Welcome to Viralcomm's homepage

What is Viralcomm doing?

How to construct agile, scalable, collaborative systems?

Viral Communications focuses on constructing infrastructure-free agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves. The goal is purely photonic communications—optics and radio, no wires, with minimal costs for innovation and flexible architectures. Primary work addresses both the basic mechanisms of radio and the applications that embed communications in the bits and pieces of daily life, from clothes, to dog collars, to furniture.

Viralcomm is headed by Dr. Andrew Lippman and Dr. David P. Reed. A group of crazy students are doing crazy things on a regular basis.

History of Viralcomm

The group was organized in 2001 to address grassroots systems that are scalable and grow in value as they scale. We recognize that scale is different from growth which is ill understood.

Our first work addressed radio. Like mainframe computers, radio has been a centralized, orchestrated system with concentrations of power and intelligence and as a result is considered not scalable. It is often allocated like real estate in an exclusionary way. Our question is whether we could devise an alternative architecture that was open and scalable. We showed how this could be done in several experiments.

We now address the combination of scalable, mobile networks, and we add in the motivations and actions of people as they traverse a space and use these networks. We think of it as "social mobility." The experiments we peruse now address this.

We also are building an information architecture for our new laboratory. It is both a social and a work space, and it is used by workers and a great many guests or visitors. The challenge is to build a collaborative environment optimized for the unfamiliar guest that engages them in the chemistry of the place and makes them part of the work.