research network. One of the best ways to strengthen and develop such a network is by face-to-face interaction. The Access Grid Room (AGR) project, which is currently in use in 10 AMSI-member Universities, is a cost effective means of bridging the distance gap within different research groups which would otherwise remain unaware of each other’s more recent activities. Australia is a sparsely populated continent where research concentrations are often placed far from one another, making faceto-face interaction costly, both in time and travel expenses. Currently, AGR’s in Australia are mainly used for delivery of Honours courses and other educational purposes; only occasionally they are used served to broadcast general mathematical seminars. Our proposal is to use the AGRs for running seminars in the broad area of optimization, including a variety of areas such as: nonsmooth analysis, variational analysis, and optimal control. Because of the technical requirements of the Access Grid system, we expect that only three institutions will be involved at the first stage: Universities of Newcastle (UN), South Australia (UniSA), and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). One of the institutions would host the seminar, which would be broadcast to the other participating universities. Universities with existing AGR facilities could serve as cluster points for serving researchers and postgraduate students from the other universities in the region. We hope that in this way the number of participating institutions will grow so as to reach researchers and high-degree students from many other universities. Potential for collaboration has been identified for the following