wicat.sys.virginia.edu

WICAT (Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology) is a multi-university center sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It includes Polytechnic University, Virginia Tech, Auburn University and the University of Virginia (UVA). Barry Horowitz, Professor of Systems and Information Engineering and former CEO of the Mitre Corporation, leads the UVA research site that focuses on "Rapidly Reconfigurable Systems". The Center's activities are organized around a multi-scale view of systems, ranging from component technology to systems control. Horowitz, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, started the UVA site two years ago. A dozen faculty members from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Systems and Information Engineering Department combine to carry out the research efforts with graduate students and selected undergraduate students.

To date, the UVA Center has focused on two application areas - military/homeland security systems and health care systems. The Center has worked on five areas of technology research within these application domains: 1) wireless sensor networks, 2) mobile communications networks, 3) image processing and video streaming for mobile users, 4) enterprise information system architectures and designs for serving mobile users, and 5) health-care body networks (e.g., sensors and drug delivery systems carried on-body). The Center's health-care efforts are tied in with the UVa medical school.

While the Center is NSF sponsored, it is designated by NSF as an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/U CRC) where industrial firms and government agencies are the major sources of research support. Current UVA research sponsors include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Accenture, Mitre, Areva, Department of Defense, and the US Army Night Vision Laboratory. UVA also gets leading edge equipment support from vendor companies (Cisco, Palm, Sun, Intel, and others). The Center also has research relationships with small technology companies that provide their products and in turn participate in collaborative research activities.

The relationships with sponsors are intended to be long term. The Center focuses its research projects to address the sponsors' interests by working with sponsors to come up with mutually desirable project definitions. An important benefit derived by WICAT sponsors is the opportunity to attend two meetings per year with the multi-university team and all sponsors, enabling all Center stakeholders to see the full set of activities that are in progress. In order to help the Center attract industry sponsorship, the NSF provides funding to help the Center cover its support costs and requires the Universities to waive their overhead charges on membership-based research activities.