University Times

A project to educate a wireless information systems workforce, submitted by the telecommunications program in Pitt's School of Information Sciences (SIS), will receive an estimated $391,204 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The grant is administered through NSF's new $90 million Information Technology Research initiative.

According to SIS faculty member and principal researcher Prashant Krishnamurthy, the project's primary objective is to develop and implement a wireless information degree track that provides education in the development, design and deployment of wireless information systems with an emphasis on emerging wireless data technology.

According to the NSF, these awards are intended to spur fundamental research and innovative applications of information technology. More than 200 projects were selected from over 1,400 proposals. The newly funded activities will promote IT-driven science and engineering.

Pitt's wireless information systems project also has received grants from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Link-to-Learn program, Microsoft Corporation, and the AT&T Foundation. SIS faculty members David Tipper and Joseph Kabara are co-investigators for the project. The web site for the wireless program is http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~wireless/.