Last modified: Thursday, July 27, 2006
IU provost honored as founder of Asia Pacific Advanced Network
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 27, 2006
Michael A. McRobbie, IUB interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Michael A. McRobbie, Indiana University Bloomington interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, recently was honored at a ceremony in Singapore for his role as a founder of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network.
The "Founders Award" plaque was presented during a July 20 ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the high-performance broadband network, which supports the research and education community all across the Asia-Pacific region.
Also recognized was Kilnam Chon of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul, Korea.
"APAN has turned into the major organization promoting the development of new Internet technologies to support research collaborations in all fields between the Asia Pacific and the United States and other countries," McRobbie said. "I am delighted to have played a small role in its foundation 10 years ago."
James G. Williams, IU director of international networking, was present to accept the award plaque for McRobbie. The ceremony took place during the 22nd APAN Meeting, July 17-21, at the National University of Singapore.
In 1996, during a speech to the Asia Pacific Information Infrastructure Test Bed Forum in Seoul, McRobbie and Chon first proposed the creation of an advanced high performance research and education network called APAN to support the development of science and technology in the Asia-Pacific region. This was the culmination of a series of meetings in the region among scientists and researchers that McRobbie and Chon initiated and led.
APAN was formally established in 1997 and today is the leading research and education networking organization in Asia, with 35 full and associate member organizations from Japan, China, Korea, Australia and many other countries in the region.
APAN was created to promote advanced research in networking technologies and to develop high-performance broadband applications in the Asia-Pacific region. The non-profit international APAN consortium also provides an advanced networking environment for the research and education communities there.
After moving to IU in 1997, McRobbie conceived and led the TransPAC project to connect the scientific and research communities in the United States to their counterparts in the countries participating in APAN. This project was funded in 1998 with a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation for which McRobbie was the principal investigator. This grant leveraged several times as much additional funding in the Asia Pacific region in support of APAN and TransPAC.
One of the early participants in TransPAC was the Chinese Education and Research Network (CERNET) operated and managed by Tsinghua University, which established a relationship that led to the agreement between IU and Tsinhua University signed by McRobbie recently in Beijing.
About APAN
APAN (www.apan.net) is a high-performance network for research and development on advanced next-generation applications and services. It provides an advanced networking environment for the research and education community in the Asia-Pacific region and promotes global collaboration.
Its objectives include coordinating and promoting network technology developments and advances in network-based applications and services; coordinating the development of an advanced networking environment for research and education communities in the Asia-Pacific region; and encouraging and promoting global cooperation.
About TransPAC
TransPAC (www.transpac.org) was a high-bandwidth, international Internet connection from advanced networks in the United States to APAN. TransPAC2 is the five-year continuation of the project. As part of the National Science Foundation International Research Network Connections program, TransPAC2 continues the NSF's efforts to provide fundamental network infrastructure to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
For more information, contact Larry MacIntyre, 812-856-1172 and lmacinty@indiana.edu.
