Dan Atkins, a refugee from electrical engineering and the College of Engineering, who is now the dean of what used to be called the School of Library Science, which has now been renamed the School of Information. Dan is helping reshape the world of libraries. He is a superficially mild-mannered fellow but truly a revolutionary.
José-Marie Griffiths is the chief information officer - indeed, the first chief information officer in the history of the University - and is responsible for tying together not only the University's planning but the University's execution of its information needs. The two of them will manage the next stage of our program.

Daniel Atkins: Good afternoon. Thank you.

As Regent Power said, José-Marie Griffiths and I have organized this session to offer some specific snapshots of emerging Internet-enabled environments which augment, and indeed potentially transform, how individual groups and society at large might conduct knowledge-based activities.

I will begin, introduce some of my colleagues, and José-Marie will conclude with some comments on the implications for higher education.

As we gather here to contemplate a revolution fueled by the marriage of computing and communication and digitally encoded information, the foundation of this change is the continuing, exponential growth of the performance and the ubiquity of components for computing and storage and communication. In addition, we've made major advances, particularly in the last decade, in building the complex software systems that enable people to use not only the computer in front of them but also, often transparently, thousands of other servers and services distributed over a global network.

The world is now seeing the opportunity to use the blue layers on this slide as the foundation to support the blend of three fundamental human activities: communication and collaboration; access to and dissemination of information, data, knowledge; and measurement and fabrication in the physical world.

But we're also at the point where our understanding of the potentials of this technology, and how to achieve it, is limited by the need for a more principled understanding of the interaction between people and technology. We need a much more holistic principle of system design, which accounts not only for the technical possibilities and constraints, but also for the possibilities and constraints imposed by social, behavioral, economic, legal, ethical and other perspectives. We need real innovation not only in what we are trying to build but also innovation in how we are going about building it. This in fact is one of the goals of this newly created School of Information.

What do we call these environments, the new organizations that are emerging from the application of these technologies? We need terms that not only describe the automation of what we have always done, albeit perhaps faster, better and cheaper, but also terms for environments which help us to do entirely new things in new ways.

We really are at the horseless carriage stage in discussing this future. Some phrases that have been used are "collaborative knowledge work environments," "knowledge networks for linking distributed intelligence" or, perhaps my favorite, simply "community in the digital age."

One specific vision of the future that's been pioneered at the University of Michigan is the concept of a national, or now an international, "collaboratory." The concept was first developed in a National Science Foundation workshop, chaired by Nobel laureate Josh Lederburg and a computer scientist, Bill Wulf. And it was later elaborated and exemplified by a National Research Council committee chaired by Vint Cerf. As a result of this report, the National Science Foundation launched a program in collaboratory research, the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory - UARC - and an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Michigan won a six-year funding grant for what has become a flagship project in this area.

You'll be hearing from two members of this team in a moment, Tom Finholt and Farnam Jahanian. We also have Tim Killeen with us, the space scientist in the program, and Atul Prakash, another of the computer scientists in this project.

This project is also exploring more socio-technical human-centered approaches to designing such environments, and has also just been awarded a prize by the Smithsonian Institution as one of the four most significant uses of the Internet in support of science.

We are just beginning to see and document the collaboratory not only as a nice-to-have addition to the infrastructure of science research, but now possibly as an absolute necessity in enabling new lines of research in some fields. Since the collaboratory concept is a product of NSF, it has emphasized research and learning in science and engineering. But I expect you will see the generalization to other activities in health care, product design, distance-independent education, and quality of life in local communities.

The components of the collaboratory include communication and groupware tools, remote laboratories and fabrication facilities, digital libraries and electronic publishing. Because the collaboratory is technology-mediated, we have the possibility of working together not only at the same time and the same place but now also in processes flowing through all four variations of same and different time and place.

We'll begin our demonstrations with the major component of a collaboratory, digital libraries. The digital representation of information allows us to move it at rates near the speed of light, to store it at atomic scales of density, and to process it both by humans and with machines.

We can provide anytime/anyplace interaction with both facsimiles of traditional print-on-paper objects as well as with emerging new genres of multimedia, which exist only in digital environments. The digital library blurs many traditional boundaries, including those between the producers, the mediator and the user of information.