Enabling Virtual Organisations application wins prestigious international award

Sydney, AUSTRALIA – 29 April 2009 – AARNet, Australia's Academic and Research Network, today announced that the “Enabling Virtual Organisations” (EVO) application, which it co-hosts in Australia, has won a prestigious Internet2 IDEA Award in the US.

EVO is a videoconferencing and desktop sharing system designed to provide a seamless, real-time collaboration platform for bringing remote scientists and researchers together with resources.  It has been in continuous development by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the past 10 years and has been in use by several research and education organisations in Australia for the past two years.  They include Monash University, the Square Kilometre Array, IMOS, AUSCOPE, ANDS and several other project groups.  Locally, EVO is connected to the AARNet backbone and based on AARNet servers. 

The annual Internet2 IDEA (Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications) Awards seek to recognise leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning.

Guido Aben, Director of eResearch for AARNet said, “It is AARNet’s mission to bring new, innovative applications such as EVO to the local research and education community to enable powerful breakthroughs and help keep Australia at the forefront of scientific and academic research.

“AARNet has been the only Australian service provider offering EVO for the past two years.  This unique technology has allowed local researchers to communicate face-to-face with their peers in remote communities or in other parts of the world.

“EVO is one of many unique, world-leading applications that AARNet provides and we will continue to make available new applications and technologies to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the research and scientific community.”

AARNet co-hosts EVO in Australia with the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS).  EVO provides users with one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one videoconferencing, instant messaging, file sharing, desktop sharing, whiteboard and telephone bridge access at a local call rate from anywhere in Australia.

The EVO architecture emerged from over a decade of development and large-scale operation of collaborative tools, and Caltech’s unique communications fabric for high-performance messaging, pervasive monitoring and autonomous control of global-scale systems called MonALISA (monalisa.caltech.edu).  EVO allows users throughout the scientific world to collaborate on integrated standards-based collaboration tools in all phases of their daily work, whether working on desktops or laptops with any of the major operating systems, in conference rooms using standard videoconferencing equipment, in experimental control rooms or auditoriums.

Through the use of intelligent agents, EVO automatically directs the data streams, optimally interlinking the sites participating in a conference, and moderating the flows and their quality to accommodate a wide range of network conditions. This provides round the clock non-stop system operations supporting many thousands of users, with a minimum of human intervention. On the client side, EVO supports a wide range of audio, video and display devices, including support for HD (1080i) sessions on mass market PC systems with large single or multiple screens at low cost. EVO’s OpenGL-based 3D VIEVO interface has the unique capability of handling a wide variety of real-time high-resolution video, audio and other content in the form of “objects” for state-of-the-art scientific collaborative sessions.

- ENDS -

About AARNet

AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the company that operates Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet). It is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO. AARNet provides high-capacity leading edge Internet services for the tertiary education and research sector communities and their research partners. AARNet serves more than one million end users who access the network through local area networks at member institutions. For further information, please visit: www.aarnet.edu.au.

For further information, please contact:

Rachel York

Max Australia

(02) 9954 3492

rachel.york@maxaustralia.com.au