U of O DISCOVER Lab wins $3.4-million IBM award

The Univ of Ottawa's DISCOVER Lab is boosting its research in collaborative tele-presence for national security applications with the awarding of $3.4 million worth of equipment and software from IBM Corp, Armonk NY. The award — made under IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) Grant program — will also see the lab switch its supercomputer platform to IBM from its current SGI system, enhancing its capacity to attract new industry and government contracts.

The IBM award is the latest in a series of funding coups for the DISCOVER (Distributed & Collaborative Virtual Environments Research) Laboratory, which has received more than $40 million in funding and celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

"The ability to obtain research contracts is what we are striving for (and) the IBM computer platform is a very powerful machine," says Dr Nicolas Georganas, associate VP research (external), distinguished university professor and co-founder of the DISCOVER lab. "The award also moves us into the area of national security which will attract more industrial and government contracts."

The DISCOVER lab's current research areas include 3-D physical modelling and animation, distributed and collaborative virtual environments, intelligent sensor networks and ubiquitous computing, multimedia computing and communications and tele-haptics.

In applying for the IBM grant, U of O lined up endorsements of three US-based IBM labs including the Thomas J Watson Research Center and the Almaden Research Center near San Jose CA. The labs then provided letters of support resulting in the SUR award. Georganas says the lab will seek matching funds through the Canada Foundation for Innovation's next major competition and the Ontario Research Fund.

The SUR program was launched to promote research in areas of mutual benefit to IBM and recipient universities. It is designed to stimulate collaborative research projects, increase access to IBM technologies and provide opportunities to undergraduate, graduate and PhD students within IBM. Approximately 50 SUR awards are made annually.

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