Working Together: Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)

  • 03/26/15

Headquartered in the Champaign, IL, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC, www.cic.net) is a consortium of the Big Ten member universities plus the University of Chicago. For more than 50 years, these world-class research institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the provosts of the member universities, CIC mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Midwest headquarters.

CIC universities conduct more funded research each year than the Ivy League and the University of California system combined. With annual research expenditures topping more than $10.2 billion, and spanning 11 states from the High Plains to the Eastern Seaboard, the 15 universities of the CIC have an enormous influence in research and education far beyond their geographical footprint.

One successful collaboration among the CIC membership reducing costs in the area of technology and connectivity is OmniPoP. OmniPoP is a fiber-optic network collaboration between participating CIC institutions, connecting them to each other and to research “hubs” worldwide with high-speed connectivity. This collaborative project unites the members’ regional optical networks on collaboratively owned fiber cable circling downtown Chicago. It provides multiple access points for researchers as well as the sort of redundancy that eliminates network downtime due to unforeseen fiber-optic cable damage.

OmniPoP provides services to faculty and researchers that allow them to share bandwidth-intensive applications (such as high-definition video) and massive research datasets between regional, national or global collaborators. In addition, OmniPoP has established direct ultra-high bandwidth connections to higher education and research peers, which reduce users’ cost and network latency.

CIC’s latest Annual Report offers a snapshot of how the member universities collaboratively leverage their strengths to increase access to higher education, improve the health of our communities and region, and create an enormous economic impact across the nation.

For more information on CIC or the OmniPoP collaboration, or to download the Annual Report, log on to www.cic.net.

Featured

  • University of Connecticut Upgrades Basketball Facility’s AV Systems

    The University of Connecticut recently partnered with Metinteractive to upgrade the AV systems of the Gampel Pavilion basketball facility on its campus in Mansfield, Conn., according to a news release.

  • Extron, CENTEGIX Partner for Comprehensive School Security Solution

    Professional audiovisual solutions provider Extron recently announced a partnership with CENTEGIX, which provides rapid incident response technology, to integrate two of their top products in the name of school safety.

  • California Boarding School Opens New Inquiry Collaborative Facility

    Cate School, a boarding school in Carpinteria, Calif., for students grades 9–12, recently announced that it has finished renovating a historic dining hall into a new academic hub, according to a news release. The school partnered with Blackbird Architects and Tangram Interiors on the two-story, 16,000-square-foot Inquiry Collaborative.

  • Designing School Spaces for A++ Performance

    In recent years, the educational world has gained greater appreciation for the ways a space’s aesthetics, just like its acoustics, can positively impact educational outcomes. Consequently, engineering, designing, and constructing a school environment demands acoustics to be equally an art and a science, requiring architects and designers to see with their ears, while acousticians must hear with their eyes.

Digital Edition