SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY COMMISSIONGovernor Gray Davis Dear Governor: We congratulate you on your vision of creating the California Institutes for Science and Innovation. These Institutes will stimulate the economy and the people of California will reap the rewards for decades to come. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] proposal, led by UC San Diego in partnership with UC Irvine, brings together Southern California's unparalleled strengths in telecommunications, information technology and software engineering, and applies them to key areas such as biotechnology, environmental monitoring, transportation, and the new media arts. It is one of the most exciting proposals we have ever seen, we feel it will serve the entire state well, and we offer our wholehearted endorsement. We believe the explosive development over the next few years of the wireless mobile Internet is critical to the future of the worldwide economy. Truly, the field touches every endeavor in business and society. If California is to remain at the forefront of technology, it is crucial that one of the State's three Institutes for Science and Innovation focus on this area. The San Diego-to-Irvine research complex is clearly the most appropriate site for this endeavor. We have the largest and strongest cluster of telecommunications companies in the nation, many of which are partnering with UCSD and UCI in this proposal. The UCSD campus has established strong industry partnerships in this field through its Center for Wireless Communications. Those of us who participate in the CWC have been delighted with the students who have come out of the program and with the creative research by the faculty. With its San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD has established a worldwide reputation as a leading edge site for information technology. We are confident that Cal-(IT)2 will build on this proven track record. We find this proposal most compelling because:
This latter point is crucial to all member companies on this Commission because well-trained technical employees are our lifeblood for the future. One of the most critical application areas addressed by Cal-(IT)2 is medicine. As those of us in the biotechnology industry well understand, the post-genomics era will result in medical advances that are today unimaginable. But this promise will only be realized if we develop the information infrastructure to synthesize and analyze biological data, and then give doctors the tools to apply those results at the bedside. Again, San Diego is the appropriate place to drive such innovation forward, with its strong industry cluster of biotechnology companies, its leading biological research institutes and its great School of Medicine and clinical enterprise. Finally, we have high confidence in the successful implementation of Cal-(IT)2 given the extraordinary management team that has been put in place. The Institute director, Larry Smarr, is a proven leader as he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance. Smarr has the credentials, expertise and vision in information technology, and management experience required to run this large organization. The Chief Scientist of the Institute will be Ronald Graham, who was previously the Chief Scientist at AT&T Bell Labs before joining UCSD in 1998. We are particularly pleased to see a leader with this kind of industry experience on the team, because he will be constantly mindful of the Institute's partner needs. Additionally, the campuses have selected two outstanding faculty to lead the UCI and UCSD research efforts in Peter Rentzepis and Ramesh Rao, respectively. We urge you and your distinguished selection committee to consider these merits and designate Cal-(IT)2 as a California Institute for Science and Innovation. Sincerely,
cc: Robert C. Dynes, Chancellor, UCSD |