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04.10

National Initiative Envisioned to Drive Student Innovations in Broadband

By IEEE-USA Staff

Leveraging the recent release of a proposed national broadband plan by the Federal Communications Commission, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has invited public comment on a possible national initiative to inspire student-driven innovation in new broadband applications.

U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and OSTP Deputy Director Tom Khalil outlined the concept in a recent OSTP blog posting, noting that “students have contributed some of the most important advances in information and communications technologies—including data compression, interactive computer graphics, Ethernet, Berkeley Unix, the spreadsheet, public key cryptography, speech recognition, Mosaic, and Google.“

OSTP envisions an initiative that would serve as a sort of “Petri dish,” bringing together universities, companies and students to incubate and grow new ideas. According to Chopra and Khalil, “this initiative could be led by the private sector, encourage multi-campus and even global collaboration, build on investments already made in high-speed research networks such as Internet2 and National LambdaRail, and take advantage of a growing number of grants from the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).”

Key elements could include:

• Campus-based incubators that focus on developing broadband applications, with access to high-speed networks, cutting-edge peripherals, software development kits, and cloud computing services

• Relevant courses and/or multidisciplinary programs that allow teams of students from different fields to design and develop broadband applications

• Competitions that recognize compelling student-developed broadband applications, not unlike Google’s Android Developer Challenge, Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, and the FCC-Knight Foundation’s Apps for Inclusion competition OSTP is soliciting feedback and suggestions on the concept at broadband@ostp.gov.

There are a number of other outlets designed to encourage and reward student-driven innovation in other fields.

• Sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Abbott Fund, the annual Collegiate Inventors Competition recognizes and rewards innovations, discoveries and research by college and university students and their faculty advisors. Entries must be the original idea and work product of the student/advisor team, and must not have been made available to the public as a commercial product or process or patented or published more than 1 year prior to the date of submission to the Competition. Up to 12 finalists win an all-expenses paid trip to present their work to a panel of expert judges. Undergraduate and Graduate category winners receive a $15,000 prize and one overall Grand Prize of $25,000 is awarded.
  
  2009 undergraduate winners included a Dartmouth team whose household electrocoagulation arsenic filter was developed for a capstone engineering design course in response to a challenge to reduce arsenic found in groundwater to safe levels, with a cheap, reliable device made of materials locally available in rural Nepal.
  
  (For more information, see: http://www.invent.org/Collegiate/)
   

• The James Dyson Award is an international design award that celebrates, encourages and inspires the next generation of design engineers by challenging them to design something that solves a problem. The competition is open to product design, industrial design and university-level engineering students (or graduates within 4 years of graduation) who have studied in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK or the USA. National winners compete in an international round, with an international winner receiving a $15,000 prize, plus $15,000 for the student’s university department.
  
  (For more information, see: http://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Default.aspx)
   

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has also provided a venue for student innovation with its series of Grand Challenge competitions for design of autonomous vehicles and most recently its Network Challenge, in which a team of MIT students took less than 9 hours to locate ten red balloons placed at undisclosed locations around the United States. The challenge was geared toward innovation in the use of social networking tools.
  
  (For more information, see: https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/Default.aspx)

The history of successful student-driven innovation, especially in the information technology field, is a bright one. Larry Page and Sergei Brin developed Google’s page rank algorithm while at Stanford. Linux was developed by Linus Torvald while studying at the University of Helsinki. The graphical Web browser Mosiac was developed by Mark Andreesen while at the University of Illinois, and was subsequently licensed and adapted by Microsoft as the basis for Internet Explorer. Students such as Len Kleinrock at MIT laid the mathematical foundations for packet-sharing that underpinned ARPANet and eventually the Internet. Often cited as the first “killer app” for the personal computer, the VisiCalc spreadsheet was developed by MIT students Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, and sold through the company they formed, Software Arts.

One can only hope that future generations of student innovators will continue to rise to the challenge, taking advantage of broadband and other technology opportunities that emerge to drive new applications and lay the foundation for growth of new companies, jobs and perhaps even the establishment of entirely new industries.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.