The National Science Foundation is challenging the research community to replace the Internet with technology that meets the needs of the present century. The GENI initiative will create an experimental facility for moving ideas toward practical solutions. For the initiative to succeed, the research community needs to come up with new ideas that can be verified or disproved by experiments on a large-scale network. Our principal contribution to twentieth-century networks was guidance on transport of ones and zeros from source to destination. Layered protocols isolate the ones and zeros from other properties of the information conveyed. This talk describes GENI and goes on to question bits and packets as the universal currency of information. It asks the research community to take a top down look at information networks and establish the foundation of future information systems.

Since 1999, David Goodman has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York. He currently holds a temporary position as Program Director in the Computer and Network Systems Division of the National Science Foundation. Before moving to the NSF in February 2006, he was Director of the Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology, a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center at Polytechnic University, Columbia University, and University of Virginia. Until August 2001, he was Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Poly.

Prior to joining Poly, he was at Rutgers University, where he founded the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) in 1989. He was WINLAB Director until he moved to Brooklyn Poly. In 1995, he was a Research Associate at the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University. In 1997, he was Chairman of the National Research Council Committee studying "The Evolution of Untethered Communications." From 1967 to 1988 he was at Bell Laboratories, where he was Department Head in Communications Systems Research. Dr. Goodman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of The Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.