This grant provides infrastructure support for the development of the research and educational activities of the Laboratory for Electronic Networking and Distributed Systems at Bowie State University. The support includes computing equipment and software, faculty development costs, and student assistantships. The principal investigators will conduct research in (1) distributed heterogeneous data and information management. (2) data compression techniques, and (3)distributed artificial intelligence systems. In addition, the educational activities will include further development of a pipeline program to attract and retain more minority students in computer science careers. Components of this program include a mentoring project for minority undergraduates, summer training in computer programming for high school students, tutoring and laboratory research experiences for undergraduates.//