Internet2, the nation’s most advanced networking consortium, presented the Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) award to Scott Deal and Matthew Burtner for their creation of Auksalaq. In presenting the award, they were commended for “innovation in advanced network applications for collaborative research and education” at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting in Raleigh, N.C. on Tuesday, Oct. 4. Writing in support for the award, Joel Chadabee, President of the Electronic Music Foundation wrote: “Auksalaq is the single best and most important realization of meaningful opera for today’s world.” Tom Knab, chair of the IDEA award judging committee and chief information officer, Case Western Reserve University’s College of Arts & Sciences wrote that “the winning submissions were from an exceptionally strong nominations pool and represent a cross-section of the wide-ranging innovation that is occurring within the Internet2 member community.”
In presenting the award to Deal and Burtner, the presenters said “Auksalaq represents a new generation of artistic works revolving around the exploitation of high bandwidth networks in the pursuit of live, interactive expression by combining computer interactivity with music, dance, drama, art and literature. The opera introduces an innovative toolkit of telematic software applications developed at the University of Virginia Interactive Media Research Group and the IUPUI Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Lab that facilitate a seamless, multi-site, integrated presentation entailing all of the artistic elements (music, media, movement, videography, audio processing and audience interactivity) to create an interactive, multi-dimensional experience. All of the winning applications have applied advanced networking technology to enable significant progress in research, teaching, learning or collaboration to increase the impact of next-generation networks around the world”.
Joel Chadabee also wrote that “Auksalaq is a pioneering work that pushes the boundaries of networked, media-enriched performance. It weaves together multiple narratives relating to global climate change into a powerful, evocative, and multi-faceted story, presenting different perspectives in the ways in which we view the world through a variety of media, including projections, documentary material, live music, verbal narrative, and electronic sound. In its relevance to today’s world, in its theatrical multiple-media presentation, in the ways in which it brings humanity together with technology, it is a remarkable work and an example of how opera may and should evolve today.”
One additional IDEA Award went to a team from the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for their application, On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS). ESnet development collaborators include Chin Guok, Evangelos Chaniotakis, Andy Lake, Eric Pouyoul and Mary Thompson. Also, for the first time, we added a category for applications developed by students and those were remarkable for their creativity and relevance. Two IDEA student winners are Baris Aksanli, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering from the University of California San Diego, for Monitoring and Visualization of Energy consumed by Networks (MAVEN), and Kyung- Hwa Kim, a Ph.D. student in computer science from Columbia University, for DYSWIS, a Collaborative Network Fault Diagnosis System project.
Internet2, owned by U.S. research universities, is the world’s most advanced networking consortium for global researchers and scientists who develop breakthrough Internet technologies and applications and spark tomorrow’s essential innovations. Internet2, consists of more than 350 U.S. universities; corporations; government agencies; laboratories; higher learning; and other major national, regional and state research and education networks; and organizations representing more than 50 countries. Internet2 is a registered trademark.
For more information on the IDEA Award, click here.
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