GENI Project Office Announces $12M for Community-Based GENI Prototype Development

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(Business Wire)--
The GENI Project Office, operated by BBN Technologies, an advanced
technologies solutions firm, announced today that it has been awarded
a three year grant worth approximately $4M a year from the US National
Science Foundation to perform GENI design and risk-reduction
prototyping. The funds will be used to contract with 29
university-industrial teams selected through an open, peer-reviewed
process. The first year funding will be used to construct GENI Spiral
1, a set of early, functional prototypes of key elements of the GENI
system.

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a suite
of infrastructure, now in the design and planning phase, that will
support network science and engineering experiments.

GENI will support a future, experimental network infrastructure
that will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer
and information science and engineering, as well as from economics and
the social sciences, to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research
environment. The GENI Project Office (GPO) issued a call for proposals
to perform design and risk-reduction prototyping in December, 2007.
Twenty-nine of the 74 submitted proposals were selected for the
initial cycle of GENI's spiral development process.

GENI prototyping projects will construct and integrate key design
elements of the GENI infrastructure suite. GPO system engineers will
perform top-down integration planning and project guidance; and the
community will also self-organize in a bottom-up fashion as equipment
and substrate teams begin to integrate with evolving prototypes.
Project progress and demonstrations will be evaluated at tri-annual
GENI Engineering Conferences and detailed project information will be
available on the GENI web site, www.geni.net.

"We have received many novel and exciting proposals and are eager
to see GENI prototyping get underway. The GPO will be working
intensely to establish contracts with the project teams as quickly as
possible," said Chip Elliott, GENI Project Director.

The GPO plans to issue an additional solicitation of $3.5M a year
in late 2008 or early 2009 for other prototyping projects to address
more new and exciting technology areas.

About BBN Technologies

BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages
its substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced,
repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system.
With expertise spanning information security, speech and language
processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control
systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial
collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs
approximately 700 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge,
Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland;
Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park,
Minnesota; and O'Fallon, Illinois. For more information, visit
www.bbn.com.

BBN Technologies
Mark Gauthier, 978-325-7048
mgauthier@bbn.com
or
Joyce Kuzmin, 617-873-8193
jkuzmin@bbn.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008