Champaign, Il — The University of Illinois today received $50,000 and the 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for its innovative software design in a ceremony held in Washington, D.C.

The award was presented at the Fall Task Force meeting today (Monday, Dec. 10) of the Coalition for Networked Information (www.cni.org) by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and one of the inventors of the World Wide Web.

The award honors not-for-profit organizations for leadership in collaborative development of open-source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. Open-source software is distributed under a free license, and users collaborate to alter, improve and find new applications for the software.

The University of Illinois was recognized for initiating the OpenEAI Project, which studies and implements connections between information systems known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and for its ongoing contributions to the development of the OpenEAI methodology and software.

Accepting the award on behalf of the U. of I. was Douglas Vinzant, senior associate vice president for planning and administration.

"The University of Illinois is honored to receive this prestigious award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation," Vinzant said. "The software has enabled us to work more easily with vendors and other units within the university, and the distribution of the software and documentation under an open-source license also benefits many other organizations working to implement a service-oriented architecture."

Stephen Wheat, enterprise architect for administrative information technology, said that with its $50,000 award from the Mellon Foundation, the U. of I. will fund research assistantships for graduate students in computer science and other information-technology related fields. The research assistants will work on projects that further the understanding of enterprise application integration and service-oriented architectures for integration.

"This award will provide graduate students with an opportunity to work with IT professionals from the University of Illinois and other organizations on real-world systems integration projects, applying structured enterprise application integration and service-oriented architectures," Wheat said. "This provides not only a learning experience for the students but also an opportunity for the university and many other organizations to benefit from the creativity and enthusiasm of our students."

The OpenEAI Project is an open-source project dedicated to discovering and documenting the controlling dynamics, principles and practices of enterprise application integration and to present, implement, and promote those findings to its members and community through the open-source licensing of its software. The development, availability and evolution of open-source Enterprise Application Integration software are important to IT professionals in all industries. More information about the OpenEAI Project software, documentation and licensing information is available at: www.OpenEAI.org.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a philanthropic organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, N.J. The MATC awards are a project of the foundation's Program in Research in Information Technology. More information about the MATC awards, including the news release containing other awards, is available at http://matc.mellon.org.

The recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker, CEO, Mozilla Corp.; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist, Xerox Corp.; Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; and Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media.

The University of Illinois (http://www.uillinois.edu) enrolls almost 70,000 students at its three campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield. It has an annual operating budget of $3.9 billion. The university employs more than 23,000 faculty and staff and has more than one-half million living alumni.

The Urbana campus is a pioneer in high-speed computing and houses the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In August of 2007, the National Science Foundation awarded the center a $208 million grant, to be used over a four and one-half year period, to develop the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer that will go online in 2011.