Stanford University, SLAC, NIIT

1
Stanford University, SLAC, NIIT

• Prepared by Les Cottrell, SLAC
• for the Convocation Dinner NIIT , March 9, 2007

2
Stanford University

• Location

3
Some facts

• Founded in 1890s by Governor Leland Stanford
  wife Jane
• in memory of son Leland Stanford Jr.
• Apocryphal story of foundation
• Movies invented at Stanford
• 1600 freshman entrants/year (12 acceptance), 71
  studentfaculty, students from 53 countries
• 169K living Stanford alumni

4
Some alumni

• Sports Tiger Woods, John McEnroe
• Sally Ride Astronaut
• Vint Cerf father of Internet
• Industry
• Hewlett Packard, Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft,
  Scott McNealy Sun
• Ex-presidents Ehud Barak Israel, Alejandro
  Toledo Peru
• US Politics Condoleeza Rice, George Schultz,
  President Hoover

5
Some Startups

• Founded Silicon Valley (turned orchards into
  companies)
• Start by providing land and encouragement
  (investment) for companies started by Stanford
  alumni, such as HP Varian
• More recently Sun (Stanford University Network),
  Cisco, Yahoo, Google

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Excellence

• 17 Nobel prizewinners
• Stanford Hospital
• Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) my
  home
• National Lab operated by Stanford University
  funded by US Department of Energy
• Roughly 1400 staff, contractors outside users
  gt 3000, 2000 on site at a given time
• Fundamental research in
• Experimental particle physics
• Theoretical physics
• Accelerator research
• Astro-physics
• Synchrotron Light research
• Has faculty to pursue above research and awards
  degrees, 3 Nobel prizewinners

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Work with NIIT

• Start 2004, MoU, funding from Pak MoST US State
  Dept.
• Development of students, build research capacity,
  develop publicly available tools, publish etc.,
  e.g.
• Quantify the Digital Divide
• Develop a robust measurement infrastructure to
  provide information on the extent of the Digital
  Divide
• Develop innovative visualization tools
• Improve understanding, provide planning
  information, expectations, identify needs (e.g.
  last mile problems, fragility, congestion ),
  report to politicians, funding agencies, net
  operators, end users, is it good enough for
  Grids, telemedicine (e.g. consulting expertise
  for poor communities)
• Case studies for S. Asia, Pakistan, Africa
• Provide and deploy tools in Pakistan (NIIT, QAU,
  PERN)
• Geo-location of hosts
• Network Weather Forecasting Anomaly detection,
  diagnosis and alerting

8
Students

• About a dozen students at NIIT co-supervision
  SLAC/NIIT
• Plus 6 chosen students with internships at SLAC
  for one year each
• Exposure to National Lab and world class network
  experts, work on state of the art projects,
  exposure to high speed networks such as will be
  available in Pakistan with PERN2,
• Take courses at Stanford
• 3 currently at SLAC
• 3 students completed their year, will return to
  NIIT as research assistants to share experiences
• One returned to NIIT to pursue PhD
• One to startup company in Silicon Valley
• One to U of New South Wales

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Experiences

• Extremely successful on-going collaboration
• Developed and refined effective ways of
  communicating at a distance
• Useful tool kits developed and made publicly
  available
• Many publications and public presentations
• Students hard-working, dedicated, enthusiastic
  and innovative
• Have performed well in course work at Stanford,
  compare well with Stanford students
• Next step proposal to join the International
  perfSONAR project (currently Europe, US
  Brazilian NRENs)
• provide open set of protocols ref.
  implementation for cross-domain sharing of
  network measurements