We live in interesting times. We are witnessing many new ways of working together as mathematical scientists. The emergence of advanced communication technology, the internet in particular, has allowed the creation of a new breed of research facilities. The average new facility can be envisioned as a distributed and networked institute, connecting many research teams into a cohesive, interdisciplinary whole. There are already many experimental projects, both official and unofficial, based on sophisticated network-based collaboration. These institutes and networked research groups will allow us to use all the tools available to us as World scientists moving into the twenty-first century. There will be many technical challenges ahead of the new institutes, but the prize is a significant one: to form places where researchers from all over the world can visit, physically, and just as importantly, electronically, and collaborate together. Western Canada is supremely equiped for such facilities, with the advanced technical knowledge present here, and our active and sophisticated research community.
Networked institutes have the capacity to bridge gaps between scientists that have been formed by geography and discipline: by using the capabilities of modern technology, we gain, for Canada and elsewhere, the powerful advantages of multidisciplinary science. This is not just something that helps those of us who do the majority of our research via computers, but the entire scientific community. Multidisciplinary and multicultural communication is why, after all, we have conferences. We all know how much we gain by interacting will other researchers. With general collaborative scientific communication systems combined with distributed, networked, scientific institutions, we can be enriched by that interaction all year round.
This paper will look at some specific technical challenges that such collaborations face, especially the problems the new networked facilities will face. It will concentrate on rather specific solutions to those problems, using the latest networking technologies.