Brig “Chip” Elliott is the Principal Investigator and Project Director and Chief Engineer for the GENI Project Office. As Project Director, he will assume overall responsibility for timely completion of GENI’s planning, including development and management of the GPO itself and its dependent working groups and sub-contracts. As Chief Engineer, he will ensure that GENI is well-designed and technically feasible, satisfies its research requirements, and is fully ready for construction. He has been actively involved in GENI’s planning since early 2006 as a system engineer for the wireless group, and is personally committed to GENI’s goals and success.

Chip has nearly thirty years of experience in leading large, technically-challenging projects, both in industry and in academia, with particular expertise in routers, wireless Internet technology, mobile “ad hoc” networks, quality of service issues, advanced optical techniques, and novel routing architectures. As Principal Engineer at BBN Technologies, Chip has led the design and successful implementation of secure, mission-critical networks based on novel technology for the United States and its allies, with aggregate value above $3 billion. From 2001 to 2006, Chip served as Principal Investigator for the DARPA Quantum Network, in which he led the design and build-out of the world’s first quantum cryptography network. It became fully operational in October 2003 in BBN’s laboratory, and since May 2004 has operated non-stop between Harvard, Boston University, and BBN. It currently consists of 10 nodes operating through both telecommunications fiber and freespace. Under his leadership, BBN designed and built quantum cryptography systems based on both attenuated laser pulses and photon entanglement (Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs), the world’s first super-conducting single-photon detectors, and a novel suite of protocols and algorithms that combine these systems into an overall key distribution network. They fully integrated with Internet (IPsec) network security mechanisms, providing an operational capability with exceptionally high levels of security based on the laws of quantum physics. In the course of this project, Chip led a wide variety of academic, industry, and government research teams operating under subcontract to BBN.

Prior to his quantum work, Chip led the design and implementation of the world’s first fielded mobile ad hoc network, the Near-Term Digital Radio. The NTDR network is a fully mobile, secure, and highly survivable mobile ad hoc network (MANET) that has now been adopted by the armies of the United States, U.K., Canada, and a number of allies. Each network consists of up to 400 vehicle-mounted radio/routers plus associated host computers. Nearly a dozen countries around the world now rely on these networks, including the United States, U.K., Canada, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, and Sweden, and sales pending to Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Jordan, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan. Prior to his NTDR work, Chip served as chief network architect and system engineer for the Canadian IRIS tactical system, an advanced telephony + data + video-conferencing Internet first deployed into 8,000 vehicles for the Canadian Army, and subsequently into another 40,000 vehicles in the U.K. Army. It now forms the core tactical communication system for both countries. Key innovations include completely a self-configuring voice network; quality of service guarantees for high quality packetized voice flows, load-adaptive routing, and routing extensions to handle roaming Internets connected via cellular-like infrastructure. Link types include fiber optic, LAN, satellite, microwave and UHF radios, etc. Chip has also served as senior advisor on various national and commercial networks including three LEO satellite constellations (Discoverer II, SBIRS Low, and Celestri / Teledesic) and Boeing’s Connexion system.

Chip holds over 85 patents issued and pending. He is an IEEE Fellow, currently serves on the DTO Technology Experts Panel for Quantum Cryptography and the Naval Studies Board (National Academy of Sciences), where he is co-chairing a study on distributed sensing networks. He has participated in a variety of other national advisory panels including the Defense Science Board and Army Science Board. In 2005, he was named keynote speaker for the National Security Agency’s Transition to Executive Leadership program. He received Frost & Sullivan’s Award for Excellence in Technology (2005), is a Fellow of the World Technology Network, and a Finalist for the 2004 World Technology Award for his leadership in quantum cryptography. He is also a member of the AAAS and ACM, and a senior member of the AIAA. He has spent four years in visiting faculty positions at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1980-1981), Tunghai University, Taiwan (1985-1986), and Dartmouth College (1990-1992).

Chip graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976 with an honors degree in mathematics. He has published 14 conference papers and 23 refereed articles and book chapters, been an invited speaker at numerous conferences, and served on peer reviews for the National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).