Abstract: Optical fiber is the medium of choice for building high-capacity networks: from broadband access networks to regional metro networks to long-haul backbone networks. After the telecom bubble burst in 2000, the optical networking (ON) industry went into a consolidation phase. But, in 2004, ON equipment manufacturers started reporting profits again, and this $5-Billion industry is poised to double in size over the next 4-5 years.

Successful growth of ON, however, will occur only if researchers from multiple disciplines (physics, optics, communications, networking, computer algorithms, operations research, and business school) are able to work together in identifying, understanding (one another's jargons), and effectively solving the important and exciting inter-disciplinary problems in the field. A sampling of these inter-disciplinary opportunities and new research challenges will be outlined in this talk.

Short Bio: Biswanath Mukherjee received the B.Tech. (Hons) degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (India) in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree from University of Washington, Seattle, in June 1987. At Washington, he held a GTE Teaching Fellowship and a General Electric Foundation Fellowship.

In July 1987, he joined the University of California, Davis, where he has been Professor of Computer Science since July 1995, and served as Chairman of Computer Science during September 1997 to June 2000. He is a winner of the 2004 Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award at UC Davis. Two PhD Dissertations (by Dr. Laxman Sahasrabuddhe and Dr. Keyao Zhu), which were supervised by Professor Mukherjee, were winners of the 2000 and 2004 UC Davis College of Engineering Distinguished Dissertation Awards.

He is co-winner of paper awards presented at the 1991 and the 1994 National Computer Security Conferences. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Network, ACM/Baltzer Wireless Information Networks (WINET), Journal of High-Speed Networks, Photonic Network Communications, Optical Network Magazine, and Optical Switching and Networking journal. He also served as Editor-at-Large for optical networking and communications for the IEEE Communications Society. He served as the Technical Program Chair of the IEEE INFOCOM '96 conference. He also serves as Chairman of the IEEE Communication Society's Optical Networking Technical Committee (ONTC). He is Editor of Springer's Optical Networks Book Series.

Mukherjee is author of the textbooks "Optical WDM Networks" (to be published by Springer in 2005) and "Optical Communication Networks" (published by McGraw-Hill in 1997). He is a Member of the Board of Directors of IPLocks, Inc., Silicon Valley startup company founded in March 2002. He has consulted for and served on the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) of a number of startup companies in optical networking. His current TAB appointments include: Teknovus, Intelligent Fiber Optic Systems, and LookAhead Decisions Inc.