the energy resources of a wireless hand-held device and that it doesn’t take forever to work. People get impatient and it’s irritating that the battery for these devices is always running low.” Anyone who has ever taken one of these devices on a business trip and forgotten to take the charger will be watching this research closely.

Matching or partial matching of funds from corporations such as Microsoft and organizations such as the National Science Foundation have increased, thanks to TRIF funds. Downey says that his department has been successful in its ability to leverage TRIF monies used for a few graduate students for a semester in order to obtain funds for a research project. “That’s one of the techniques that Proposition 301 has been using to encourage external funding,” says Downey. “We are inventing new things and conducting research in new directions that would not occur without the existence of these funds. The funding must continue in some fashion, or we can’t continue to do new and innovative things.”

In the College of Fine Arts, the gains made have been equally significant. The College has increased opportunities for student work experience in arts technology research in facilities like the Treistman Center for New Media. According to James Holcomb, assistant dean for the College of Fine Arts, Proposition 301 funding has allowed the College to grow in both the capacity and quality of computing labs. It has also allowed more students to participate in meaningful education and progress toward professional careers in the technological arts industries such as interactive design, Internet and multimedia, computer games development, film, television and the recording industry.

Additionally, there is a planned graduate degree, a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts. This degree is based upon collaborative projects in the technological arts patterned on how the media and technology industries work in teams. The interdisciplinary degree will bring together students from a variety of backgrounds and whose problem-solving skills and creative potential include performance, visual and media arts. These students will be encouraged to pursue even more interdisciplinary educational opportunities with the Colleges of Science, Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Eller College of Business and Public Administration.

A series of University-wide electronic commerce workshops covered topics from online retail competition and digital property rights to online market research and personalization. Sponsored by the Eller College of Business and Public Administration and funded by TRIF, the workshops’ goals include bringing together University faculty members and graduate students to learn about each other’s research. Presenters have included outside corporate speakers on related topics. In turn, the interaction will help inspire new research ideas and collaborations between members of the University community. The series was organized by David Lucking-Reiley, associate professor in the economics department.

TRIF funds also have allowed interdisciplinary collaborations to extend beyond the UA campus. One example from the College of Engineering and Mines is an effort between the UA and Arizona State University. The focus of that particular activity is called “The Connection One Center,” and its focus is on mixed signal processing. This technology, says ITCDI management team chair Peterson, is important from the telecommunications standpoint and even more critical for wireless communications and wireless Internet.

“While Proposition 301 support has been minimal for that Center, much more support came in from the National Science Foundation and from private industry,” says Peterson. “Every one involved is excited because they see others coming to the table with money. With ITCDI providing continuing support at a fairly modest level for the next two or three years for that Center, we can begin to see success.”

“The mandate for the universities is economic development,” says Peterson. “We are seeing improvements that we can attribute directly to Proposition 301 support, but these improvements are super-imposed on a base that’s getting worn away. That’s why partnerships and the leveraging of dollars is critical. We are trying to build something that will still be here when the Proposition 301 funds go away.”