SUBJECT:

Governor Davis Announces Cal-(IT)2 Selection

Dear Friends:

It is our tremendous pleasure to report that Governor Gray Davis has selected our proposed California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] as one of the three newly established California Institutes for Science and Innovation.

Governor Davis has initiated this wonderful new program to reinvest in California's long term economic prosperity. These Institutes will produce significant scientific advances in fields critical to the future of California's economy. They also will play an important role in training the next generation of scientists and engineers to stimulate creation of new businesses and jobs for California. The State investment in the three institutes, combined with industry, campus and federal resources, totals well over $900 million.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Jacobs School of Engineering Dean Robert Conn for chairing the steering committee that initiated this extraordinary proposal. I would also like to thank Institute Director Larry Smarr, Institute Chief Scientist Ronald Graham, and Institute Associate Director for UCSD Ramesh Rao for their leadership of our new Institute.

Cal-(IT)2 teams UCSD and UCI faculty, students, and research professionals with California high technology companies to lead the development of tomorrow's worldwide information infrastructure. More than 220 faculty and 43 companies are involved. This $300 million research initiative will create a powerful research base on two partner campuses along southern California's Tech Coast, and will help ensure California's global competitiveness and prosperity. The institute will have tremendous benefits for our region in terms of new business, new jobs, and novel research applications that will improve our quality of life.

Cal-(IT)2 represents a groundbreaking collaboration across two UC campuses and across the many divisions and research centers on each of our respective campuses. It ushers in a new era of cross-disciplinary discovery.

Cal-(IT)2 faculty, industry partners and students will research the scientific and technological components required to bring a new information infrastructure into being. Over the next decade, major changes in Internet telecommunications will revolutionize the way we live and work. Digital wireless links will extend the Internet throughout the physical world, tens of millions of households and businesses will move from slow modems to speedy broadband Internet connections, and an all-optical core architecture will vastly increase the Internet's capacity to handle new users and applications.

Institute applications researchers will investigate how the new Internet can create knowledge, improve the quality of life, and advance markets important to California's economy including: environment and civil infrastructure; intelligent transportation; telemedicine, bioinformatics, and digitally enabled genomic medicine; and new media arts. Cal-(IT)2 will help shape government policies to enable all sectors of society to benefit from the information revolution while ensuring privacy and security, and will advance new management practices appropriate for the networked economy. Through its education program, students will work side by side with industry and academic researchers, and will emerge highly qualified to lead California's technology companies into the future.

This is an historic event for our campus, our region and the State of California.

                                                Sincerely,

                                                Robert C. Dynes
                                                Chancellor