ITI's mission is to provide the infrastructure through which its collective members can seek out and attract large scale research dollars, and to advance technology committed to solving grand-challenge national, social, and commercial problems. The institute leverages its industry partners as well as talents and resources from the school in multiple disciplines to conduct collaborative research in a wide range of areas related to the internet, systems, and technologies enabling developments in computers and communications.
The Information Technologies Institute (ITI) is a Focused Research Activity (FRA) and is operationally within the Baskin School of Engineering (SOE). Via its research centers, ITI focuses research in an inter-related set of areas of interest to faculty in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering (as well as some from Physics, Chemistry, and Applied Mathematics).
Areas of emphasis include:
- Design and development of complex networked systems and software technologies
- Storage systems and databases
- Multimedia systems and applications in education and business managment
- Communications
- Opto-electronics (including nanotechnology devices)
- VLSI design, packaging, testing
- Sensors, sensor systems and Internet appliances
- Visualization and computer graphics
- Knowledge management / data mining
- Decision support tools
For ITI, advanced "Internet" applications provide the impetus and focus that bring together the components of research related to the rapidly expanding world of networks, distributed computing, "smart" sensors and internet appliances. As electronics and packaging developments lead to low cost and powerful sensors, resulting in a broad array of instruments, these become Internet devices, bringing a significant increase in the data captured, transmitted, stored, managed, and displayed. ITI also promotes research in applications of the emerging capabilities of the Internet to such exciting areas as distance education and telecollaboration, environmental monitoring, and resource management.
Directed by Computer Engineering Professor Patrick Mantey, ITI has faculty from throughout the School of Engineering , and also has participation from the Division of Physical and Biological Science, the Division of Social Sciences and the Arts.
ITI was proposed as part of the campus initiatives in 2000, and was organized as an official FRA early in 2001. Contrary to the original plan, the ITI has not pursued becoming an Organized Research Unit (ORU), as an ORU appears to bring no new funding nor other apparent advantages over an FRA.
