No fuzz, no breakup: here comes Internet2

The Internet?s next incarnation, Internet2, promises to make the computer more like a video-telephone.

With bandwidth speeds up to 100 times faster than now, Internet2 will enable video and voice transmission without the delay, fuzz and breakup that people experience on the present Internet. Professors at different institutions will view fluid, crystal-clear images of one another on-screen as they consort online during experiments. The images will no longer be grainy and jerky.

Graduate students will talk to one another through their computers? microphones with the same clarity as a telephone, instead of with the muffled grunts that characterize today?s Internet conversations.

Sounds a bit like wide-eyed futurism, but it?s already happening, says William Graves, PhD, a member of Internet2?s original steering committee and senior vice president of the Collegis Research Institute in Durham, N.C. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded grants to more than 50 universities grants to connect themselves with Internet2?s foundation?its very high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS).

Those institutions are among the 120 universities now signed on as Internet2 members. They plan to test Internet2 capabilities so that eventually the present Internet can adopt the ones that work best. The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) of Washington, D.C., is overseeing the project. UCAID spokesperson Greg Wood predicts that Internet2?s offerings will reach most universities within three to five years.

At present, any campus can join Internet2, but upgrading a campus network for Internet2 poses hefty costs. Internet2

member institutions have committed up to $50 million per year to fund the project. To help with the costs, the government and some private sector companies offer annual stipends to participating universities.

Jonathan Cohen, MD, PhD, who is trained as both a psychologist and a psychiatrist, is among those who?ve demonstrated the power of Internet2 for the classroom and for research. Cohen and his colleagues at the Laboratory for Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience, a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, beamed a live 3-D image of a Pittsburgh patient?s brain to lawmakers and researchers meeting in Washington, D.C., to discuss Internet2. As the patient underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging and perform-ed various memory and visual tasks, onlookers in Washington watched her prefrontal cortex, Broca?s Area and parietal lobe light up in red, blue and yellow.

?Seeing these brain areas at work could add a whole new dimension to classroom lessons about the brain, and certainly to collaborative research using neuroimaging techniques,? says Cohen.

Officials at NSF say Internet2 offers a host of such opportunities for psychology professors and researchers. If psychologists get involved from the beginning, they can help define Internet2?s offerings, says psychologist Steve Breckler, PhD, of NSF. To visit Cohen?s brain demonstration, go to http://www.psc.edu/science/Goddard/goddard.html. To find out more about Internet2, go to http://www.internet2.edu/.

?Bridget Murray

Psychologists interested in Internet2 and other Internet-related projects at their institutions can contact Steve Breckler, NSF's program director for social psychology, or psychologist Mike McCloskey, PhD, its program director for human cognition and perception.