Senior executives who wonder where the next generation of corporate leaders will come from can look to the Technology and Management Program at the University of Illinois.

Believed to be the nation's first interdisciplinary program for undergraduate engineering and business students, this program brings outstanding juniors, seniors, and faculty together for cross-disciplinary courses, team projects, and interactions with business leaders.  Engineering students learn about market forces and the financial implication of technology investment, while business students gain an understanding of technology drivers and the product development implications of market strategies. 

With first-hand experience at solving real technology problems in their full business context, these students are employed by some of the nation's top corporations.

Currently students can earn a bachelor's degree in their home department and a minor in Technology and Management, but a $1-million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will allow the program to expand.  Made in the name of Allan M. Hallene, a long-time member of the Foundation's board of directors and a U of I graduate (BSME 1951), the grant will be used to develop a master's level curriculum and to establish the Alan M. Hallene Endowment for Leadership in Technology and Management. 

The endowment will support traditional and non-traditional teachers, including senior executives with insights on management issues and industry trends.

Program directors Russ Jamison, College of Engineering, and George Monahan, College of Commerce and Business, envision the Technology and Management Program as "an innovative model for creating a meeting place where business leaders, faculty, and students can focus on difficult questions related to leadership in an interdisciplinary environment."  The grant offers an opportunity not only to strengthen the undergraduate program, but also to develop new initiatives for education, research, and outreach.

A key goal is to develop a master's degree program.  In the proposed five-year program, a student could earn a bachelor's degree from a department and a master's degree in Technology and Management.   The interdisciplinary master's degree work would include an emphasis on corporate leadership and a one-year project with a corporate sponsor.

Other new plans include a research component that will create a "living laboratory" for interdisciplinary teams.  In addition, the program will provide more opportunities for company representatives to interact with students and faculty, focus on issues important to their companies, and take advantage of continuing education.

These and other innovations to the Technology and Management Program are designed to make it a comprehensive resource for preparing students to be successful in today's technical, interdisciplinary, team-based industry environment.—Tina M. Prow

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Innovative Information Technology Research

The opportunity to develop innovative uses of information technology in science and engineering attracted College of Engineering researchers to a recent National Science Foundation grant program.

In a press release announcing the awards, NSF Director Rita Colwell described the projects as "long-term, high-risk research" selected to "support development of software and IT services that will help scientists and engineers make the kind of discoveries that will eventually be applied by industry."

The NSF awarded $156 million in grants to fund 309 projects at universities and institutions nationwide.  Following are U of I grant recipients by principal investigator.

N. R. Aluru, General Engineering, Microelectronics Laboratory, Beckman Institute, Computational Design of Mixed-Technology Systems, $1,712,000.

M. Pauline Baker, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Collaborative Research: Modular Ocean Data Assimilation, $500,000.

Shun L. Chuang, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Microelectronics Laboratory, High-Speed Wavelength-Agile Optical Networks, $2,564,000.

Jonathan B. Freund, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Collaborative Research on the Development of an Integrated Algorithm for Heat Conduction from Nano- to Macro-scale, $192,504.

Jamshid Ghaboussi, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Simulation of Machine-Medium Interaction in a Real-Time Virtual Environment, $399,999.

Robert B. Haber, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Multiscale Models for Microstructure Simulation and Process Design, $4,000,000.

John C. Hart, Computer Science, (Revolutionary Computing) Multipass Programming for Personal High-Performance Computing, $489,671.

P. Bryan Heidorn, Library and Information Science, An Internet Environment for Biodiversity Survey Collaboration and Verification, $475,866.

Paul G. Kwiat, Physics, Foundations of Solid-State Quantum Information Processing, $4,590,491.

David A. Padua, Computer Science,  A New Framework for Program Optimization, $1,800,000.

Josep Torrellas, Computer Science, Collaborative Research: Novel Scalable Simulation Techniques for Chemistry, Materials Science, and Biology, $1,241,000.

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Next-generation Processors for a "Cool Campus"

The University of Illinois was one of 40 universities worldwide to receive a new, high-speed, high-performance computing system.

The HP/Intel Itanium-Based Systems Grant Program is a $2.5 million joint effort by Hewlett-Packard Company and Intel Corporation.  The grant includes Hewlett-Packard servers and workstations with the new Intel® Itanium processor.  The Itanium architecture, which was co-developed by HP and Intel, is considered a next-generation processor.  The Itanium-based systems offer significant advances in speed and performance.

Principal investigators for the U of I project are Wen Mei Hwu, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Roy Campbell, Computer Science Department, who already are conducting research on security in wireless environments.  Their new project, "Illinois Sandbox: HP e-Speak for a Connected Mobile e-Campus Community," will address engineering and human principles underpinning development of a prototype "Cool Campus"—a next-generation e-community.

In a Cool Campus environment, mobile connectivity infrastructure and applications would "transcend diversity and domain boundaries to provide secure connectivity, data access, and communication," according to the researchers.  They will use the grant to wire multiple buildings with the same technology for wireless communication and focus on issues of real-life deployment of mobility and connectivity.   

"The grant provides a way to work across multiple disciplines to create a testbed—to get a significant number of people using wireless systems from building to building and to see how it scales up," Campbell said.  "Wireless holds great promise here for creating a future unified environment where a student could walk into any building with a laptop and find secure connectivity."

Although wireless technology is becoming more common in airports, concerns about security have hampered broader adoption, Campbell noted.  "We'll build on the work we've done in that area, and if this project works, it could encourage people to deploy wireless through the whole community."

The scope of this research is broad enough to encompass studies of service brokering, facility scheduling, mobile instant messaging, information retrieval, course delivery, and business transactions.  Plans are to extend wireless infrastructure to campus buildings on nine square miles, taking in three colleges as well as the Undergraduate Library, Illini Union, and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. —Tina M.Prow

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