Jaron Lanier provides an update on the leading edge effort of university research groups from I2 members institutions including Brown, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Penn. Tele-Immersion will enable users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared, simulated environment as if they were in the same physical room. This new paradigm for human-computer interaction is the ultimate synthesis of networking and media technologies and, as such, it is the greatest technical challenge for Internet2.   Jaron also talks about GUMBO, an ambitious project to create large-scale distributed simulations of biological systems, making use of high performance links and new protocols. The Grand Unified Modeling of Biological Organisms, GUMBO is able to contain many different levels of description and use these varied levels to constrain and evaluate each other. GUMBO is going to change the way biological theories are expressed, compared, and tested---it’s a post-human-genome-project grand challenge. From the Series:Internet2 Fall 1999 Member Meeting Plenary Sessions