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Albany, NY - The University at Albany's Center for Technology in Government (CTG) has been selected as a partner in a nationwide effort to build a National Technology Infrastructure for the twenty-first century. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the infrastructure will enable the United States to stay on the leading edge of science and technology by integrating computational, collaborative, visualization, and information resources into a powerful "National Technology Grid." The governing organization, the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), will organize the efforts of more than 50 research centers across the United States. Headed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Alliance includes top-notch research partners from educational institutions, national laboratories, industry, and supercomputing centers, across the country.

The Alliance partnership links the Center for Technology in Government with powerful technology research centers across the country. NCSA, with a long history of creating innovative technologies for scientific computing, spurred the development of today's Internet through such technologies such as Mosaic, the precursor of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. Together with recent initiatives to develop an advanced computer chip fabrication facility at the Center for Thin Film Technology, the University at Albany's membership in the Alliance brings more high-tech research opportunities to the Capital Region.

Illustrating the need for a large scale collaboration, the Alliance is separated into three primary efforts: the Application Technologies team (AT), the Enabling Technologies team (ET), and the Education, Outreach and Training team (EOT). CTG, playing a dynamic role as the government EOT team leader, will unite with hundreds of educators, scientists, engineers, computing experts, and information specialists to focus on the use of these technologies within government, communities, schools, and businesses. Peter Bloniarz, Research Director at CTG stated, "this opportunity to work with other research and supercomputing centers is tremendous. CTG will work with the finest research and development professionals in the world."

Awarded $100,000 for the first year of the five year program, CTG will help identify, develop, and disseminate innovative applications of technologies to the practical problems of federal, state, and local government. Using its award-winning methodology that encourages and reduces the risk of technology supported innovation, CTG will promote, apply and evaluate new tools and technologies for government. Several first year activities include:

• Creating a clearinghouse of government-oriented best practices based on technologies developed by the technology teams in the Alliance.
• Working with other government EOT partners to develop model methods of government assessment and evaluation of advanced technologies.
• Developing educational materials for easy dissemination of government activities in the Alliance.

The mission of the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany is to foster public sector innovation, enhance capability, generate public value, and support good governance. We carry out this mission through applied research, knowledge sharing, and collaboration at the intersection of policy, management, and technology.