Do you want to bring guest lecturers to your class, or offer seminars to other universities? Let's suppose you have identified someone at another school who is interested in being a guest lecturer in your class; perhaps a colleague you have worked with or an expert on a particular topic.  A schedule conflict may not permit them to travel to Villanova, but Internet2 offers them a way to visit your class as a virtual guest lecturer.

If your guest speaker can arrange to be in an I-2 studio at another institution, you can bring your class to our teleconferencing classroom (which can accommodate 20 students) and they can watch, listen, and interact with the speaker.

Conversely, if other colleagues would like you to address their classes or speak to groups in their university, we can arrange for you to communicate with them via internet 2 as well.

Art and Internet2: 

A play is performed simultaneously on two stages 160 miles apart.

Internet2 also can provide the ability to combine art and advanced technology, as was recently the case when Rensselaer and NYU joined forces, using Internet2 to distribute a musical in real time.  The performance was the first musical of its kind, as it united music, video, and interactivity over Internet2, providing a simultaneous artistic show that could be viewed in real time without actually being present at the performance.  The high bandwidth quality and ability that Internet2 offers, including the synchronization of high-quality video and audio, provides more capabilities then what the public internet can offer.

Fostering Collaboration:

The possibilities of Internet2 are not limited to just streaming audio and video.  In fact, a major advantage of I2's super-bandwidth network is its ability to share any type of data in real time.

In fact, there are various ways you can leverage the technology behind Internet2 to collaborate on projects with colleagues, or field experts in other locations.

Physicists can collaborate and participate in experiments at a moments notice; Biologists can examine 3-dimensional replicas of objects over the high-bandwidth network of I2 while collaborating with scientists at other Universities; And doctors on the other side of the world can assist in a medical emergency, all through Internet2's collaboration abilities.

For example, the recent case of a patient at Ohio State's Surgery Center.   The patient was operated on while another surgeon consulted on the procedure from across town where he viewed a live broadcast from inside the patient's body, thanks to I2 and a tiny digital camera in the patient. 

Internet2 offers Astronomers everywhere the ability to remotely control telescopes on the other side of the world, from the comfort of their offices.

Researchers are now using remote control facilities to peer through the world's largest telescopes, without traveling thousands of miles.  The high-speed connection that Internet2 offers make it unnecessary for researchers to make the trip to the telescopes, and also provides real time alerts of when to log on for optimal stargazing.  For example, at the University of Florida, Astronomer Charlie Telesco uses an Internet2 link to view the eight-meter telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii via a video conferencing application on his office computer. 

In addition, Astronomers are now using Internet2 to create an international partnership of observatories with the goal of joining telescopes on different continents, creating the world's first global cyber observatory.

Applications and data sets:

Internet2 provides gigabit networking technology. This technology allows partners to link by high-speed networks to vast databases at remote sites;  the technology will allow transferal of data from one location to another at revolutionary speeds.

Educational research and scientific demands for speed, throughput, reliability and security grow constantly. The ability to exchange information and knowledge with less delay and risk have been the drivers in accelerating the development of the Abilene network.  The Abilene network provides a separate network to enable the testing of advanced capabilities and services. These services are expected to include multicasting¹, Quality of Service (QoS)² standards, and advanced security and authentication protocols.

¹ Multicasting:  the simultaneous delivery of data packets to multiple end points.  Multicast, or point-to-multipoint transmission, enables collaborative applications and efficient distribution of large data sets to multiple sites.
² Quality of Service (QoS):  mechanisms for allocating resources to specific applications or classes of  applications thus enabling high performance while running over shared networks; the ability to commit resources to specific applications to ensure bandwidth,  jitter and packet loss stay within an acceptable range. 

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