[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 10]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 13528]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          IN RECOGNITION OF THE 5TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GOOSE AWARD

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. ANN M. KUSTER

                            of new hampshire

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 22, 2016

  Ms. KUSTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Golden Goose 
Award, which recognizes researchers whose seemingly obscure, federally 
funded research has returned significant benefits to society.
  In particular, I rise today to congratulate Cornell University 
biologist Dr. Tom Seeley and his colleagues from the Georgia Institute 
of Technology, John Bartholdi, Sunil Nakrani, Craig Tovey, and John 
Vande Vate, who will be receiving a 2016 Golden Goose Award for their 
research on honey bee foraging and computer servers. Dr. Seeley, like 
me, is a Dartmouth College alumnus, and he has gone on to become one of 
the world's leading experts on bees. Working with his Georgia Tech 
colleagues, who are actually all engineers, Dr. Seeley conducted basic 
research to understand how honey bees forage. While some might have 
questioned the worth of their initial research, these researchers 
eventually adapted their model on honey bee foraging into an innovative 
algorithm for assigning computer servers that is being used by Web 
hosting companies, impacting a rapidly expanding global market worth 
$50 billion.
  Supported in part by funding from the National Science Foundation and 
the Office of Naval Research, they created a model predicting how honey 
bees would allocate themselves in their ever-changing environment based 
on their known behaviors. By drawing parallels between server 
allocation challenges and the honey bees, they developed an algorithm 
that more efficiently, and profitably, allocates servers to the 
variable demands of the Internet than any algorithm then in use.
  Today, Web hosting services are utilizing algorithms like Tovey and 
Nakrani's that mimic the behavior of natural systems to boost profits 
and more efficiently operate server farms in a rapidly growing $50 
billion global marketplace.
  The work of these scientists demonstrates the importance of continued 
federal investment in scientific research. As a proud member of the 
bipartisan Science and National Labs Caucus, which seeks to encourage 
scientific advancement through federal investment in research, I look 
forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle to support innovation.
  I am pleased to congratulate these scientists on their valuable work 
to our society.

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