The Communications Futures Program (CFP) @ MIT

The Academia category in this blog serves the purpose of presenting academia work and results. It is meant for discussion but also as a little advertisement for academia work that was and is conducted within the community.

As a first item, I’d like to present the Communications Futures Program (CFP) research consortium at MIT. I’ve been involved in CFP for quite some time now (more than two years). The consortium investigates different areas of interest related to the future of communication.

CFP is organized in several WGs around topics that are deemed important to the industry and the research community. These WGs are Value Chain Dynamics, Internet Architecture (with its sub-groups on QoS, Spectrum Policy, and Inter-connection), Privacy & Security, and Viral Communication. The Broadband WG was disbanded in June this year after running about two years (led by Sharon Eisner). The main PIs in CFP are Charlie Fine (Sloan), David Clark (CSAIL), David Reed (MediaLab), Andy Lippman (MediaLab) and Karen Sollins (CSAIL).

CFP was created in early 2004 with the Value Chain Dynamics WG being its first operational WG (then called Core-Edge Dynamics WG). I had the pleasure of co-chairing this WG together with Prof. Charlie Fine from MIT Sloan until recently. For about two years, until June 2006, the work was conducted in close collaboration with the sister-program called Communications Research Network (CRN) at University of Cambridge. This relation formally ended although some of the work, such as around Spectrum Policy, will continue to be conducted jointly.

Please note that many of the results of CFP are restricted to the members of the consortium. However, I intend to discuss some findings of CFP and its research in the future on this blog in order to make the work in this research consortium more public. For more detailed information however, I will need to refer you to the individuals or the public web sites.

So for now, please have a look at the consortium’s webpage.