Formed in 1991, GCATT is a program of the Georgia Research Alliance, a public/private partnership fostering technology-based economic development across the state. Although GCATT is based at Georgia Tech, it supports research programs in advanced telecommunications at the Georgia Research Alliance's six research universities. The GCATT Building houses a variety of research programs with a national and global presence. Inside the 150,000 square foot facility are 70 laboratories for over 400 researchers. The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) start-up incubator is home to new companies that together employ approximately 100 people at any one time. The research centers that make up GCATT range in focus from core telecommunications technologies, such as wireless, optical, signal and image processing, to cutting-edge applications such as e-commerce, wearable computing, telemedicine, and enhanced distance learning, as well as compression technologies that have gone on to define cellular telephony, voice over IP, MP3, and HDTV.