"A major aim here is participation with industry and government, and not just as funders. We need industry to sharpen our thinking, to help us sort out what the deeper issues really are and to make sure we are relevant."
Jon Crowcroft, Marconi professor of Networked Systems at Cambridge, said another major target is to better understand how economic, regulatory and technical organizations interact. "We can't consider each of these things in isolation any more. Some things are not solved by the market or by government, or by Microsoft, Intel and Cisco," he said.
Crowcroft said a key theme would be developing a road map for wireless and spectrum usage and an examination of viral communications.
Andrew Lippman, a senior researcher at MIT's Media Lab and a long-time proponent of "viral systems," added: "The magic is not in the tech alone. It is in how it meshes with society. The measure of any invention is not how good it is but how quickly people pull that off you and run with it. SMS wasn't developed for schoolgirls in Japan to chat with each other, it was invented for telcos to send you advertising."
The CII is just one of the research initiatives being established by the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which was formed to bring academia and industry together to improve the competitiveness of various industrial sectors.
