The Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI ) Project Office (GPO) announced today that Aaron Falk has been appointed Lead System Engineer and Interim Engineering Architect in the GPO, which BBN Technologies operates under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

GENI will be a national facility for experiments on a wide variety of advanced research in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, and networked services and applications and will support those experiments at a large scale with real user populations. Compatibility with the Internet is NOT required.

GENI's design will be created by volunteer working groups reporting to Mr. Falk in his role as Interim Engineering Architect.

Mr. Falk brings extensive systems engineering experience in a range of disciplines, including large NSF projects, both within the GENI engineering community and as lead developer of the Embedded Cyberinfrastructure (ECI) subsystem of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) project. He also chairs the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), overseeing management of fourteen research groups, each with hundreds of members drawn from the research and standards communities, and has been an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) leader for over ten years.

"GENI creates a huge opportunity for ambitious research," said GENI Project Director Chip Elliott, " and Aaron's unique combination of research leadership and very strong systems engineering skills will help GENI meet its research needs on time and on budget."

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies solves real problems through the creation and disciplined application of advanced technology. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. Today, BBN is managing the planning and design of GENI, an advanced network facility spanning the United States; is saving lives in Iraq and Afghanistan with its Boomerang Shooter Detection System; operates the first metro quantum cryptography network; has deployed the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system; and is proving the benefits of the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system in clinical trials. For more information, visit www.bbn.com.